
{"id":6588,"date":"2009-07-30T06:53:34","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T14:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=6588"},"modified":"2009-08-04T15:34:12","modified_gmt":"2009-08-04T23:34:12","slug":"picnic-in-the-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2009\/07\/30\/picnic-in-the-park\/","title":{"rendered":"Picnic in the park"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/goatpatrol4.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/goatpatrol4.jpg\" alt=\"Photo by Kirk Ross.\" width=\"150\" height=\"200\" align=\"left\" \/><\/a><strong>by Beth Mechum<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Staff Writer<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Goat Patrol doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need a lunch break. Its entire day is a lunch break.<\/p>\n<p>And the business works out such that it benefits all interested parties.<\/p>\n<p>The dog park at Hank Anderson Community Park now has a lot less poison ivy and the goats are to be thanked for that. A baaaahhhh is what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get in response \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the same sound heard around the park last Tuesday and Wednesday, as Goat Patrol human coordinator Alix Bowman watched her goats clear the land without the use of any pesticides or noisy machinery.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nBowman said the goats have the same hours as most landscapers and are even more efficient in getting to the hard-to-reach places.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The goats are often less expensive and get into a lot of stuff other workers wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to touch,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said.<\/p>\n<p>What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s poisonous to humans can be dessert to goats. But they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t eat just anything. Bowman comes out to survey the land to make sure what needs to be cleared is something the goats will want to nibble on.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s great for the goats, because they should have a variety of plants to eat,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Bowman said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and so in doing this, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re exposed to a lot of different types of vegetation and they enjoy it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>The goats come in and do the clearing away; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s then up to the city to maintain it.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not landscapers; they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not going to neatly trim your hedges into animal shapes,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Bowman said.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday morning, David Poythress, street superintendent with the town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s public works department, was at Anderson Park taking a few snapshots of the results and mingling with the patrol as they worked back through to clean up an area cleared Tuesday.<br \/>\nAs the goats gobbled up the last bits of a large patch of poison ivy \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even rearing up on hind legs to reach higher up the tree trunks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Poythress said he was impressed. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you want to get an idea of the difference,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153check out the area farther down where they haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been yet.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>A few moments later, the patrol was herded into the as-yet-untouched area. Though thick with vegetation, the degree of munching that ensued indicated that was about to change. <\/p>\n<p>Bowman noted that she didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t come up with the Goat Patrol concept: she heard about it while living on the West Coast.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I thought goats would really fit well in this area, with everything from the vegetation to the climate to the social atmosphere in the Triangle,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been very warmly received.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/goatpatrol7.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/goatpatrol7.jpg\" alt=\" width=\"150\" height=\"113\" align=\"left\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Beth Mechum Staff Writer The Goat Patrol doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need a lunch break. Its entire day is a lunch break. And the business works out such that it benefits all interested parties. The dog park at Hank Anderson Community Park now has a lot less poison ivy and the goats are to be thanked for&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[299],"class_list":["post-6588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-green"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6611,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588\/revisions\/6611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}