SEATTLE — Earth Day isn’t until Tuesday, but volunteers across Washington got a head start on it over the weekend by clearing invasive plants, planting native ones, picking up trash and generally working for a cleaner, safer environment.
At Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum, about 150 volunteers on Saturday pulled invasive plants such as blackberry and ivy, put down cardboard to curtail weeds and repotted native ferns.
“We’ve got some pretty hardy souls out here. We had a hailstorm in the morning and a lot of them worked right through it,” said Kristin Mitchell of the Student Conservation Association, which helped organize the project.
Volunteers worked to clean up eight sites along the industrialized Duwamish River in south Seattle.
Near LaConner in Skagit County, 8-year-old Alec Bartlett, of Bow Hill, didn’t let snow put a damper on his participation in the Swinomish Earth Day Celebration.
“My favorite thing here was the snow we got to walk into when we were picking up garbage,” Alec said. “It just made it a lot of fun to work.”
More than 200 volunteers were treated afterward with a salmon lunch presented by the Swinomish Indian tribe.
Near Marysville, about 75 people pulled Scotch broom and blackberry vines from former farmland that the Port of Everett has restored as a wetlands.
“We saw heron and eagles out here today,” said Keeley O’Connell of People for Puget Sound. “This is a huge, huge bird habitat.”
Collecting small trees seems to be a staple at Earth Day celebrations, said Susanne Hutton, a Girl Scout leader whose troop handed out grand fir seedlings donated by Weyerhaeuser Co.
“Some families come every year and get a tree,” she said, noting that planting a tree is a great way to help the planet.
At the Olympic Sculpture Park on Seattle’s waterfront, a “Climate Day for Kids” featured a variety of environment-oriented children’s activities, including a survey of sea creatures at a recently restored beach on Elliott Bay.
“It’s good for kids to get a sense of the critters in Puget Sound and how that connects to the whole world,” said one boy’s father, Scott Shinn. “It’s important for kids to know they are part of that whole system.”
In Bellingham, about 30 volunteers armed with rakes and shovels worked in the woods near the Civic Athletic Complex to clear out non-native vegetation.
“It feels good working in the dirt and being around plants and trees,” said one of the volunteers, Western Washington University student Timothy Van Slooten. “I like getting my hands dirty with actual dirt.”
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