NUCFAC PLT YLINC Summer 2014 Day One - Amazing things to sea!

Peppers from the Stephen F. Austin High School garden. Deliciously organic!

We began at Stephen F. Austin High School, on Houston's East End. For years, Austin High School has been one of the most active members of our unified network of Project Learning Tree Greenschools!, completing several environmental impacting projects, including rainwater catchment systems, a water conservation project, and extensive urban gardens. The Youth Leadership in Nature Challenge students harvest several fresh fruits and vegetables from the Austin gardens before we went south, towards the waters of Galveston.

How have a good time camping in East Texas during the summer

FNFGT's Y-LINC is just around the corner, so we thought offer some camping tips from from our Blogger, Adrain Delgado, and his wife, Lyndi Long, who have been camping with FNFGT since 2010!

Me and Lyndi love the great outdoors, and Texas' National Forests have always treated us well. Sometimes we get the best sleep of our lives under the stars, especially when we set up our camp right.

First we find a suitable spot. When we choose camping spots, we assume the clouds will be dropping a lake on us everyday, so that when it does rain, we will be dry.

Our campsite....

• is not completly flat, but slopes slightly away so that rain can drain away.
• does not have any holes of divuts to where water can collect.
• is not directly under tree branches, since the can fall after a storm.
• is on high ground, in case of flooding.
• Is in a clearing or at a designated campsite, so that we do not have to trample plants or disturbe the local environment. Always keep in mind that you will not be the last person to see this place.

Then we pitch our tents. Our tent is the Coleman Sundown 7, and has served us well for two seasons going on three. We sealed all the seams before hand with seam sealer, and we always put up our tent bone dry.

Moldy Tents get donated to this guy. 

We prefer to lay down a tarp under our tents, to help insulate and keep the tent dry. But we make sure that the tarp does not extend farther than our tent, becuase if rain were to fall on the tarp, it would flow under the tent floor and get us wet. We fold the tarp so that when we lay our tent on top of it, the tarp is completely covered.

We have found its good to face the tent door towards the prevaling winds, so that at night the breeze will help cool us off.

We line the bottom of our tent with sleeping mats, especially the deflatable kind like the Wenzel Roll and Go mat. These mats are light and back down well enough for our non backpacking outings. 

During summer, it will be hot and humid during the day and probably warm and humid at night. Mosquitoes will be out in force, so bug repellent is always in our bag. Most tents should have a mesh that keeps air flowing in and bugs out, but if not, try spraying the tent with bug repellent for added protection. Make sure the spray contains DEET for maximum effectiveness.

To keep cool enough to sleep, and to make a little white noise, we have a O2 Cool battery powered fan that we leave on "low" during the night.

This year, we are going to try this DIY air conditioner we made.

1. Cut a 10 inch hole in the lid of a styrofoam ice cooler

2. Cut a hole in near the top of one of the narrow sides of the ice cooler.

3. Fill the ice cooler half way with ice and water. You may as well put drinks or other items that need to stay cool in there too.

4. Cover the hole with the fan, and turn it on. As the air flowing into the ice cooler melts the ice and evaporates the water, the air coming out will be cooler. Keep the tent ventilated to minimize moisture build up

As always, carry lots of water with you, at least a gallon per person per day. If you can't carry that ammount of water, try using portable filters like the Sawyer Mini Filter or the LifeStraw, which allow you to filter water directly for streams or lakes. FNFGT still reccomends that you use every available tool to santatize any water you drink from a stream in addition to those aforementioned products. In other words, if you can choose betweent boiling the water for ten minutes or using a personal water filter, then boil the water first. 

  

NUCFAC PLT Greenschools! Spring Break YLINC 2014 Day 5 and 6

Friday was the last day the students would spend camping, and it easily could have been their best night.

We returned to Stephen F. Austin State University to the beautiful Pineywoods Native Plant Center, which maintains the historic Tucker House and the resplendent Tucker Woods park. The Tucker Woods is a bottomland hardwood environment with paved trails snaking throughout and lies adjacent to LaNana Creek in Nacogdoches, Texas, providing a natural escape and outdoor laboratory for SFASU faculty, staff and students.

NUCFAC PLT Greenschools Spring Break Y-LINC 2014 - Day Four

Della Barbato, FNFGT's Greenschools! coordinator, had a friend at the University Center at SFASU

The Y-LINC students spent the entire day at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, touring the university with very generous teachers and university staff explaining what SFASU can offer them.

Piero Fenci opens up the kiln for the Y-LINC campers.

Professor Piero Fenci, a master ceramist in his 80th semester of teaching, presented SFASU’s dream like ceramic studio. There were dozens of throwing wheels, pallets of raw clay, kilns full of projects, and all the materials needed to make a custom glaze. The students got to make their own little sculptures, and the ceramics teacher agreed to have them fired and sent to the students later down the line. Austin High art teacher David De Hoyos was especially impressed with the facilities.

NUCFAC PLT Greenschools! Y-LINC Spring Break 2014 - Day Three

Last night was our last night at Stubblefield Lake Recreation Area, so this morning our young leaders packed up their tents and picked up all the detritus of two nights spent under the stars before heading off to their first destination, the East Texas Plant Materials Center in the Stephen F. Austin Experimental Forest.

The Natural Resource Conservation Service maintains several Plant Materials Centers throughout the country, for the purposes of developing new solutions to conservation problems with native plants, according to Assistant Manager Melinda Brakie. She said that the ETPMC can take a handful of seeds harvested from the wild and develop a new release of a native plant that can resist drought or invasion by non-native plants. Plant Materials Centers like ETPMC release these new strains to commercial seed developers and non-profit groups, helping to improve agricultural yields, restore native prairies and much more.

Melinda showed us the ETPMC's interesting method of treating their wastewater: specially engineered beds of water-loving plants that soak up effluent and clean the water again, without a single moving part or artificial chemical. She also gave us a tour of the seed lab, where seeds are analyzed and germinated, as well as their seed sorting machine that uses air a specialized sieves to separate the seed for the chaff. The PLT Greenschools! certified students got to see the planted that they had planted in the Winter Break Y-LINC trip earlier this year, thus creating a photo-op for SFA High mascot Stevie.

Stephen F. Austin High School mascot Stevie with a tray of plants that the YLINC
campers planted in the Winter Break Y-LINC earlier this year. They have
obviously been in the good hands of the ETPMC staff!

We then traveled to Stephen F. Austin Sate University, where one of our long-time Amigos del Bosque partner Andre Saenz is currently in his introductory courses at the Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture (ATCOFA). He is pursuing a degree in Wildlife Management, and we are very proud of him.