SustainingUS Tag

Late last winter we conducted a professional development session with the Riverstone International School middle school teachers. We discussed ideas for how they could get support in their classrooms with sustainable objectives and projects, and created a dream list of sustainability projects and ideas for...

Last Thursday and Friday we broke the daily rainfall records in Boise, and on Friday as the rainfall turned to snow, we broke a 1969 snow record for daily snow in April with 2.1" of snowfall, according the to the National Weather Service...

Updated! The Boise River ReWild project is a community effort of partners working with Golden Eagle Audubon Society to restore over 40 acres of land in the Boise River corridor. In September of 2022 SustainingUS adopted a plot to help keep the project going and...

Winter is a great time to work on getting ready for the spring planting season. This February we designed a rewarding project for the Riverstone International School 9th grade Wednesday field experience. The school wanted to create community gardens along the back of the play...

This fall we got approval to create a laydown yard at Riverstone International School. We identified and area and signed up for ChipDrop, a platform connecting professional arborists with those in need of free mulch. Utilizing ChipDrop we are delivered arborists woodchips and logs which...

October is a great time to plant perennial shrubs and trees. This project day started with lessons in: ecology, fire and windbreaks, succession, native plants and restoration. The Riverstone International School 9th graders are a great group of students who seemed to enjoy making campus...

This winter and spring I had the pleasure of working with an amazing educator, Sydney Bergen, from Riverstone International School. Together we worked with the school administration to design a curriculum for her 8th grade Design Technology Class to create a pilot Nature Play Area...

This spring Lucky Peak Nursery, a USFS production nursery, overproduced native plants for their needs and had to sell the extras to the public! In early April I purchased 50 sage brush, 50 bitterbrush, and 100 ponderosa pine seedlings....

"We had a fabulous harvest and feast today!!! Everyone tried them and most came back for more! They said to tell their “mushroom teacher” that they were brave and ate the mushrooms!!! Thank you for an amazing experience." Mrs. Beltrami, Riverstone Pre-K teacher....

Warm Spring Creek Phase 2. Over the winter we saw some consistent water flows and ice in the project area. The biologs worked as intended and when the channel was overfull we were able to create a small "flood plane" and still maintain the...

We are excited to announce the details of the 4th annual Teacher Sustainability Summit. Save June 9th and 10th on your calendars to join us! Call for presenters and past grant winners. We would love to have you present on your sustainability successes and share the...

This year we found some great advantages- there are outdoor teaching tents, socially distant classrooms, and an emphasis on the outdoor classroom. Its a lot to celebrate given what COVID forced upon us. Earth week at Riverstone was not as boisterous as previous years but...

There are so many benefits to having living plants in indoor and especially in educational spaces. Indoor plants are important for mental health; they contribute to feelings of peace and solitude, and are inherently calming. Several years ago the Riverstone Green Team (Snake Plant Blog)...

One of the most striking changes for some of us is the total social disconnection we have created out of a desire to be safe and socially conscious citizens. For some introverts, I know this has been a time of reprieve- a great time to...

We are excited to have the ability to have green team meetings! Given how strange a year its been and health focused restrictions we are meeting outside once a week to work on projects wearing masks! One silver lining that our outdoor focus and outdoor...

To get our populace into the mindset of making big changes the Green Team and Sustainability Council came together to start planning our Earth Week last year. We decided a great way to introduce our plan and a good kick off would be a community...