"Tree-mendous" Thanks from the Intervale!
Guest post by the Intervale Center
In December 2020, City Market partnered with COTS for its annual holiday tree sale. Expanded to both City Market stores, the community purchased 645 holiday trees, helping to fund the important work of COTS during an extraordinary year.
In addition, for every tree purchased, City Market donated funds to the Intervale Center to help plant trees through the Intervale Conservation Nursery. The Nursery is an enterprise of the nonprofit Intervale Center that grows and sells native trees by the thousands across Vermont, planting 250 or more acres of new forest along our rivers and streams every year!
Pre-Covid, the trees purchased by City Market were planted as part of community planting days in Burlington and surrounding communities, reforesting acres of land close to home with the hard work of volunteers. Covid-19 restrictions made community planting days tough to coordinate this year, so the Intervale Center got creative, working with partners to provide trees to two in need. City Market community members helped provide 60 beautiful cedar saplings to the Orleans County Natural Resources Conservation District that were planted at the Albany Community School with the help of students.
They also provided hundreds of trees that were planted in Burlington at McKenzie Park by the City of Burlington Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, 350.org, and community volunteers in mid-May, just as Covid-19 restrictions were being lifted.
Volunteers planting new forest at McKenzie Park in the Intervale
Kids planting trees at the Albany Community School
The Intervale Center is a nonprofit based in Burlington that works to enhance farm viability, promote sustainable land use and engage people in the food system. It is located within the ancestral home of the Vermont Abenaki people, Winooskik, the place of the wild onions, and is committed to supporting, honoring, and protecting Abenaki survivance and their homeland.
Most people know their community events like Summervale, or that they own and manage recreational and agricultural land in Burlington, but many don’t know what they are a statewide organization that provides business planning services to farms across Vermont, grows and plants trees, and provides important leadership statewide and nationally at the intersection of conservation and agriculture.
The Intervale Conservation Nursery started in 2001 to help farmers reforest riparian – or riverbank - buffers along farm fields with trees and shrubs locally sourced and grown in Vermont. Today, the Nursery plants over 30,000 trees across the state, working with towns, conservation districts, community groups, farmers and private landowners to reforest miles of stream and riverbank each year using trees and shrubs grown in the Intervale.
