Volunteers are needed to help maintain the gardens in a seven-mile section of the Erie Canalway Trail that has been adopted by Sandy Guzzetti and her husband Mike through the adopt-a-trail program of Parks & Trails New York.
“Our unique approach to the trail is to plant gardens and put bike art in each trailhead/road intersection,” said Guzzetti, team leader. “No other place on the 338 miles of trail across New York State does this.” The gardens are attractive and they help trail users easily see intersections and trail continuations.
The Guzzettis finance all the planting and maintenance costs of the gardens, but they need more volunteers for the watering and gardening tasks.
Anyone can help. You don’t need a gardening background or specialized knowledge.
Their section of the Erie Canalway Trail runs from Stevens Street in Lockport south through Pendleton, with one more trailhead garden on Tonawanda Creek Road near New Road in Amherst, for a total of 10 trailhead areas.
Guzzetti likes to have a team of three or four people to maintain each trailhead area, but some areas have only one or two people.
“Right now our Lockport trailheads can really use more people helping,” she said. “Clubs, families, school groups, churches, or just a group of friends make great partners to care for a trailhead.”
Their gardening season starts about mid-May and goes to about the beginning of November.
“So basically we begin when the chance of frost disappears until the first hard frost,” she said.
The section of the Erie Canalway Trail from Buffalo to Lockport gets used by about 350,000 people annually.
You can contact Guzzetti at Trailkeepers@roadrunner.com or 716-930-6307.
