This month Boxerwood achieved a long term goal: we’ve created a new garden of native plants to beautify the approach to the Lodge, rehabilitating an area that had been largely taken over by invasive species. The garden was designed by Eli Kosarin, a talented landscape professional who has been working at Boxerwood as an independent contractor for the last year. …
Paying It Forward
Kudos to 18 Maury River Middle students, who one Friday after school last month, planted three dozen trees along a tributary of Woods Creek. Most of the students were members of the Boxerwood Bay Club, committed to local give-back action after a fall trip to the Chesapeake Bay. The project was in partnership with Rockbridge Conservation, owner of the property, …
Join the Rumpus
Hello Rockbridge Friends! We are producing another original spectacle at Boxerwood to be performed October 14 -15, 2023 and welcome your help. A WILD NOTION is an ecological call to action and hope, concerning three Rockbridge County youth who have forgotten how to dream. Dany, Iris and Maxine are called into the woods by forest emissaries to search for and …
Week #11: Well Done, Compost Champions
Our 2023 Backyard Compost Challenge has come to a close. We’re still waiting for a few data inputs, but so far the final aggregate total for pounds of food waste kept out of the Rockbridge landfill over the course of these ten weeks is 3,810 pounds: almost two tons. Thanks to your post-project surveys we learned other interesting things that …
Week #10: Two Tons
It’s week ten, the last week of the 2023 Backyard Compost Challenge. Pretty soon we will have our final food scraps data and we will know exactly how much food we managed to keep from rotting in the landfill and adding methane to our atmosphere. For this week’s blog we wanted to let you know just how big of an …
Week #9: Lightweights and Heavyweights
Can you believe it? Week nine of the Backyard Compost Challenge is upon us. For the blog this week we thought it may be interesting to check in with some of the folks who have reported the highest and lowest food scrap weights so far. We got an inside look at how different households function and the many variables that …
Week #8: School Composting Projects
This week on the blog we talked to Ginny, our compost data number-cruncher, to learn about Boxerwood’s other major composting endeavors. The Backyard Compost Challenge is a wonderful way to encourage our community to compost at home, but our work doesn’t stop there. To help bring about a culture of composting all through the county, Boxerwood is partnering with local …
Week #7: Other Ways to Reduce Food Waste
It’s week seven of the Backyard Compost Challenge! Hopefully you all are feeling like compost experts by now. Since we’ve spent quite a while talking about compost, I thought this week we’d talk about some other ways to reduce household food waste. Did you know that nearly 40% of food is wasted in the United States? While much of this …
Week #6: COREworks and the BCC
Hello Citizen Scientists! I’m Ginny Johnson, Boxerwood educator and behind the scenes number-cruncher for the Backyard Compost Challenge (BCC). One of the other Boxerwood programs I facilitate is COREworks, our homegrown carbon offset marketplace. You may remember seeing it mentioned on the form you filled out at the start of the BCC. COREworks is a mechanism to take your earth …
What’s For Dessert Betts?
Thank you to BEA co-founder Hunter Mohring for sharing this story about one of the pieces of artwork still lurking about Boxerwood, as created by its first gardener (and owner), Dr. Robert Munger. The first day I came to Boxerwood, I fell in love. It was spring and Boxerwood was bursting with new growth, fresh blooms, noisy birds; and there …