Community Green Up Day Wraps Up Gaithersburg's Green Week

Gaithersburg ended its Green Week Saturday with Community Green Up Day and a morning dedicated to cleaning up the city.

With 11 different cleanup sites around Gaithersburg, volunteers from Lakelands Ridge to Gaithersburg Middle School to the Izaak Walton League National Conservation Center came out to pick up trash, plant flowers and educate themselves on the environment. 

At each site, volunteers cleaned from 9 a.m. until noon and worked on a variety of projects depending on what location they were at.

Visitors at the Izaak Walton League National Conservation Center, located off of Muddy Branch Road, picked up trash while also building a rain garden near the center’s entrance.

David Hoskins, the executive director of the conservation organization, said rain gardens are something anyone can do to stop dirty stormwater runoff from making its way to creeks and streams and lowering the quality of the water.           

“Conservation starts at home with the engagement of citizens,” Hoskins said. 

Aside from the rain garden and trash pickup, the Conservation Center partnered with other environmental organizations, like the Muddy Branch Alliance, to host different events to educate visitors on nature.    

Families could take a walk and learn about invasive plant species, watch a demonstration with a bee keeper, make bird feeders and fish in the water behind the center. 

Meo Curtis, the Watershed Planning and Monitoring Manager for the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection, said events like these on Community Green Up Day are meant to make people more aware of the impact they have on the environment. 

“It’s important to get people to recognize what they do on their own land affects everyone,” Curtis said. 

Specifically, she said individuals need to be careful of how they manage their fertilizer, pesticides and pet waste on their land.   

At Gaithersburg Middle School, students, teachers and volunteers made history while planting flowers in the courtyard and at the entrance of the school. 

Volunteers buried a time capsule in the courtyard in commemoration of the school’s 50th anniversary last year. 

Once the capsule was placed, everyone turned their attention to picking up dead leaves, planting new flowers and spreading mulch donated by the city. 

Lola Rogers, a teacher at the school who led the effort, said the cleanup not only shows “city” kids how to garden and plant flowers, but also teaches them character.

“If students have a nice and clean place to come and learn, it teaches them respect,” Rogers said. 

Community Green Up Day was part of the wider, city-sponsored Green Week from May 2 to 7, which included a different event focusing on the environment every day.