July 2014 – Makin it Rain Garden with the Baltimore Community ToolBank

Our July event was with the Baltimore Community ToolBank (www.baltimore.toolbank.org) and it was a beautiful day to be outside watering, creating, building, drilling, hammering, planting, weeding and cleaning. The day began with the ToolBank’s Executive Director Noah Smock telling us a little about the ToolBank’s wide-ranging mission and how they got started. 

The ToolBank is an awesome organization whose main function is to provide tools to the nonprofits that need them. They have a massive collection of every piece of equipment you could imagine and they rent them out for 3% of their actual cost. If a shovel costs $20, you can have it for a week for 60 cents! They are also committed to improving their community and to that end they do all kinds of cool environmental related projects. They are the ones making the floating wetlands that go into the harbor to clean polluted water. If there comes a day when you can swim in the harbor, you have the ToolBank to thank for it.

They also create rain gardens that take the water from when it rains and funnels it into these gardens, rather than having that water go into the harbor and take all of the pollutants on its way with it. That’s what we were working on. We drilled and hammered wood beams together to create a compost area and a wall to contain the garden. It was so much fun and we had an awesome time out there.

If you would like to volunteer with the Baltimore Community ToolBank or would like to learn more about it, contact Noah Smock: noah.smock@toolbank.org