Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Sportfish & Wildlife Restoration Program

If you’re a gardener, or just looking for a volunteer opportunity, then put November 14th on your calendar, and take part in the Sheldon Lake State Park Prairie Plant-a-thon.

And, we hope to get a hundred, a hundred and twenty-five people out here to spend the morning, and see if we can get three thousand or so plants planted in the ground. We got 26-hundred in, in a four hour period last November.

Robert Comstock is superintendent of Sheldon Lake State Park, which is outside of Houston. The Plant-A-Thon is part of an ongoing effort to replant 400 acres of the park with native tall grass species.

Hopefully in the next two to three years we’ll have all the prairies in the park restored to their former glory.

Many of the native grasses used during plant-a-thons, and weekly restoration projects, are rescued from construction sites around Houston by members of area Texas Master Naturalist Chapters.

They dig up clumps of native grass that they identify from projects all throughout the Houston area. And they’ll work out here and they’ll take these clumps of grasses, and break them apart and put them into one gallon pots where they’ll sit for about three months to get their roots established.

Then volunteers plant the grasses into the prairie. Find details about the Plant-A-Thon at passporttotexas.org.

That’s our show…made possible by a grant from the Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration program…working to restore native habitat in Texas.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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November 14, 2009 — Sheldon Lake SP — Prairie Plant-a-thon Day — Join a biologist and staff as we introduce native grasses and plants into historic prairie lands in the park. Come prepared to dig in the dirt, and learn about our native tall grass prairie. Coyotes, bobcats, eagles, and hawks could be spotted. 8:30 a.m.-1 p.m. (281) 456-2800.

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