Week of April 20, 2025 – April 26, 2025
by Anna Stunkel, Environmental Educator
After a long, cloudy winter with mostly overcast days, the sun is finally making an appearance. It feels rejuvenating to wake up to blue and cloudless skies with robins and chickadees singing. For those of us who spend time hibernating indoors over the winter, this sunshine is a welcome invitation to spend more time outside again.
I always enjoy admiring how sunshine brings out emerging green hues on the forest floor. Leaves slowly unfurl from buds and mosses soak up the warmth. Along with our native spring ephemerals like bloodroot and trillium, there are invasive plants taking advantage of the changing weather. If left unchecked, these plants can easily carpet the forest floor and steal the sunlight from anything else trying to grow. Plants that originate from other areas often don’t have animals grazing on them as they would in their native range, so they multiply easily.
We can help our native plants to grow by managing the land for their benefit. If you walk around Baltimore Woods as spring progresses, you might notice clumps of roots hanging from branches here and there. Our volunteers are hard at work removing invasives like Garlic Mustard and letting their roots dry out so they’re unable to resprout.
This kind of work can be very rewarding since it helps create space for a variety of plants. And as we help the forest ecosystem or even your own garden, interacting with soil by feeling and smelling it is also beneficial to us. Studies have shown that exposure to soil can reduce stress and improve our mental health. Children who grow up around soil and spend time outdoors have healthier gut microbiomes and immune systems.
With this resurgence of spring growth, let’s remember to give back to the Earth, get our hands dirty, and soak up the sun. If you’d like to help with our stewardship projects at Baltimore Woods, you can join an upcoming stewardship work day or work night, sign up for our Earth Day stewardship project, or save the date to come to the Native Plant Sale May 16 & 17 at Baltimore Woods to increase native habitats in your own garden.