Fall is a great time for apple picking, corn mazes, and enjoying beautiful autumn foliage, but as the Town of DeWitt and Onondaga Earth Corps know, it’s also a good time to plant a tree. Tomorrow morning starting at 9:00 AM, volunteers and community leaders will meet at DeWitt Town Hall to participate in the planting of around 150 trees. Funded by the US Forest Service’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative under their invasive species program, this is a wonderful opportunity to get involved in a local environmental conservation project. You can read more about this event in the Eagle News story here.

While the trees planted tomorrow will be of several different species, one aspect of the project will involve planting a hemlock hedge intended to serve as a hedge insectary for raising a colony of biocontrol insects as part of the New York State Hemlock Initiative’s biocontrol research program. Hemlock hedges enable us to rear hemlock woolly adelgid predators outside the limited space of the lab environment. Hemlock hedges also give us access to locally adapted populations of biocontrol insects for nearby wild release. Our hemlock hedge program seeks to increase the impact of our biocontrol research by allowing us to rear greater populations of predators and facilitate more predator releases.

You can learn more about our hemlock hedge program, including how to get involved, here.