June 2026 Newsletter

Happy June! We hope you’ve been staying cool, the summer heat is certainly upon us!

Last Quarry Care for 2025-26

The last Quarry Care of the 2025-26 season is coming up this weekend on Saturday, June 13th from 9AM to 12PM! If you’re free, we’d love for you to join us at the Lemont Heritage Quarries Recreation Area for a fun day of invasive species removal. We will be changing things up a bit, targeting invasive herbaceous species like burdock instead of our usual woody plant targets (i.e. buckthorns and non-native bush honeysuckles). Many of these plants are getting ready to drop seed, so cutting and pulling them now is essential! We will be targeting biennial species like burdock, garlic mustard, mullein, and teasel. Because they are biennials, a single plant only lives for two years. As such, we can effectively control these species without herbicides by cutting and pulling them before they seed out.

It’s crazy to think that we’re already at the end of the 2025-26 season… We were able to get a ton of great work done over the year thanks to all of your help! From native plantings to invasive removal and burning, you play a key role in our mission to support a wilder world! If not this weekend, we hope to see you again this October for the 2026-27 Quarry Care season!

Foraging Walk at the Quarries (July)

Join The Wilder World Trust and The Conservation Foundation on Saturday, July 11 from 10AM to 11:30AM to learn about Illinois-native forageables at the Heritage Quarries Recreation Area! Eric Izzo of The Conservation Foundation will lead the walk and discuss concepts like plant identification, which parts of the plants to eat and how to prepare them, safety, and foraging ethics. We will be looking for summer berries (like gooseberry) and other in-season, edible plants. This is a free event open to all ages and experience ranges.

Native Milkweed Planting

We want to give a massive thank you to Monarch Watch and their Free Milkweeds Grant Program for their generous support of our restoration efforts at the Heritage Quarries Recreation Area. Through this grant, we were able to plant 474 individual milkweed plugs covering 4 different species (common milkweed, swamp milkweed, whorled milkweed, and butterfly milkweed) across 10 acres of land at the Quarries. These species were selected for the site and, as such, should do well at their chosen locations! As they establish, these milkweed plants will support many future generations of monarch butterflies and other pollinator species.

Volunteer Spotlight - University of Chicago Lab Schools

If you’re a frequent visitor to the trails, you might have noticed that parts of the woodlands on the western side of the Quarries have become a bit more open... This was no accident, and was made possible through the hard work of University of Chicago Lab School volunteers! The students helped us to clear invasive buckthorn and bush honeysuckles from the woodland understory. While we still need to go back to take out the big invasive trees, there is now enough open space to begin seeding shade-tolerant sedges and other plants. It all begins here!