Foresters’ Fund Supports Douglas County Forestry Tour
In 2020, OSAF member Alicia Christiansen was awarded a Foresters Fund grant for $2290 for the “Douglas County Reforestation Education for Fifth Grade Students” project. The project goal was to add in a reforestation activity to the Douglas County School Forestry Tour, an educational event offered to all Douglas County 5th grade students each year. The 2022 Tour was held May 4-6 at the Glide Education Forest near Glide, Oregon. Over 550 students attended the Tour this year, which is anticipated to grow as the pandemic gets farther out in our rearview mirror. Normal participation at the Tour is usually upwards of 800 students.
During the “Tour,” students spent the morning in the woods rotating between stations learning about different forestry and natural resource topics. After lunch, we gathered and played forest-themed games. The reforestation activity took the place of an old game.
For this activity, we built a 25-foot-long planter box (with pecky cedar donated by C&D Lumber) and filled it with soil. Private timber companies and the BLM donated 1000 Douglas-fir seedlings, which the students practiced planting in the box using garden trowels. Each teacher was sent home with a bundle of seedlings to hand out to their students. Each seedling was bagged individually and contained a planting instruction card that also provided details on our state tree. Oregon Women in Timber and SAF collaborated to lead the reforestation activity and work with the kids, so they understood how to properly plant and care for a tree.
Overall, this event was a huge hit! The local paper, the News Review, wrote a nice article about the Tour and it mentions this project and SAF: https://www.nrtoday.com/news/douglas-county-forestry-tour-returns-for-59th-time-after-two-year-hiatus-with-a-new/article_5557cb31-995f-514e-89fd-a062756d81d6.html.
