Friends of Northaven Trail

GROW: Fund the crew. Keep the blooms.

The Northaven Trail is a nine-mile commuter and recreational bike and hike trail built and maintained by the Dallas Parks and Recreation Department. The trail runs from Denton Drive to just east of Central Expressway (US75) connecting to the White Rock Creek and Cottonwood Creek trails, with future plans to connect it directly to the SoPac trail.

Friends of the Northaven Trail is a non-profit volunteer organization for the support, maintenance and beautification of the Northaven Trail.

NEEDS

We planted nine miles. 
Now we have to keep nine miles alive.

Over the past several years, volunteers from this neighborhood have planted wildflowers along all nine miles of the Northaven Trail. Pollinator gardens at Royal Park, Welch Road, Pensive, Freda Stern, and St. Michaels.. A meadow at Lavendale and west of Inwood. Native prairie where there used to be turf and trash.

It worked. In April, people pull over on Northaven Road to take pictures.

Here's what we've learned since: planting is the easy part.

A wildflower meadow is not a flower bed. It has to be cut at the right time or it won't reseed. Bermuda, Prickly Lettuce, and Johnson grass have to come out before they set seed, or you lose the whole zone in one season. Invasive vines have to be pulled by someone who can tell them from the natives growing three inches away. Miss the window and the work of an entire spring is gone — not damaged, gone.

Our volunteers meet twice a month. Nine miles does not wait for the last Saturday.

That's what GROW is.

GROW pulls in a professional gardening crew on the trail alongside our volunteers — people who know prairie restoration, who know the cutting calendar, who can tell a seedling from a weed in March, and who can cover ground on a Wednesday when the rest of us are at work.

And here's the part we care about most: the crew takes the jobs nobody volunteers for. Hauling. Grinding out invasives in August. The unglamorous, necessary, all-day work that burns people out and quietly costs you volunteers.

Which means our volunteers get to do what they came for. Planting. Building gardens. Bringing their kids. Watching something they put in the ground come back the following spring.

GROW isn't a step away from being volunteer-run. It's what lets us keep being volunteer-run.

What your gift actually does

It's not abstract. You can go stand in it.

Give today, and in October you can walk out and watch the flock — 450 goats and sheep moving through 56 grazing areas, clearing thatch so native wildflowers can reseed without a mower or a drop of herbicide. Then come back in April and see what came up.

That's the whole cycle: the crew and the flock do the hard, unlovely work in the fall, and the trail hands it back to the neighborhood in the spring.

Last year, 231 neighbors gave. That's what nine miles of wildflowers costs — not one big check, a few hundred people who use this trail deciding it's worth keeping.

Fund the crew. Keep the blooms.

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See our TAILS (sheep and goats) in action

Learn more about our TAILS event here : https://tails.northaventrail.org