We Love our Volunteers!
If you didn’t already know, Wimberley Parks and Recreation hosts volunteer workdays almost every Wednesday morning from 8 a.m. – 10 a.m. from October to April every year. This chunk of time allows our staff to plan about 25-30 workdays to assist with projects, not only at Blue Hole, but also our other smaller, but equally fabulous parks. This group consists of master naturalists and nature lovers, who tend to be extremely knowledgeable on native flora and fauna and all aspects of what goes in to keeping an outdoor space looking pristine. Our staff are constantly learning something new from them, so if you are reading this and thinking that you wouldn’t fit in, take our word that our group is very warm, welcoming, and it is a great environment to learn from these knowledgeable folks. The point of this blog post is not really to educate and recruit folks to our workdays, though if it has that effect on the reader as well, then great. The point of this post is to brag on the group of folks that we hold very dear to our hearts – our volunteers!
Very quickly, let’s preface by saying Wimberley Parks and Recreation is a very small, but mighty staff of only 8 full-time employees. Larger cities have departments of 100+ people, and a large percentage of those people are park maintenance staff. Wimberley has 3 full-time maintenance workers to take care of 6 parks, with the largest being 126 acres at Blue Hole Regional Park. We recognize that Wimberley is relatively small compared to some of those cities with large personnel numbers, but it also goes without saying that our staff stays very busy managing the parkland that we have. This sometimes makes it very difficult to keep up with everything that we would like to get done, especially special projects like planting 40 5-gallon trees, re-mulching a quarter mile of trail, or even just trimming plants, pulling weeds and keeping our landscaped gardens looking top-notch. It is with the help of our amazing volunteers that we are able to get things like that done, and still are able to keep up with all of the other day-to-day tasks that encompass maintaining parkland. It is truly incredible to see the amount of work that can be done by 10 devoted volunteers in only two hours’ time. It makes projects like completely transforming the space around the Wimberley Community Center sign with beautifully a xeriscaped landscape of native cacti possible. It makes projects like planting 100+ native plants in an old spray field at Blue Hole in an effort to restore the land to a native prairie possible! These are both projects that our group was able to accomplish this year, and again, all just in a couple of hours.
When we call our volunteer group devoted, we mean it. There are volunteers in our group that have been showing up to volunteer workdays long before any of our current park staff has worked for the department. We have folks that are here practically every Wednesday morning, all season long, with a smile and car full of tools, ready to work and take on any project we throw at them. From the bottom of our hearts, Wimberley Parks and Recreation would like to thank all of those who have taken even just one Wednesday morning to spend your free time working with our staff on a project. If that was this year, or 10 years ago, your efforts matter and our parks would not be the same without you! Wimberley is such a special place, full of like-minded people, who care deeply about preserving and conserving this slice of heaven we call home. Our staff recognizes how lucky we are to work in such a community, and to get to serve such extraordinary people.
Last Wednesday was the last workday of the 2025-2026 season. We will pick back up when the summer comes to a close, and the (hopefully) cool weather sets back in October. Till then – thank you all who came out this season – we had a blast! See you soon!