Summer Crew Update — and CHCF #WaterBlitz today!

Well, it’s July.

That means three things: 1) ice cream has a half-life of approximately 3 minutes outside; 2) at all times, someone is grilling something somewhere; and 3) the Summer Crew is out and about caring for D.C.’s urban forest.

It’s half-way through the Summer Crew season and our teams have already accumulated 2,486 “tree touches” –  interactions of watering, weeding, mulching, and pruning – during record setting temperatures. Two teams make up our Water By-Cycle fleet, which travel by street bikes to Casey Trees-planted trees in locations with little street parking, and two additional teams commute by truck to further away sites. Over the three weeks so far, the Summer Crew teams and staff have accumulated 959, 742, and 1,062 tree touches, respectively. Let’s hope the weather is much more kind to our crews in the weeks to come.

On top of all the time they’ve been putting in caring for D.C’s trees, our Summer Crew teams have participated in professional development activities with Barry Stahl and Davey Trees. Barry is a horticulturist with the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) at Daingerfield Island, and taught the crew how to properly propagate, plant and pruning American elm cultivars. Davey Trees is an international tree care company who literally showed our crew the ropes by taking them tree climbing and introduced them to careers rooted in arboriculture.

As our Summer Crew works toward their goal of 5,006 tree touches, they will be all around Capitol Hill today thanks to a generous gift from the Capitol Hill Community Foundation. Follow our Summer Crew throughout the day on Facebook and Twitter (#WaterBlitz) to learn how hard our crews work to keep D.C’.s’ trees alive, or even come and join in on the fun.

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