The Halloween 2011 turned into a bonus for the Hilltop Reservation when the town mulched all the downed trees and gave the mulch to the Hilltop Conservancy to restore a three-acre meadow.
Turns out, Hurricane Sandy will do much the same for another stretch of the park. Theresa Trapp, the treasurer of the Hilltop Conservancy, sent us this photo of two Department of Public Works trucks unloading mulch created from trees felled by last year’s giant storm. “Verona had a LOT of mulch as a result of Hurricane Sandy clean-up, and the Hilltop had 2 more big rocky areas that needed what I like to call ‘pre-dirt’ applied to them,” Trapp wrote us. Both sites are on the western side of the loop road.
As with the meadow restoration work in 2011 and 2012, the plan for the Hurricane Sandy mulch is to smooth out and compact the piles, and then let the mulch decompose into topsoil over the next several years. “There is a lot of nitrogen (leaves) in this mix,” Trapp wrote, “so the process should be pretty quick — the site might even be ready to plant with native grasses and wildflowers by early 2015.”
