This blog moving to new address

We're Moving!

Future posts will all appear on our new blog; find us at our new address, https://friendsbaltsustainability.wordpress.com/

All prior posts are now available there as well. If you follow with RSS, there's a new feed for the new blog, just head over to the new blog and find the RSS logo in the sidebar. You can also follow by email, and you sign up over there.

With this new address, we will be able to highlight more aspects of sustainability at Friends, and to create some new related pages about aquaponics, the MD Green school application process, Native Plants Teaching Gardens, etc....

Contact Joshua Ratner with questions.

Yeehaw, Paw Paw!

This spring, paw paw, or Asimina triloba had beautiful dark maroon flowers. Sadly, I have no picture for you. But then, right after school started, it looked like this.

Paw paw tree, with fruit

Then on the morning of September 17, I was sad that I couldn't find any, and assumed the squirrels had gotten them before me. But then I found an uneaten, ripe one on the ground. Penny included for size to show you that this is NORTH AMERICA'S LARGEST NATIVE FRUIT. And it's growing on our campus. Yeehaw, paw paw!

And I, at least, thought it was delicious. My students in Literature and the Land, who had to write about it during a sensory descriptive writing exercise--they were not so sure. A few brave souls get a lot of credit for testing that fifth sense: taste. 

Friends School of Baltimore's Native Plants Teaching Garden: not just for looking at, y'all. 

Small Green Thumbs and a Big Orange Harvest

More Friday afternoon pictures of Friends school kids getting their (little) hands dirty. Here are Ms. Morrisey's students in in April, 2015:

.... And then scrubbing clean again:

But WAIT A MINUTE: those aren't the same kids, and they aren't scrubbing their hands. That's this year's Ms. Morrisey's kindergarten crew, cleaning this fall's carrot harvest:

,

These are small raised beds, but they get a lot of love and a lot of use in the spring and fall. There's a lot of jargon and debate about what "real" or "tangible" results should look like in twentieth-century education: personally, I think it should like this colander full of knobby, crunchy beta-carotene.

People and Planet First Conference in downtown Baltimore this weekend

I don't think anyone from Friends is presenting at this conference, but enough parents, teachers and fellow travelers have emailed us to recommend or say that they are going to this conference that I think I should pass along the information:
the People and Planet First Conference this weekend in downtown Baltimore sounds very exciting. And it's free!  Greenpeace USA Director and Story of Stuff founder Annie Leonard gives the evening keynote. Meanwhile, on campus, even before it's completely finished, the new fallen tree garden is already reducing erosion during today's (rather impressive) rainstorm:

The Birds and the Bees (and other pollinators too)

In late July, Catherine Zimmerman came to Friends to film as Friends students young and old planted the new Little Friends Swale (one of the most recent additions to the Native Plants Teaching Gardens) as part of The Meadow Project, a documentary film about the role that native plants and meadows play in supporting pollinators like bees and butterflies.





As she says, if you like butterflies, you need to give them something to eat! And if you like birds, you need to give them seeds and bugs and berries; native plants are the best way to encourage wildlife in our backyards.

 Zimmerman came to film a new planting at the swale because it's full of (among other things) winterberry, milkweed, and mountain mint--these are plants vital to a complete ecology at multiple trophic levels. Here's a post with some details about why we need swales like this and what the garden used to look like. And there's this Flickr set of the most recent planting.

And here are students in Mr. Ratner's US English elective, "Literature and the Land," where students read plenty of Dickinson, Thoreau and McPhee, but also get outside to choose one plant to study, sketch, and journal about all semester.

US students, Mountain Mint, and Cassia Marylandia

Also, see those white placards with the red flags? Those will tell you what you're looking at throughout the garden. If you just want to see the list of the 68(!) native plants species represented in the Little Friends Swale, well, here you go.



-Joshua Ratner