You’ve heard of the farmer in the dell, but this is a new one.
A battalion of 20 goats have been unleashed upon North Baltimore’s Wyman Park Dell to do a job a lawn mower could not: tame the steep, overgrown sides of the bowl overlooked by the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The hungry horde arrived in the pocket park Thursday afternoon, carted in from a Centreville farm owned and operated by Eco-Goats, a company that specializes in the kind of environmentally friendly — and adorable — vegetation control only goats can provide.
And the furry fiends have their work cut out for them. During the spring, as the coronavirus pandemic tore across the state, the organization that cares for the park wasn’t able to host its monthly volunteer clean-up. Although these events are back on now, Friends of Wyman Park Dell President Cailin McGough said, the patch of land the goats have been charged with munching still could use some extra attention.
Lucky for the park’s newest employees, the 0.65-acre hillside is ripe with multiflora rose plants and wineberries — two types of vegetation that McGough said are tasty treats for goats.
“We love our people volunteers, but sometimes there are just things that goats are better equipped to do,” she said.
This isn’t the first time goats have been brought on to tackle unruly slices of land in the Baltimore area. Since 2014, goats from Darlington’s Harmony Church Farm have been transported to Towson University’s Glen Arboretum to putter around for a few days, chowing down on invasive species.