Greetings! Winter will soon be over, and a group of your neighbours are already planning for Spring.

HVRA's Treeing the Village committee has received a $25,000 grant from the City of Toronto to provide subsidized backyard trees this Spring to up to 350 area residents that want them. We'll soon be distributing flyers door to door to publicize this opportunity. We're also contacting all of absentee landlords to encourage them to purchase backyard trees for their properties. And we'd like to recruit interpreters who can describe our offer to our Chinese, Italian and Portuguese neighbours in their first language. We hope that Central Tech students will help us dig all the holes for the new trees on the last weekend in April, so that we can plant the trees on the first weekend in May.

Meanwhile, we're also seeking federal student summer employment monies to hire two U of T forestry students to complete the second half of the tree inventory that was launched with the help of 40 volunteers. Once completed, the results will provide all of us with a good overview of the health of the urban forest in the Harbord Village. And it will enable every resident who visits the HVRA website to readily learn what types of trees are in their neighbourhood, and read about the condition of each tree. (By the end of February, you can learn alot about last year's work on the inventory at www.harbordvillage.com.)

Finally this Spring and Summer, we'll also be launching our Adopt a Street Tree. Volunteers will be needed to canvass local businesses to adopt a street tree outside their business, and ensuring it is well-watered throughout the growing season.

We'd welcome any assistance, big or small, that you can provide to help us achieve success with these projects. Everyone is welcome to attend our next Treeing the Village committee meeting, which takes place this Wednesday, Feb.20th at 7pm at 79 Robert, the home of Carmen Gauthier.

If you cannot attend this upcoming meeting, but would like to help, please email me at tim@greenteacher.com or call me at 416-960-1244.

And whether or not you have time to help us, do encourage your neighbours to take advantage of the subsidized trees that we'll soon be promoting in the neighbourhood.

We are exciting about the projects we are taking on, and are hopeful that - together - they'll help us create a leafier, healthier neighbourhood.

I will look forward to hearing from you.

Tim Grant, chair, Treeing the Village committee