Watch this Space: Sq Ft Gardening With Mr. Spawn

Square Foot Garden by the Middle School

See that nifty grid, the smiling student, and the ever-moving Mr. Spawn? Thanks to Mr. Spawn, the students in his gardening club and the (mostly future) efforts of students in his classes, these will soon be "square foot gardens," in which all students in his class will plant and care for vegetables in their individual gridded square foot. We'll post again when the grids turn green!

Long Live Sustainability (Friendsbalt page is LIVE!)

Woohoo! Our webpage is live!


We're proud that sustainability now has a home on the "About" section of the Friendsbalt.org website. This means that current and prospective students, parents, and employees can search for and learn about what we're doing at Friends. (I know that personally it was one of the things I looked for when I was applying for a job).

Thanks again to everyone who was involved--Jane Huth Walsh, Stephanie McLoughlin, Heidi Blalock, Danielle Keeney, Scott Harrington, Katherine Jenkins, Joshua Ratner, and the Sustainability Council.

Our webpage and our blog are linked, with excerpts from all new posts to this blog automatically appearing on the webpage, so you can now stay up-to-date by checking either location. Go ahead and try it now, following this link to your webpage, and then the link back to the blog, and then back to the webpage....in an endlessly sustainable loop of sustainability. Actually, don't do that; instead you should email us and come help us think about what work to do next on the Green Schools MD application!

Talking Squawk: Friends Alum on Maryland Poultry Pollution

Time for another Guest Post! Recent alum involved in Maryland environmental work emailed sustainability@friendsbalt.org to tell us about her work on poultry pollution:

Hi everyone! I'm Lindsey Sellman, Friends Class of 2014. This summer I worked as a canvasser for a non-profit organization that you may have heard of called Food and Water Watch. It is located right on Hopkins campus in a building right across from the shopping center with Chipotle, Potbelly, and Starbucks.

This summer we worked to pass a bill called the Poultry Fair Share Act-- a bill in which would hold the large, corporate poultry producers of Maryland's eastern shore accountable for their own mess in the Bay, as they dump millions of pounds of chicken waste into the Bay each year. This summer, I knocked on doors and encouraged people to donate to our organization and write letters to their senators and O'Malley supporting the Poultry Fair Share Act. 

Food and Water Watch has offices in other cities around the U.S. including Cincinnati (only about 40 minutes from my college, Miami University), Austin, TX, East Lansing, Michigan, and New Brunswick, NJ. This summer, I had the opportunity to work with people from the other offices. The office in Austin recently banned the distribution of plastic bags in stores throughout the city. The office in Michigan is working to clean up the Great Lakes and follow the Clean Water Act. The Baltimore office has worked to ban fracking in Maryland. I hope you guys can take a look at my blog, as it explains how passionate I am for this awesome organization!

Feb 10 Swap Shop = Green (even when the dresses are black or the shorts are scarlet and gray)

Sustainability: not just for treehuggers anymore.

Time for another Swap Shop!

Swap shop events encourage reuse, save people money, and reduce or eliminate the need for new raw materials. So when you donate gently used scarlet and gray shorts, your black bow ties or party dresses, you turn those colors green. Check it out:

The Parents Association and Diversity Council are hosting a 2nd Swap Shop event on Tuesday, February 10th from 3-6 pm in the MS lobby. Please donate gently-used party dresses or sports equipment, as well as clothing with the Friends School logo and music performance attire. Donations will be accepted in front of the ZAC on Friday 2/6 from 7:30-8:00 am. Drop-off boxes will also be located outside all divisional offices. You don't have to donate to participate in the swap on February 10th. For questions, please contact Rebecca Murphy at rmurphyjones66@yahoo.com

Hi There: This is Sustainability at Friends

Hi! If you're encountering this blog for the first time, this is a good spot to start. Friends School Sustainability Council uses this blog to record and celebrate all things sustainable at Friends. You can find the long version of our mission statement or a (brief, we promise) history of our Sustainability Council. Maybe you just want to learn more about the Native Plant Teaching Gardens or you're curious about how sustainability enters our humanities or our science classes. 
This blog will continue to give students a chance to reflect on their thinking, highlight collaborations across divisions on campus and beyond, and document green infrastructure plans and progress on campus. We hope you'll check back again and that you'll email sustainability@friendsbalt.org with ideas or to volunteer. We're always eager to have people join the Sustainability Council: here's what we're focusing on this year.

Hope to see or hear from you soon,

-Sustainability Council Clerks (Scott Harrington, Katherine Jenkins, Joshua Ratner) 

Urban Forest Renewal

Urban Forest Renewal Class at Friends School

Govans Urban Forest

The Urban Forest Renewal class, co-taught by Jessica Garman and Josh Carlin, sends a group of Upper School students out to local parks and forests. They've submitted proposals for art projects at Robert E. Lee Park, visited urban green spaces, and read a lot about the challenges and opportunities regarding urban forestry and lumber. There's much more on their blog, Urban Forest Renewal, entirely written by students in the class. You can also read more of their reflections after the jump.

Guest Student Post: Maddy Shay on Environmental Summer Research

I asked Maddy Shay,class of 2015, to  write a post about her involvement with the Environmental Summer Research Experience for Young Women at Roland Park Country School first as a participant in 2013 and then again as a Teaching Assistant in 2014. Even though this isn't a Friends School program, students from Friends School regularly participate.

Maddy writes:

The goal of the Environmental Summer Research Experience for Young Women is to investigate environmental anomalies, particularly ones involving soil, while educating young girls on various scientific skills in both the field and the lab. The program starts with a biota survey that takes about a week and a day out of the three week program. This is when groups divide up between four sites and collect as much data as possible from their site having to do with the chemicals in the soil, plant populations, and presence of arthropods. Keep reading for more details and links to the work she produced after the jump!

Asters and Goldenrod and Beardtongue (Oh My!) or: A Short History of Conservation and Native Plants Teaching Gardens at Friends School

Asters and Goldenrod and Penstemon Digitalis (Beardtongue) on the Upper School Steps

Curious about how Friends has come to have landscaping that is as ecologically sensitive as it is beautiful? Here's a great history (with pictures) written by Kay McConnell & Julie Moir Messervy about their work on campus. Here's a brief sample from that piece in which Kay describes how Friends administrators collaborated with Guilford Garden Club to get the process rolling:

Together, we agreed upon a plan for GGC members to design garden spaces, shop for locally grown native plants, and supervise the school community on planting days. Lower School science teacher David MacGibeny wrote a series of grants to the Chesapeake Bay Trust, and with CBT support and an investment of both dollars and elbow grease by the school, 3,750 native trees, shrubs, grasses, ferns, and perennials have been planted over the past five years. Another 700 have been sold at three campus native plant sales to be planted in home gardens.

And here's a gallery on the Baltimore Sun featuring Kay McConnell and Friends School landscaping. We'll ask Kay to write an update soon--these gardens are still going strong, but there are many new exciting projects as well.

New Logo Announced!

We have a new logo!

We're excited to use this logo around campus and on the web. Many many thanks to Upper School student Nat Werkheiser who created the design as part of Upper School Art teacher Ben Roach's digital design class. After the council approved Nat's design and offered additional feedback, Ben Roach made final adjustments in consultation with Upper School English teacher and sustainability council member Joshua Ratner.

We really like the design. It was important to the council that the design would be recognizable as unique to Friends School (building silhouettes) while still incorporating elements that everyone thinks of as related to sustainability--things like cycles, trees, the color green, etc.... We think the mix of grey buildings and green trees, along with the four arrows in the circle, will convey to visitors and to members of our community that Friends School cares about sustainability. Great job Nat!

If you're advertising an event that has a sustainable element to it, please let us know at sustainability@friendsbalt.org and we can send  you the logo. 

Middle School students beautify Stony Run

Recently, some Middle School students went out to do some clean up around Stony Run, but they didn't stop there:

See the original post on the Friendsbalt Facebook page.