Monday, November 16, 2009

The Date Is Set

At long last and after many obstacles, the Jefferson median tree planting is going to begin!

On Saturday Dec 12th at 9:00 am the first 32 trees will be delivered at the intersection of Jefferson and Hampton. We will be planting on both sides of Hampton. With 32 trees we need a LOT of volunteers so please forward this to your neighborhoods, schools, churches, clubs, service organizations, etc. Remind them that this is just the first step of a multi-year project. Eventually we will be planting the entire length of Jefferson from Sunset High School continuing West all the way to the Cockrell Hill city limit (a total of 1.6 miles), so it will pass by many neighborhoods. This will be absolutely transformative for this corridor and change the median from a mostly barren moonscape to a nice shady linear park. So we hope to get a broad cross-section of Oak Cliff residents helping, especially since most of us drive this area at some time or another.

Trees cool and clean the air, provide habitat, muffle traffic and other noise, and increase property values. Trees are neighborhood friendly. Any time we can add more trees we improve the quality of life for all residents of Dallas. Please help us with this effort. Dress appropriately for the weather that day (dress in layers) and bring a shovel and gloves.

If you can't help us on that date, perhaps you are able to make a financial contribution to the project. We need to buy watering bags for the trees. We will try to get free wood chips (let us know if you have connections!) but if we can't we'll need to buy them. We must keep the trees watered and mulched for the first 2 years. And for this first phase we are planting in very rocky soil. We have walked those two medians and the rock is very close to the surface so we are having the holes augered ahead of time to make planting easier. We appreciate our volunteers and don't want them to have to chip through rock with pick axes! So we need to pay someone to auger 32 holes in that rocky ground. That will be our largest expense for Phase I.

Please mark your calendar now.

Thank you!
Van Johnson