In March, North Coast Land Conservancy kicked off a new volunteer program called Tidy Wild Tuesdays. The idea is for volunteers to come together weekly to complete projects like gentle gardening and landscaping around the Circle Creek Conservation Center Campus.
While supporting NCLC’s stewardship staff, the program also provides individuals the opportunity to volunteer with the organization and further its mission through projects like weeding, watering, mowing, (re)potting plants, pruning shrubs, mulching paths, native plant propagation, and other light work. Already, over the past three months, their efforts have yielded significant and noticeable effects around the campus and the trail system at Circle Creek.
Spearheading the program are Pat Wollner and Liz Newhouse, with Jeff Roehm contributing as a native plant specialist. Both Pat and Jeff are longtime volunteers of NCLC, while Liz started volunteering with the organization more recently.
She first met Jeff and Pat a few years ago at a workshop about making hypertufa planters; she expressed her interests in gardening and tending to nurseries. Fast forward to NCLC’s open house at Circle Creek Conservation Center last November, when she linked up again with Pat and heard the team was ready to start landscaping the campus. She offered to help take the lead.
“I’m very happy to be out here,” says Liz, who is a hobby botanist and Master Gardener.
She especially enjoys that it’s “a clean slate,” an opportunity to develop a whole new concept, based on NCLC’s intended uses for different areas on the Circle Creek grounds.
Liz is an avid gardener, dabbling in the dirt as far back as she can remember. Her mother not only had a degree in landscape architecture and horticulture, but she let each of her children have their own plot in the family garden, where they could plant and tend to whatever they wanted.
“She got us out there at a very young age,” Liz says. “My brothers and sisters, we all learned a lot. … It’s just been part of my life.”
No matter how many years pass, she continues to be fascinated by the science of plants—that you can take little seeds, put them in soil, water them, and they transform into broccoli crowns and carrots and flowers.
“Just that whole process, it still seems amazing to me,” she says, adding she also enjoys “being part of nature, and making things prettier, or more usable, or both.”
As the TWT coordinators work with NCLC staff to set goals for Circle Creek, they are adamant that it’s not just about deciding “what we’re going to do,” Liz says. It’s equally important to get to know the property’s varying landscape, and they fully embrace that it will take time, patience and experimentation to fully form—and implement—the plan.
Their approach involves meticulously building a strong understanding of “what the land wants and what actually works,” paying close attention and making adjustments as needed, Liz adds.
She also is new to fulfilling a coordinator role, although she’s a regular volunteer with the Wildlife Center of the North Coast. In this case, stepping up has been an enjoyable process, she says, “especially with people like this, who are so happy.”
It is the camaraderie and sense of community that draws in many of NCLC’s volunteers—and keeps them coming back.
“No matter what we’re doing, we’re all out here having fun,” says volunteer Jock Wise, who has attended nearly every Tidy Wild Tuesday since the program started. “There’s no stress to it.”
He’s lived in Arch Cape more than a decade and has been familiar with NCLC nearly as long. Now that his professional responsibilities are winding now, he’s found more time to volunteer. Although he was happy to “help out wherever,” it felt comfortable to join a fledgling program and be there to support it from the beginning, to get it going.
“The timing made it sort of natural to do this,” he says.
For Carly Tester, who grew up in Nehalem and started volunteering with NCLC earlier this year, having a hands-on approach to helping out on the land is an empowering way to cope with eco-anxiety and climate anxiety.
“If I can just do one thing every day that makes a positive impact that I can see, that’s tangible, that’s been super helpful,” she says. “It helps you to feel less helpless and more motivated to look for opportunities to find positive change.”
To get involved with TWTs or other NCLC programs, fill out a Volunteer Inquiry form and we’ll be in touch!
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