March 23, 2024
Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/23/2024
10:00 am-2:00 pm
Categories
Date: Saturday, March 23
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Location: Riddell Preserve – more details upon registration
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The season of broom stewardship is here and you’re invited to beautiful Riddell Preserve for the 2024 Broomapullooza closing event! Come on out for a day of forest stewardship centered on getting rid of French broom (see why below), delicious snacks, nature art, and community! And, in an exciting addition, volunteers have been using the pulled French broom to build an amazing participatory broom scuplture with artist Kelsi Anderson. And today, you can help us burn it, if you’d like. We’ll also have another family-friendly activity outside of the burn piles to do, if you choose! All ages welcome (see hike information below).
Kelsi is an ecological artist who creates large-scale earth murals + site specific art installations. With a kindred relationship with nature and place, Kelsi explores how art can make us feel more connected to ourselves, nature, and a sense of place through facilitating collaborative, community based public artworks. You can see images of her work on her website www.wildearthart.com and www.instagram.com/wildearthart
Thank you to our friends at Sonoma County Ag + Open Space for helping to make this stewardship event possible!
What is French Broom? An invasive plant, French broom was brought to California in the last century for use in decorative gardens. Sadly, it soon took over, growing at fast rates and spreading seeds with abandon, thousands at a time. As a result, it’s taken over spots in the forest, where it crowds out native plants and acts as fuel ladders, allowing wildfire to reach into the canopy of the trees. Broom is also toxic to many wildlife species and doesn’t make good forage. What these forest creatures do feed on is oak acorns, Douglas fir tips, understory grasses, and young oaks; removing broom helps these essential species to thrive! At Broomapulloza you’ll have a chance to make a difference with a few hours of getting that broom out of the ground and into a burn pile! The more hands we have, the more we can say “BUH-BYE BROOM!”
What Can I Expect At this Whole Broomapullooza Meets Burning Broom Situation? When you arrive at Riddell Preserve with the LandPaths’ car caravan or your carpool, you’ll park in a grassy graveled area. The hike to the cabin is .75 miles on a narrow, well-maintained dirt trail with a 600-foot elevation gain from parking area to cabin. Which is to say, mostly uphill with light curves.
The predetermined Broomapullooza stewardship sites are located near the cabin and they’ll be broken down by difficulty, so you can choose the level that works for you. For example, sites with younger broom on flat surfaces are considered “easy,” and so on. You’ll be able to choose between pulling broom seedlings by hand (we’ll provide the gloves), pulling heftier broom shrubs with a weed wench, and/or cutting them with saws and loppers. At this closing event, we’ll be pulling a bit of broom and then doing the work of burning the piles of plant materials. And we’ll be giving thanks to the land and burning (safely) the collaborative French broom sculpture that volunteers have been building with Kelsi over the last few weeks. We’ll have marshmallows, hot dogs, popcorn and other snacks on hand to cook over the burning broom! What is the Art Project? As we work on caring for the land, let’s bring our creativity to it! During this year’s Broomapullooza, we will be pulling invasive French Broom. As a way of composting it, we will be using the pulled material to create a large scale, community art installation over the course of the six weeks of volunteer days. Each volunteer day will commence with broom removal + land tending, and then any participants that are interested can spend part of the day co-designing + creating an artistic piece that will grow over each week. Each week we will work on a different component of the installation. On the final volunteer day, we will finish the piece and give thanks with a final “Burning Broom” celebration.