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TTF recently helped with planting an Audubon-certified native bird habitat at Wyncote Elementary School. You may remember the last time we assisted with a native bird habitat at Cedarbrook Middle School — it was featured in this Greenlife Pennsylvania video.
This time, the project was led by two dynamic leaders from Delaware Valley Earth Force’s Youth Leaders team. Throughout the day, Wyncote students helped in each stage of the planting, with the final result being a beautiful garden of all native plants for local birds — and people! — to enjoy.
Here are some photos from the day, courtesy of Delaware Valley Earth Force. Below, Barb Duffy from the Cheltenham Environmental Advisory Council demonstrates proper planting techniques to some very helpful student participants.
You can view more photos from the day in this Flickr set.
Many thanks to all the wonderful, dedicated volunteers who came out to help clean up the creek behind Cedarbrook Middle School this weekend!
More pictures will be posted soon on our Facebook page.
For more clean-ups, events, and volunteer opportunities, please visit our Events page.
In Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia Counties, 21.57 tons (43,149 pounds) of trash and litter was removed from local waterways and the Delaware Estuary in a coordinated effort by volunteers on International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) Day. The ICC, sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy, is the world’s largest single-day, volunteer effort focused on cleaning the world’s waterways! TTF participated along with a group of dedicated volunteers, picking up 1402 pounds of trash and litter at Wall Park. See photos and our original post here.
Thanks to all of you who helped to improve the quality of our waterways and environment!
Thank you SO much to all of our amazing volunteers and to everyone who came out and ethically recycled their e-waste this past weekend!
During the drive the parking lot of Cedarbrook Elementary School, normally empty on a weekend, was crowded with people and piled high with “e-waste” –old computers, TVs, radios, stereo equipment, toasters, and other used electronics that had reached the end of their useful lives.
Over the course of the weekend, over 150 families brought old electronics by the carload and paid $1 per pound to have them recycled ethically.
By Sunday afternoon, over 11,000 pounds of used electronics were packed up for shipping to facilities that will redistribute the use-able items to people who can use them, harvest working parts from broken components, and forward unsalvageable items to carefully chosen U.S. operations that recycle e-waste in accordance with the highest international standards (more information at www.ban.org). Over the past two years, TTF has helped to ethically recycle over 50,000 pounds of e-waste!
The-waste drive is the brainchild of Christopher Swain (pictured above), the first person in history to swim the entire lengths of several dirty waterways including the Columbia River, the Charles River, the Hudson River, and Lake Champlain to raise awareness about clean water issues. Cheltenham a stop on the way for Swain, who is currently swimming 1000 miles down the Atlantic coast from Marblehead, Massachusetts to Washington, DC. The ocean swim is part of his TOXTOURTM project (www.toxtour.org), an ongoing campaign to collect and recycle, ethically, one billion pounds of e-waste, to prevent toxic chemicals and heavy metals from fouling the world’s waterways and ecosystems.
A special thanks to our hard working crew from Arcadia University!
You can view more photos from the event in our Facebook album.
Last weekend, TTF received a Community Greening Award from The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society for our riparian buffer and outdoor classroom at Glenside Elementary School. The project, a 10,000 square foot riparian buffer along the main stem of the Tookany Creek behind Glenside Elementary School, was initiated by Glenside 4th grade teacher Linda Jephson and developed in partnership with Glenside Elementary School, Glenside Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), Cheltenham School District, the Cheltenham Environmental Advisory Council (EAC), and NAM Planning and Design, LLC, and funded by grants from TreeVitalize and the Royal Bank of Canada.
In the next phase of this project, we will install permanent educational signage and create outdoor classroom seating with safe, gated access to the creek so that students across the district can participate in hands-on environmental education.
The Community Greening Award, a collaboration of PHS and Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful, recognizes individuals, garden clubs, civic associations, businesses, municipalities and community groups who have created and maintained public green spaces that enhance their communities.
Several entries this year included innovative ways to capture storm water run off such as rain gardens. Nominations included train stations, public parks, Main Street planters, church gardens, and landscapes around municipal buildings and museums. Spaces were judged on a host of criteria, including variety of plant material, maintenance, design, visual appeal, and use of space. Though these landscapes were not competing against each other, it was the task of the committee to determine which plantings deserved PHS recognition.
For a full list of winners, please visit the PHS website.
Headquartered in Philadelphia, PHS is a non-profit membership organization with more than 16,000 members spanning 48 states. PHS is the producer of the world-class Philadelphia International Flower Show, which will celebrate “Passport to the World” Feb. 28- March 7, 2010. Philadelphia Green works in partnership with agencies, corporations and community groups to transform derelict vacant land, streets and parks into vibrant, stabilized and well-managed open spaces. These efforts contribute to the quality of life throughout Philadelphia, serve as economic stimulus for communities, and provide a model for similar efforts nationwide.
We had a great time planting a riparian buffer along the Tookany Creek at Curtis Arboretum this weekend. Thank you to Barb Duffy and the Cheltenham EAC for all of their great work!
See more photos in our Facebook album for this planting!
Check it out this short film about the bird habitat we helped create at Cedarbrook Middle School!
We’ve tallied up the data from our clean-up at Wall Park, and it is astonishing to see all that we picked up from the creek and its banks in just a few hours! We collected:
1402 pounds of trash, including:
- 205 food wrappers/containers
- 156 plastic bags
- 152 glass bottles
- 90 plastic bottles
- 87 beverage cans
- 59 lids/caps
- 45 cups/plates/knives/forks/spoons
- 42 cigarettes
- 31 straws/stirrers
- 20 cigar tips
- 9 toys
- 7 pieces of clothing
- 7 pull tabs
- 5 plastic tarps
- 4 car parts
- 2 bicycle tires
- 2 paper bags
- 1 55-gallon drum
- 1 balloon
- 1 bait container
- 1 fishing line
- 1 light bulb
- 1 lighter
Some of the most peculiar items we found were: beer cans from the 1970’s, pottery shards, wire cables, a circuit board, a four-pronged light-bulb, a gigantic tarp, rubber gloves, and full cans of iced tea.
Thanks again to all the great volunteers who came out to make the day a success!
On September 19, 2009 at Wall Park in Cheltenham Township, over 40 residents participated in a stream cleanup event that removed over 1,400 pounds of trash from the Tookany Creek and its banks. The event was a cooperative, volunteer effort by citizens from across the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford watershed. TTF hosted the event as part of International Coastal Cleanup Day, a worldwide, annual project led by Ocean Conservancy. Local organizations, including the Cheltenham Environmental Advisory Council (EAC), the Arcadia University Environmental Network, Cedarbrook Middle School, and TTF came together to make the day a success. PA CleanWays provided tools and supplies for the volunteers.
The substantial effort we made here on Saturday morning was part of an even larger, global effort. International Coastal Cleanup Day is the brainchild of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental ocean advocacy group dedicated to the health of the earth’s waterways. By sponsoring organizations on every continent to host local waterway clean-up events, the Ocean Conservancy shares credit for removing over 100 million pounds of marine litter from of 170,000 miles of beaches and inland waterways over the last 20 years. Last year, nearly 400,000 volunteers collected more than 6.8 million pounds of trash in 100 countries and 42 US states – the largest volunteer effort of its kind!
1,400 pounds of trash were removed from the Tookany Creek and its banks at Wall Park
We’ve made some really great progress cutting back invasive plants and planting native ones (with the help of 75 fourth graders) at Glenside Elementary School. Two weeks ago, over 30 volunteers removed invasive vines and bushes overrunning the area. Lat week, Glenside Elementary students, PTO members and local volunteers planted over 400 native trees and shrubs. At the end of the project, an educational sign and seating area will be installed for student use.
The planting project will improve the health of the creek while providing students with hands-on learning about watershed ecology and protection. Over 5000 square feet of lawn grass along the fence by the creek will be replaced with native trees, shrubs and grasses. These plantings will provide a much-needed buffer between the lawn and the creek. Native plants help absorb stormwater to slow flooding, prevent erosion of the creek’s banks, and keep fertilizers, salt, trash and other pollutants out of the creek’s waters. Native plants also provide important habitat for birds, fish, and other native wildlife crucial to the ecosystem.
Here’s a picture of some of the awesome volunteers from our invasives removal.
