Come help us plant four new water-harvesting, traffic-calming chicanes or curb extensions at the intersection of two bicycle boulevards at 9th Avenue and University Blvd — an installation in the public commons, planted and stewarded by the participating public.

Its also a great opportunity to see how such an event, or other Neighborhood Forester endeavors, could be organized elsewhere—such as your neighborhood.

Date: Saturday, February 15, 2025.
The chicane basins (each having over 5,000-gallon annual capacity) were just completed – so now we can plant. Got to plant the rain before we plant the plants!

Time: 9:00 am for a planting demonstration, then we all plant, seed, and mulch together. The demonstration will show you how to plant the rain to maximize its potential, how to plant food-bearing native trees by seed and/or with nursery stock to maximize passive summer shading/cooling, and how to recycle/plant prunings and leaves as fertility-building, carbon-sequestering, pollutant-filtering, water-harvesting mulch.
End time of noon is approximate (with a good showing of folks we’ll likely finish up early).

Cost: FREE—plus your planting help

Meeting spot:
SW corner of 9th Ave and University Blvd by the community bulletin board
Once we finish planting there, we’ll move to the other three chicanes around the intersection.

Come join us in planting native shade trees, understory vegetation, wildflowers, and seed within or beside water-harvesting earthworks in the public rights-of-way. The idea is to plant native food-producing, flood-controlling, wildlife-habitat-producing, beautiful, air- and water-filtering, living air conditioners. Street trees that shade up to 75% of the street’s surface can also cool summer neighborhood temperatures by up to 20ºF.

This enhances the walkability and bikeability of our neighborhoods, which improves health for all and drops crime. When we harvest street runoff to irrigate the street trees, we reduce water consumption as we reduce downstream flooding, we naturally bioremediate/filter pollutants, and help indirectly and directly recharge our groundwater.

This effort builds on the 2010 installation and planting of water-harvesting, traffic-calming strategies in the neighborhood that were funded by a Pima County Neighborhood Reinvestment grant, plus a nearly 30-year Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters program of planting rain and native food forests in street-side street-runoff-harvesting eddy basins.

Brad Lancaster and the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters got the neighbor, neighborhood, and city approvals, applied for—and got funding through—the Inflation Reduction Act Grant Program—via the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, and did the design and project coordination; Logan Byers did the autoCAD drawings; Tucson Bird Alliance (formerly Tucson Audubon) is our fiscal agent; KE&G Construction, Inc. did the concrete curb and asphalt work; Dryland Design did the basin excavation and rock work; Churchman Sand & Gravel provided the catalina granite rock and boulders; Desert Survivors and Spadefoot native plant nurseries provided the plants; the project; while the planting will be done by the amazing volunteers who show up (supervised by Brad Lancaster).

What to bring: Work clothes, sun hat, gloves, and water as we’ll be working outdoors. A pointed shovel, pruning tools, and/or hard rake would also be great (and we’ll have some extra tools on hand for those lacking them).

After-planting baby goat social
We have baby goats a 100-foot walk from the planting site.
So for those who are interested, once we are done with the planting, you can play with our baby goats. They are very social and love to be held.

ALSO COME TO OUR SUNDAY PLANTING EVENT in the West University Neighborhood. Details here.