If you saw goats roaming at Wyman Park over the weekend, it wasn’t your imagination.
The Friends of Wyman Park Dell, a volunteer-run nonprofit organization, brought goats back to help landscape the 16-acre park across from the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The four-legged landscapers grazed the slopes during Goats on a Slope as part of a vegetation removal plan.
“This area of the park was determined to be too steep to mow/weed whack, but the Friends of Wyman Park Dell wanted to maintain the site line from the lower Dell up to the Baltimore Museum of Art as per the park’s Master Plan,” said Martha Waldron, board president for the Friends of Wyman Park Dell. “We are naturally converting this portion of the park into a hillside meadow that will eventually consist of native grasses and wildflowers. We are letting the trees in this area naturally die out and will purposefully not replant. The goats provide a sustainable (and cute) strategy for removing the invasive and overgrown vegetation on the ‘BMA Slope’ and eat those young unwanted tree saplings.”
Prosperity Acres, a Calvert County farm, was hired to complete the weekend project. Scheduled to run from Friday to Monday, the vegetation removal was completed in a little over 48 hours.
Farm owner Mary Bowen said she completes jobs like these all over Maryland, northern Virginia, and sometimes Washington, D.C., but this is the goats’ first time in Baltimore.
“Most jobs are typically anywhere between 30 to 50 goats,” Bowen said. “This one only required 14 goats, so it was a little smaller.”
“The goats are done when the foliage is down, but we still have to leave some along the ground because the slope will start to erode if they were to decimate it,” Bowen added. “So you’ll still see some foliage on the ground when they are done with their job.”
In 2020, the Friends of Wyman Park Dell partnered with a different company based on the Eastern Shore for Goats on the Slope.
“They were great partners but we wanted to take on larger-scale jobs, which is why we got in touch with Prosperity Acres,” Waldron said.
Waldron said that in both 2020 and 2022 the Goats on the Slope project was fully funded by the community of neighbors through a GoFundMe campaign. In 2022, the nonprofit also received a Love Your Block Grant Award from BMORE Beautiful.
The goats may return every year until the area is ready for meadow plantings to be installed, “but this will require consistent funding and planning,” Waldron said.
The Friends of Wyman Park Dell plan year-round community programs in the Dell. Check out their website www.wymanparkdell.org to support or donate.
