Reminder for local folks: Earthcare meeting this Saturday at 2:00 at Prairie Hill

 This is a reminder to mark your calendars for our meeting this coming Saturday afternoon, 2:00 at Prairie Hill Cohousing, 140 Prairie Hill Lane in Iowa City. Our program will be an exciting one about Oak Trees. Here's what Mary Kirkpatrick has written about it:

Our meeting will focus on the state tree of Iowa which is the oak tree.  No other group of trees is more important to both rural and urban forests and landscapes in Iowa.  Oak trees provide homes for many species of wildlife, sequester carbon, build soil, and provide leaf litter that nurtures life.

Before European settlers came to Iowa, the land was covered with prairie and oak-hickory savannah which is a fire-dependent ecosystem transitioning between prairie and forest, characterized by scattered, open-grown oak/hickory trees.

Our speaker will be Jim Walters, a retired University of Iowa groundskeeper who grows many oak seedlings from acorns he collects around Iowa City.  He shares these seedlings with people in our community to promote the growth of more of these wonderful trees.  Our action item for the meeting will be to encourage people to find homes for these baby oak trees.  Mary Kirkpatrick will start the meeting with an 'oak quiz' based on some information from author and entomologist Doug Tallamy's book "The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Tree".  

Mary has written me from China, telling me that Jim Walters will be bringing some stratified acorns to hand out to us, so that we can start our own trees! Blair and Mary should be coming back from China soon, or are already back. So we'll see them on Saturday. Come and join us, if you're close enough. It should be a very interesting time!