Assisting on Conservation Land
What you can do to help take care of Acton’s conservation lands?
When walking trails, you can “become the land steward”. This means:
- Pick up any trash you see (always carry some sort of trash bag)
- Sweep the trail by removing any twigs, branches, and loose rocks you find.
- Report any downed trees across the trail to lscsawyers@googlegroups.com
- Trim back any encroaching flora
Usually, when trimming back flora encroaching on a trail, you will find that that it is an Invasive Plant species. Ideally these shouldn’t just be trimmed back, they should be removed!
As long as you are positive on your identification of an invasive species on conservation land, go ahead and remove it. If unsure, let it live.
Most, if not all, of our conservation lands have areas which need serious work on invasives removal. Pick your favorite conservation land, and ask the land stewards. and we can point you to an area where you can do serious good.
The meadows in conservation lands are special places. Examples are found at Stoneymeade, Grassy Pond, Nagog Hill, Heathen Meadow, Pratt’s Brook, Morrison Farm and Wetherbee,
They are (mostly) mowed yearly by the town, but need lots of additional work to stay “meadows”. This includes:
- Removing branches that fall into them (placing them into the adjacent woods)
- Removing invasive species growing in them.
- Removing invasive species growing in their perimeter.
- Report any downed trees into the meadows to lsc-sawyers@actontrail.org
- Pruning the trees in the meadow (this requires some training)
- Removing saplings growing in the meadows. Oak saplings tend to survive mowings, and require serious tap root extraction. Wetherbee and Pratt’s Brook have a lot of these.
If you do any work or monitoring of a conservation land, we strongly suggest contacting the appropriate land steward and keeping them informed.