Clean Up

A "before" picture of overgrown piles of junk: crossties, assorted planks, siltfence, aluminum strips, broken concrete border blocks, gravel, and lots of ants.

Today we gathered at the school with our trucks, loppers, trashbags, work gloves, clippers. With the help of parents, grandparents, teachers, students, and nine science club volunteers from Shorter College, we pulled out --

* yards and yards of half-buried fabric silt fencing left over from the construction of the school, 15 years ago
* a table lamp and a shade
* several tires and one wheel
* broken-up concrete picnic table
* old tetherball poles
* railroad ties
* multiple plactic pots, baskets
* the detritus of muliple visits of raccoon families to our school dumpster
* several good treated planks
* a bunch of aluminum siding
* a basketball
* assorted bottles and cans
* a couple of unmentionables

The local "remote" recycling center won't take the tires so they are still on my truck!

What a difference a few dozen willing volunteers and a couple or three hours of sweat can do! I am especially glad to have the hillside behind our cafeteria free of the raccoon litter! It is extremely steep, full of blackberry brambles, blaspheme vine, poison ivy, and close-packed pine saplings. Thanks to our intrepid, slipping, sliding, scratched, and bug-bit crew our hillside is clear of litter.

Two students work on a less wild clean-up site.

And the ugly black swaths of silt fences are gone from the woods and the stream..

The Rivers Alive! clean-up is the first public event of our year-long Watchable Wildlife nature study project. It is also part of our Adopt-a-Stream program.

Thank you to everyone who helped out!

I was too busy working to take many pictures. Here's one of our hardest-working families of workers with an extra they brought along.

Now our nature studies will commense in pristine woods and stream.