UPDATED INFORMATION ON THE SMALL GREENFEST!

The first annual Small Greenfest will be held on the Clint Small Middle School Campus (4801 Monterey Oaks Blvd. 78749) on Saturday, September 29, 2012 from 3-7PM.

The festival should be amazing! It will be a great way to get the family outside and to get in touch with nature! There will be food, fun, and live music for all ages!

Food will be provided by Austin area food trailers! More information to come. Give us recommendations of other trailers you LOVE so we can invite them out too.

CATCH activites will be running the entire time! Kids and adults will have the opportunity to race, play on our disc golf course, balloon pop, and even attempt some track activites. There will be 2 inflatable obstacle courses and a rock wall for climbing. There is an optional  wristband that will cost $10 a person. That will cover all events, activites, and will enter people into all door prizes. Through a partnership will out CATCH Committee(Coordinated Approach to Child Health http://archive.austinisd.org/schools/shac/catch/), we will be providing door prizes that encourage being active and outside. Bicycles, camping equipment, and sporting good will be raffled off to attendants who purchase a wristband. There will also be environmental vendors on site. Vendors will be doing sessions on composting and the City of Austin rebate program, organic vegetable gardening, and sustainable solutions.

We will have 3 different bands performing through the festival. The Gourds (http://www.thegourds.com/), One Black Lung (http://oneblacklung.com/) and The Better Halves (http://www.thebetterhalvesmusic.com/) will be on stage.

Please come out and join us! Invite you friends! It is going to be great!

Summer Photos

STEM Camp campers cooling off at Austin Nature and Science Center.

STEM Camp once again cooling off but this time at Deep Eddy. It was HOT this summer!

Robot inspiration for STEM Camp with a robotics theme.

Newly put together from garden to counteract rainwater erosion. Cacti, Milkweed, grasses, standing cypress, etc.

Native Grass Garden with student seating.

Red-tailed Hawk sitting in our Cedar elms. Natural resident, but enjoys KFC.

NWF Schoolyard Habitat. Installed 2010-2011. Flame Leaf Acanthis blooming in back.

STEM campers looking through the glass bottom boat at Aquarena Springs in San Marcos.

STEM camper testing airplane designs on the PE staircase.

 

A STEM campers close call with a native Texas habitant at Austin Nature and Science Center.

Bats on Campus & Transplantation Tuesday.

Recognize this little guy?

Bats are occasional visitors on our campus. When Small first opened, the silo stairs were completely enclosed with corrugated steel. No insulation, no windows, very little ventilation.

Temperatures in the silo soared above 100 degrees. Solutuion? Cut large ventilation slits and cover them with wire mesh. This did work. It brought the temperatures down, but the mesh wasn't the proper gauge and bats attempted to colonize it.

Another time, two students found a bat on the ground barely breathing. Naturally, they picked it up bare handed. Animal control promptly incarcerated the bat and sent it off for rabies testing. The students sweated out the results with visions of impending shots. The bat flunked its rabies test. The faculty seized the teachable moment and went over bat safety. Bat Conservation International, headquartered here in Austin, offers a poster for schools regarding this very topic. And speaking of BCI, Kari Gaukler once visited my classes and captivated the students with bat facts and fiction.

Our latest flying mammal visitor suddenly appeared in Ms. Mazac's 3rd floor classroom. This was not the first time she's been visited. Mr. Poliakoff (admittedly this info is at least third-hand) apprehended the cuprit. Next stop for our furry perp, the office. That's when I walked into an excited scene in the front office. Ms. Teinert had the offender under her desk (darkest nearby spot) in order to calm it down. Nice thinking- it worked.

I took it to my advisory class, grabbed the kids and the camera, and proceeded to the Bat Box Hilton, erected near our track as a part of Garrett Dunaway's Eagle Scout project.

If you can identify this bat, leave a comment to this posting.

After a couple of minutes, our newfound friend flew off.

Bat photos by Jaime D.

Transplantation Tuesday

One lucrative trick of the nursery trade is to buy flats (trays) of plant starts in 4" pots and repot them in larger containers. The process is known as "bumping up." All three classes helped.

The previous day, students seeded trays of three tomato varieties, sweet bell peppers, jalepeno peppers and little bluestem grass.

Click on the photo to watch us work:

Compost Harvest, Log-a-thon, and much mulch more

Since the arrival of fall, we have been ratcheting up our maintenance and fervently working on four flower bed projects. Most of the trees on campus are mulched. Well, at least the ones we are going to mulch. Our winter vegetable gardens are thriving and now set up with pvc framing and plastic sheeting ready for frost protection. Today we removed the solar shade from the greenhouse. My horticulture class performed admirably.

Emery, Madison, Dariana, and Leydy are working on the bed with the most tenacious weed problem we confronted this semester.

Our composting project started in 2001. Many of the trees we initially planted now generate a couple of bins full. We have two sources for green materials. We keep a bucket in the Teacher's Lounge for their compostables, and add what my students generate. They are allowed to have fruit or vegetable snacks during class. Also, we accept bagged grass clippings and leaves

throughout the year. The drop off point is beside the yellow service road gates on the north side of the campus. This spring we were inundated by a generous donation from a local landscaping company, so we are asking you to limit your individual donations to 10 bags.

Also, we are replacing our worn out wooden pallet bins with sturdier (and spiffier!) bins made by Ronnie Scott's students right here on campus.

When I last visited Ernesto at his Medina nursery, he suggested adding compost to our potting mixture as we bump up our one gallon trees. About one forth of our harvest will go for the horticulture program, one fourth to our organic vegetable gardens, and the rest divided between the three new bed projects. After three days of "processing" our year's accumulation, we are still less than halfway done.

Thursday's log-a-thon was an exercise in teamwork.

Originally the cedar logs that Rodney Baker donated to the school were going to be used as fencing material for the Seedfolks Garden. After checking for underground utilities where the posts were goint to be set, we decided against that idea. A lot of the logs are now serving as borders for many of our recently made flower beds.

These logs are destined for Mrs. Fillman's Memorial Gardens...

... on the other side of campus.

How do you move a pile of old cedar logs?

One log at a time.

Until now the old garden hoses we had used to delineate the bed outlines during design and installation remained.

To shield the greenhouse from chilling north winds, students are creating two beds for evergreens. We often use native evergreens as windbreaks: cherry laurel, mountain laurel, evergreen sumac, yaupon holly, wax myrtle, crossvine, skeleton leaf goldeneye, and Texas sage

work commendably.

Another area where we are installing more wind taming evergreens is at the north entrance to the school.

Thomas breaks up the compacted soil with the highly coveted pickax.

As Thomas chops, he backs up making room for Chandler to spade over the slightly less compacted soil.

Sergio is a jack of all trades. Difficult jobs, often demanding precision, are his specialty.

Here he is trimming a cedar log for use as a border for the bed at the north entrance.

End of class. Time to return the tools.

Don't cross these guys.

Ah! Another fall day spent beautifying the campus,

working cooperatively,getting exercise,

and a healthy dose of nature.