COVINGTON, Ky. - The City of Covington Urban Forestry Division has partnered with Keep Covington Beautiful and Make Goebel Great to host a community tree planting event.

Event organizers are seeking volunteers to help plant 55 trees on West Ninth Street between Greer and Philadelphia Streets and 20 trees in Goebel Park. It will take place on April 30 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. as part of the Great American Cleanup.

The tree planting is funded by Keep America Beautiful and a UPS Community Tree Planting Grant awarded to Keep Covington Beautiful and is the third and final phase of Covington’s model urban forestry corridor project.

“The idea for the corridor came out of the Linden Grove Small Area Study. The study called for a greenway to connect Linden Grove Cemetery with MainStrasse Village,” said municipal arborist Crystal Courtney. “Planting street trees creates this greenway which adds green infrastructure to the community and improves walkability for residents.”

The corridor project began in 2014 with a tree planting event on Holman Avenue that hosted over 100 volunteers who planted 110 trees between West 19th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. It was awarded the 2014 Outstanding Forestry Project by the Northern Kentucky Urban and Community Forestry Council.

The second phase took place in 2015 and extended the corridor down Holman with the planting of 30 trees between Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and Pike Street.

Once it’s finished, the corridor will be used as both a model for other neighborhoods as well as an educational tool to teach the public about best practices in urban forestry.

“We’re planning to put identification tags on the trees as well as set up tree walks for the community and local schools to explain the practice of ‘right place, right tree.’ That is the idea of selecting the proper tree species for both the tree location and the whole urban forest system,” Courtney said.

Best practices also include incorporating a wide variety of tree species in order to prevent monocultures that are susceptible to invasive insects and refrain from using species that could become invasive, as is the case with ash trees and Bradford pear trees.

Volunteers will learn about the numerous species of trees in the corridor, such as yellowwood, Kentucky coffeetree, and paperbark maple, and how to properly plant them.

Individuals interested in participating can learn more about the event and RSVP via Facebook by visiting https://www.facebook.com/events/1649742631955555/