On July 11th we celebrated and thanked Gary and Holly Focht for the inspiration they provided to the Nanticoke River Watershed Conservancy as board members and contributors of moving us ahed with so many advances. We wish them the best of memories and times, as we know they will, as they move to Maine and look forward to their successes there- and are grateful/thankful for their countless hours here!

Obviously, with a day of well -needed and deserved rain, we found ourselves inside – but not without a long list of projects to develop and work on. So we did…

I. We further discussed the project of designing a system of breaking down plastic and converting such plastic to items to resell and repurpose, following the Precious Plastics model. We have reached out to many a institution and university, hoping we can collaborate to make this idea a reality to turn plastics in our schools and community repurposed and a path to being used again for the future.

II. We look forward to meeting with representatives of the Sussex Preservation Coalition and finding ways to work together for a more efficient and reenergized community that we find ourselves in all over Delaware. Additionally, we want to find a way to work together in the future and have events that are in collaboration with our nature-environment based organizations in DE.

III. We discussed Geocaching and introducing this back to the communities that surround us, to explore the environment in new ways. The ideas of a scavenger hunt but also utilizing coordinates to see the environmental details of landscapes around us is always a learni ng experience.

Between III and IV, we had the pleasure of interviewing the builder of our new NRWC building, (Charles Shiery and Shiery Construction) and creating a podcast based on that currently. We discovered some great insights into what we have as a work space currently.

IV. We have been discussing the development of a pollinator garden at the NRWC offices and want to explore more from the University of Delaware, as well as finding ways to have a living classroom around us when we work outside.

V. We discussed clover and having this as a living mulch option. We are discussing ways to make this happen and we found an example of this as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkd9S–1-kM

VI. We are asking a Seaford Cross Country staff member, Edsony, to reach out to the XC coach and see if we can include them on our July 27th event at the Vince Morris Trail at Chapel Branch (more on that soon below).

VII. We continue to work on presentations and projects that best represent each week we have been working on various ecological topics, and discussed developing the Week 3 presentation where we were discovering indigenous species native to the area from our visit to a living native environment in week 3.

VIII. We played a cool game known as, yep, Poop Bingo.

We played several times and worked on developing species native to the Chapel Branch area and creating a game based on what individuals would see and discover at the Chapel Branch Trail. We reached out to a NRWC member to get some help with developing our own game based on our own area. We came up with over 48 items native to the area we are located at in Chapel branch trails and hope to develop this game to represent what the visitor to the trails would see.

IX. We began developing ideas for the NRWC online store to represent various items to maintain as a way to represent the NRWC in the community and online (Student-created, nature-based jewelry, hats, coasters, totebags, fannypacks, bumper stickers, golf ball sales, and more!

X. We looked ahead to see if there might be a possibility of our NRWC students presenting at an upcoming inservice for teachers and providing ways to connect all disciplines in to activities into ways to involve youth in their immediate communities.

XI. We made an excursion to the local public library to print out copies advertising the upcoming Lolly Festival on July 27th – and planned planned planned.

We always have visitors and always like capturing them as well:

XII. With overhead transparencies, we hope to create ways to develop cool tools to identify local fauna, animals, and more and create an interactive activity with this.

XIII. Of course we worked on what will be the Lolly Festival July 27th – celebrating all things nature, the environment, and our involvement within. The weather might have been ugly but we made so much progress in plotting, planning and created, with the environment at the center!

Lolly Festival Registration: Spanish – https://forms.gle/V5tyHtS4zkm1Gwqq7

Lolly Festival Registration – English – https://forms.gle/oLDpaDpUcRW3fPcM9

Mark July 26th on your calendar and definitely scan or enter your RSVP to attend and take part in the activities led by our work study students that day from 9 -12. We are working with about 15 RSVP’s and hour from 9 -12, so reserve your spot to see how they have incorporated the environment into an outdoor classroom for our Delawareans (and bring some spending money we have some amazing silent auction items thanks to SoDel and DogFish Head!

As we ended the day with warnings regarding the weather on the horizon, we also saw a promise of hope on our horizon too!