Over the course of a week, from October 6 - 10, students at Frank Ney Elementary worked with NALT school water stewards educators to plant native plants and create amphibian habitat in the riparian area where Walley Creek flows past the school.  This has the benefit of teaching children about native plants and ecosystem health, and hopefully building empathy for the plants so they don't get trampled during learning and play.

On November 10 a group of staff, students and families from the school finished planting the area where blackberry was removed in August along the paved path between Harry Wipper and the school. We're planting thimbleberry to replace the blackberry, and other native plants that will provide shade to the creek, habitat for animals, and food for people!

Doing this work over so many years has the encouraging effect of seeing positive change, however incremental.  When we started work in this area there were generations of Christmas trees and yard waste dumped over the bank, as well as a plastic swimming pool, fence posts with chunks of concrete footings attached, and tons of other litter that had washed downstream.

Since 2019 we've been installing benches (terraces) of wood, supported by long 1" x 1" stakes, and planted with ferns and other hardy species that will help prevent the bank from eroding.  There's one spot where the bank has calved, taking one of our log terraces with it, but this may eventually become a pool if flows continue to scour around it.  Like many other urban streams,  a huge amount of water enters the creek through storm drains during rain events, and what used to be dynamic flow has been restricted to a narrow area.

Today we replanted terraces where some plants haven't survived, and densely replanted an area that used to be a floodplain, where we did a huge debris cleanup in August 2023.

We also added new benches, with help from the terrace guru, Lindsay Haist, and Kirsten from Alder Environmental.  The new benches or terraces are just below the culvert at Shores Drive, an area that needs more stability.  

We're hoping these solutions will provide natural resilience in this vulnerable spot, and that the habitat will eventually be suitable for spawning Coho.