Volunteers gathered on two Saturdays in November at Landisville Mennonite Church in Pennsylvania to convert 3.65 acres of farmland into forest and meadow as part of the congregation’s efforts to improve water quality, expand pollinator and wildlife habitat and address climate change.
More than 80 volunteers planted meadow seed Nov. 6 on 1.25 acres. The following Saturday, more than 100 volunteers planted 640 tree seedlings on 2.4 acres.
On both days a statement was read acknowledging the land was home to Indigenous people before the church was founded there and that the planting project is part of the congregation’s work of reconciliation with Indigenous people.
“We wanted to do this as part of our commitment to caring for God’s creation, both now and for future generations,” said Brenda Horst, a Landisville Mennonite member who helped organize the project. “But we couldn’t have done it alone. We really relied on the expertise of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and volunteers from the community to get this done.”
In addition to volunteers from the church and the alliance, volunteers came from Hempfield High School, Franklin & Marshall College, Elizabethtown College, Boy Scout troops, Interfaith Partners for the Chesapeake, Lancaster Conservancy, Hope United Methodist Church and several Mennonite congregations.
Ryan Davis, Pennsylvania forest projects manager with the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, helped plan the project and led the plantings both days.
“We have had large groups before but never so many on site at once,” he said. “The seeding and tree planting days were just the very beginning of the process. We can expect the meadow to begin benefiting pollinators and other wildlife next spring, as the vegetative diversity there skyrockets relative to when it was a crop field. Rain infiltration will improve by the second year and we will begin to sequester carbon in the soil within just a few years.”
Mennonite Men gave a grant for the tree seedlings as part of JoinTrees, its campaign to plant 1 million trees by 2030.
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