Events & Activities
Mark your calendars! Join us Sept. 21
Planting days enhance Fry's Run buffer zone
Mark your calendars! Join us Sept. 21
At our annual fall Family Fun event at Fry’s Run Park in Williams Township, we welcome the public to informative demos and talks, arts and crafts, a kids' story tent, and a native plant sale. Native plants greatly benefit the health of the watershed.
This year's event also will include a fly-tying presentation and a lesson about the Life of Bees by FRWA member and local beekeeper Matthew Little.
Attendees can learn about watersheds and healthy streams, including how to identify key macroinvertebrates — young water-borne insects — that are among the best indicators of water quality. Children can paint and assemble cardboard replicas of those creatures, or do coloring pages featuring hand-drawn artist’s renderings by FRWA member Mary Budkoski. This year there also will be rock and face painting.
Monthly meetings - 1st Tuesdays
Planting days enhance Fry's Run buffer zone
Mark your calendars! Join us Sept. 21
We meet on the first Tuesday of each month at 7:00 pm at the Williams Township Community Center.
Planting days enhance Fry's Run buffer zone
Planting days enhance Fry's Run buffer zone
Planting days enhance Fry's Run buffer zone
Just two years ago, a handful of intrepid FRWA volunteers helped Northampton County Parks & Rec’s Jim Wilson to plant about 60 container trees and shrubs available thanks to a grant secured by Wildlands Conservancy. That was was our fourth planting at the park since 2015.
Eight years after our first planting, some of the sycamores, river birches and oaks are 30 feet tall and we've got a beautiful young woods, creating an effective stream side buffer from the creek upland into the lower meadow at the park. The buffer zone helps mitigate flooding and erosion when stormwaters come through.
By definition, a riparian buffer is a vegetated “buffer-strip” near a stream, which helps to shade and partially protect the stream from the impact of adjacent urban, industrial or agricultural land use. It plays a key role in increasing water quality in associated streams, rivers and lakes and provides a greatly enhanced and varied habitat for wildlife.
Fry's Run is famously "flashy". In recent years, the buffer zone has held up well through named and unnamed storms creating record flood levels.
When the last plantings were young and flooded, FRWA volunteers and NorCo Parks staff salvaged and staked back upright more than 100 young trees that had been flattened. Not a one was lost, however—testament to the staying power of well-rooted trees.