NEW BLOG ADDRESS

We’ve moved! Visit our new habitat & Green Team blog at:

Caraway Green Team

All of our habitat entries are at the new site, so add the Green Team blog address to your bookmarks!

http://carawaygreenteam.wordpress.com/

We are the Caraway Green Team!

We have a new name — we are officially the Caraway Green Team! We’re bringing to attention more than just our habitat — our recycling programs, energy and water conservation, and more. Caraway is going to be greener than ever! Our blog is going to get a new update, too — stay tuned!

Moth Joins Caraway

Welcome back to school — we’ve got a lot going on this year, and we’ll have regular updates here. And a big thank you to all the families who helped water our new habitat over the summer — oh how our garden has grown!

A large Imperial Moth also welcomed excited students back to Caraway — it stayed on one classroom’s windows for hours yesterday! Imperial moth caterpillars munch on Oak Trees — something we have plenty of!

Stay tuned for all the exciting plans for Caraway’s habitat… coming soon!

Thriving in the Heat

Summer is in full swing, but so is our school habitat. You can see why native plants are so wonderful — they are thriving in the crazy heat (while the rest of us are melting). The blooms are blooming, the butterflies are fluttering, and the bees are all abuzz gathering pollen. The habitat is just busy with life, and come fall everything is going to be even bigger and better than it already is!

Take a tour with us…

Just inside the arbor, countless Queen butterflies are fluttering about the Gregg’s Mistflower. It’s their favorite nectar source.

Even from the back, the garden is a rainbow.

This assassin bug is a welcome beneficial insect and will help get rid of pest bugs.

A swallowtail caterpillar feasts on dill, soon to become a beautiful butterfly.

A bumbling bumblebee is quite fond of the Mealy Blue Sage — look at that big pollen sac it’s collected! It looks like the bumblebee has also been visiting the Zexmenia.

The Flame Acanthus is starting to show off its red tubular flowers — perhaps a hummingbird will visit soon! Speaking of birds, one stopped by to get a drink of water from a birdbath, but it flew off before I could get a good picture!

The yellow Four-Nerve Daisy is striking against the purple blooms of the Prairie Verbena.

A Queen butterfly rests on the Milkweed flower, getting nectar. Soon we might have eggs and caterpillars! The aphids have found the Milkweed, so we hope some ladybugs will arrive soon to have an aphid feast.

Thank you to everyone who adopted a plant for the summer.  The habitat looks wonderful, and I know the plants appreciate the water you provide when you stop by!

Savvy Kids Conference, June 12-13

Want your child to become “fit” environmentally, financially, physically and socio-economically? Bring them to the Savvy Kids Conference at St. Edwards University, June 12-13. There will be lots of booths and workshops for kids to learn everything from money management, healthy foods,  philanthropy, growing food, and so much more. I’ll be there on Sunday representing National Wildlife Federation and teaching all about habitats. Hope to see you there!

Adopt a Plant for the Summer!

Please help us see our garden through the heat of the summer by adopting a plant species to water and care for each week. This should be the easiest way for people to help without taking up too much time or having to haul a lot of water. Basically all you’ll need to do is bring a few gallons of water (milk jugs work great) each week to water your plants.

Please pick from the list below — as people choose a plant species, I’ll mark it on the list so nothing is duplicated.

STILL IN NEED OF ADOPTION

NOTE: If you missed getting to adopt a plant, we’d love to have a back-up list of people who can fill in while others are on vacation. Let me know and I’ll add you to the watering team! There are other areas around school that could also use a drink of water from time to time, like around the sign, so there’s definitely room for help!

Anacacho Orchid (1) – requires a deeper watering every few days     PENDING

Arbor Beds (2 beds, with Coral Honeysuckle, damianita, pink skullcap, and Texas Betony): these plants need a deeper watering because of the raised beds, especially the honeysuckle   PENDING

ADOPTED:

Birdbaths (4) — keep them filled and clean of dirt for the wildlife habitat water requirement–the Midkiffs
Autumn Sage (14 total: 12 in one set, 2 elsewhere) — despite the large number, they are easy to water–the Busfields
Blackfoot Daisy (10)–the Carriers
Sensory Garden (thyme, lavender, oregano, Society Garlic, Gray Santolina, plus Chocolate Daisy, 3 damianita, 3 Mexican feather grass): easier for one family to just take the whole bed – the Hattons
Tropical Milkweed(6) + Antelope Horn (1) — the Coates family
Lantana, Texas–the Midkiffs
Basket grass, or Texas Sacahuista (2) – Fitch family
Big Muhly (3) – Fitch family
Yellow Bells (3) – Kondra Family
Damianita (14) -- Kung Family
Butterfly Herbs (3) — Kung Family
Black-eyed Susan (9) – Kung Family
Prairie Verbena  (10) — The Higdons
Woolly Butterflybush (1) — The Higdons
Texas Sage, Compact (2) — The Purcells
Gaura (6) — Mais family
Gregg’s Mistflower (3) — Mais family
Purple Coneflower (2) –  Sanders family
Skullcaps (3) — Sanders family
Firebush (1) – Purcell family
Flame Acanthus (6) – Baddour family
Mealy Blue Sage (8) — Shrull family
Standing Cypress (2) – Shrull family
Tropical Sage (1) — Shrull family
Texas Betony  (12, around Anacacho Orchid) – Rodriguez family
Zexmenia (3) — Miller family
Four-Nerve Daisy (14) — Faires- McClellan family

Once we’ve got our rain collection system installed (and once the plants are established) this won’t be necessary anymore! Thank you so much for keeping our beautiful garden thriving!

We are an official Demonstration Site!

Yesterday, Earth Day, was a tremendous one for our school and students. During our afternoon ceremony, our third- and fourth-graders got to present their 3-D Legacy of Giving habitat murals to community members from around the city, including National Wildlife Federation, Wild Basin Preserve, Wildflower Center, Spicewood Springs Library, Austin Nature & Science Center, Representative Mark Strama, RRISD Superintendent Jesús Chavez, Texas Education Agency, and Austin Children’s Museum. It was an amazing presentation, and cheers could probably be heard throughout the whole school. The recipients were thrilled, and our students’ habitat murals will get to teach others all over Austin and the state of Texas about creating wildlife habitats at home through the use of native plants!

Also visiting our school were representatives from Texas Parks and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Legacy of Giving, RRISD Assistant Superintendent of Elementary Education Beverly Helfinstein and reporters from News 8 Austin and Round Rock Leader. Yes, we were on the news last night!

We have many exciting announcements. First, National Wildlife Federation’s Meg Haenn was on hand to official recognize our school as a Certified Wildlife Habitat, and Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Mark Klym declared our school a Texas Wildscapes Schoolyard Habitat Demonstration Site. This is an important and special honor reserved for places that exhibit habitat restoration and conservation, providing the necessary elements for wildlife and contributing to biodiversity of native animal and plant species. We are proud to have our new signs already on display at our Outdoor Wildlife Lab. Please stop by and see them! And be sure to thank Mrs. Conti, our art teacher for the beautiful painting she did for our Outdoor Wildlife Lab sign, seen above.

We also officially announced that we are proud recipients of two environmental grants. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program has given us a wonderful reimbursement fund of up to $7,500 on money raised and spent toward our environmental goals! In addition, we are thrilled to be Home Depot 2010 Building Healthy Communities grant recipients for $2,500! It means we’ve got to get busy on our next eco projects, including our new rain collection system! We are very grateful to both Partners for Fish and Wildlife and Home Depot for their support of our school’s environmental goals.

If that all wasn’t exciting enough, we were invited to another special event for Earth Day. In the evening, McNeil High School’s Green Club honored several elementary schools for their contributions to energy conservation through the Watt Watchers program. Caraway wasn’t one of the top three, but we did receive an honorable mention for our energy conservation (thank you to Deborah Walker and her Watt Watchers for their hard work at getting us to turn our lights out!), and we received special recognition for our habitat, giving us the very first POWER Environmental Award — Protecting Our World’s Energy and Resources. Thank you so much, McNeil Green Club!

It was an exciting day for our students, without a doubt. The Caraway Earth Day ceremony was tremendously special, and we want to thank all of our dignitaries for spending their afternoon with us. It did rain, bringing our ceremony indoors, but the rain was a gift for our garden on Earth Day. Remember, Every Day Is Earth Day — so reduce, reuse, recycle, conserve water, go native, and go green — every day!

Earth Day Habitat Dedication

Today is Earth Day, a day people take extra care of the environment and truly appreciate Earth. For our students this year, Earth Day also represents the culmination of our school’s focus on wildlife habitats and the creation of our new Outdoor Wildlife Lab. We will be presenting our Legacy of Giving murals to their recipients, and we will have special recognition from National Wildlife Federation and Texas Parks and Wildife! If you can make it, our ceremony begins promptly at 1:45, and we recommend arriving early and parking on the street rather than in our drive. A very exciting day for Caraway!

P.S. Do you see the rogue bluebonnet that has made its home in front of our sign? It didn’t want to miss our special day!

Girl Scout Garden Gets a Makeover

For their Earth Day project and environmental badges, our Caraway Girl Scouts took shovels, trowels, and rakes in hand to redo their shade garden at school with native Texas and drought-hardy plants.

It looks wonderful, and it’s a perfect sister garden to our butterfly-hummingbird habitat! Thank you to all our Girl Scouts, their troop leaders, and their parents who worked so hard on this outstanding garden bed.

A new sponsor!

Interested in growing native Texas plants from seed? There’s no better source than Native American Seed. This family-owned company is helping get Texas back to its roots, literally. Native flower mixes, grasses, and other special plant seeds — this is the place to get them.

We are grateful to Native American Seed for sending wildflower seeds just in time for our school’s Earth Day celebration!