BGE Celebrates Earth Month with Oyster Gardening!

To celebrate Earth Month, we had a dedicated and diligent crew of volunteers from BGE join us at Downtown Sailing Center/Baltimore Museum of Industry to learn more about oyster gardening and help us prepare for this year’s season. Together, our volunteers fixed, cleaned, and made over 100 oyster habitats to help raise and restore the oyster population, did some shoreline trash pickup to prevent litter from entering the harbor, and took a museum tour of an old oyster canning factory to learn about the legacy and importance of oysters in Baltimore.

Our fearless volunteers went through our collection of used oyster cages and got to work cleaning them up for this season- which was no small feat. Cleaning off the mussels, algae, and other built up debris allows us to reuse these cages for new baby oysters this planting season!

They also helped fix and build new cages for our growing oyster population- we need all the new cages we can get as we prepare to plant even more oysters in the harbor this season!

Our volunteers also toured the Baltimore Museum of Industry- which is inside an old oyster canning factory!-and learned about how oysters are intertwined with our city’s history. Once a cornerstone of Baltimore’s economy, the oyster population was then demolished through over-harvesting. This museum tour provided excellent context for our oyster gardening program, where we seek to replenish this population and restore its ecological benefits.

And of course, no Waterfront Partnership volunteering event is complete without a Mr. Trash Wheel sing-along!

Thank you to all of our incredible volunteers who came out for this Earth Month event!