The Altona Gretna Trans Canada Trail Committee put a call out for help last week, and the community certainly answered it.
About 50 people showed up the morning of Sept. 30 to help plant over 160 trees along the trail between Altona and Gretna.
“We had a lot of volunteers, significantly more than we were expecting, which was very good,” said committee head Fred Dueck.
It was the latest step in the committee’s plans to plant upwards of 900 trees alongside the trail to ensure future generations of users can enjoy a bit of shade as they walk and bike their way down it.
“We’ve planted about 200 so far,” Dueck shared, noting the rest will go in the ground in the years ahead as funding and manpower becomes available. “It’s a fair amount of work to plant these trees, but the planting is just one part of it—they need ongoing maintenance for the first couple of years.”
Following a design provided by Morden Nurseries, the trees are being planted in small groves spaced out along the path.
“They each have five to seven trees and they are close as we can place them to the walking surface,” Dueck explained. “There will be a significant amount of open space between the groves, but there are few places where there are two or three groves on one side consecutively, so there will be some areas that will have a significant amount of shade.
“The underlying concept is that we want this to be more nature-oriented,” he continued. “The goal of the tree planting really is to bring back trees that are native to the area, for one thing, but, secondly to attract more wildlife, more birds.”
The trees are one part of the committee’s work on improving the pathway. Over the past few years, they’ve created a more level walking surface with packed gravel, updated and added signage, installed garbage and recycling bins, and put in several benches and donor plaques.
They’ve also naturalized a previously farmed piece of property along the trail by seeding natural prairie grasses.
“That’s been a bit challenging due to weather conditions, and native grasses are notoriously hard to propagate, but they’re there and growing, though it will probably take a few years until they’re really well established,” Dueck observed, noting the volunteer committee spearheads this work knowing it’s more likely their children and grandchildren will be the ones to really enjoy the fruits of their labour.
It’s all being done thanks to private donations and grants. With the support of the RM of Rhineland council, the group was able to request as many free trees as possible from the Pembina Valley Watershed District and to apply to the Green Municipal Fund to purchase others.
The committee is always looking for more volunteers to help with the ongoing upkeep of the well-used trail.
“We always need more volunteers,” Dueck said, directing people to find and connect with them on Instagram (@altonagretnatct) or via email to altonagretnatrail@gmail.com. “We’ll definitely be having more tree planting events.”
“Of the volunteers that came the other day, I would say probably most of them were trail users,” he noted. “I go out there fairly regularly and it’s very rare to not to meet one or more people out on the trail.”
