Thanks to the generous support of Piper Shores, we are again offering our summer Farm Coupon program in celebration of Cape Elizabeth’s rich agricultural community.

Make your gift of $35 or more between now and September 15th to earn a $10 coupon redeemable at five of Cape Elizabeth’s farms offering fresh, locally-grown fruits, vegetables, and seafood. It’s a reminder of CELT’s work supporting local growers and farmland conservation. We currently have easement agreements with the Wm. H. Jordan Farm and the Old Christmas Tree Farm, ensuring their agricultural uses in perpetuity.

“ Piper Shores is excited to participate in this program again,” said Marketing and Life Enrichment Director Andrea Killiard. “We have long been supporters of land conservation in Cape Elizabeth; this program is unique because it supports the sustainability of our local farms and farmers.”

To get your Farm Coupon, make your gift online, or call the office at 767-6054.

Last week we completed our school year programming with an incredible day at Kettle Cove with Cape Elizabeth’s 5 ^th grade classes. The students spent the morning rotating through three activity stations: one with lobsterman Tucker Jordan, another with oyster aquaculture expert Nate Perry, and the third with CELT Education Coordinator Natasha Rathlev. 

At the CELT station, students learned what a watershed is, and how the town of Cape Elizabeth is actually split between two: the Casco Bay Watershed and the Spurwink River Watershed. Students brainstormed a list of local bodies of water, and discussed how the land in our town and around the world is not uniform, but is made up of many different patterns and elevations. They constructed a model of a watershed and, after seeing how water flows across the land, strategized ways to keep the water in Cape Elizabeth clean. It looks like there are future environmental stewards in our midst!

We can’t think of a better way to end the school year! We are so grateful for the partnership between CELT and Cape schools, and for the support of our amazing team of education volunteers. 

As tradition goes at Cape Elizabeth High School, the last few weeks for seniors leading up to graduation is dedicated to “STPs” or Senior Transition Projects, which require every senior to volunteer with a business or organization. This year, CELT benefited from the help of 10 seniors, who reported every day for one week, to pull out pesky plants at Robinson Woods and at Pollack Brook Preserve .

Students pulled and cut Japanese Honeysuckle, Knotweed, Barberry, Bittersweet, and Autumn Olive, and then shared their new plant management knowledge with 7 ^th and 8 ^th grade classes from Cape Elizabeth Middle School.

CELT’s Education Coordinator Natasha Rathlev will be moving back to her home state of Maryland at the end of June, and she will be sorely missed!

This position has been essential to our community in building awareness for our natural resources, and in educating and creating future stewards. Natasha’s enthusiasm and ability to engage with children, adults and seniors, and her ‘can do’ attitude has had a huge impact on CELT as well as the Cape community - and beyond. We have Natasha to thank for the interpretive signs at Robinson Woods, for overseeing the website conversion with VONT, and for writing the “Naturalist’s Corner” column for the newsletter. 

Natasha coordinated, strengthened and expanded our educational programming at all three Cape schools, and a few schools in Portland too. She worked with teachers to better understand how to best meet their program needs, coordinated programs for two of our senior living centers, trained volunteers for our summer walks at Inn By The Sea, and worked with the town library to present new programs and provide resources. 

We will miss her positive attitude and smile. If you stop by the office in the coming days, please take a moment to thank Natasha and wish her well in her next chapter. We have big shoes to fill!

If you’ve been in Robinson Woods or at our Great Pond Preserve recently, you may have seen some of our favorite floral residents of the oak-pine forest—the pink lady's-slipper ( Cypripedium acaule ).

This magnificent wildflower is one of the most common orchids native to the Northeast. Lady's-slippers can grow as far north as the Alaskan tundra. As dainty and elegant as their name may make them sound, they actually thrive in acidic, nutrient-poor soils and difficult conditions—more like steel-toed boots than 'slippers'!

These flowers have mastered the bait-and-switch. Their ostentatious color and subtle scent invite bumblebees to crawl into the flower’s bulbous lip in search of nectar, but find nothing inside! To get out, the bees crawl through a one-way tunnel that's generously dusted with pollen. The lady's-slipper is banking on the bumblebees trying again with a different flower, this time depositing the pollen they've picked up. Eventually, the bee wises up and learns to stop wasting time on lady's-slippers, which in turn, leads to relatively low reproductive rates among the flowers. So please don’t pick any.

Got any good pictures of wildflowers on our trails? Please send them to [email protected] and we may feature them on our social media pages!

Thanks to a grant from the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, we’re welcoming our summer stewardship intern, Dianna Farrell. Dianna and her husband moved to Cape Elizabeth nearly four years ago and fell in love with the area.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Dianna went back to school to study earth sciences and geography, her true passions, and is now working towards a degree in Geography-Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at USM. She just returned from Iceland where she applied GIS and Remote Sensing techniques to study land cover change and glacial retreat.

Dianna is passionate about caring for natural resources and enjoys hiking, canoeing and going for walks with her husband, Mark and dog, Dakota. Be sure to say hello if you meet her out on the trails this summer!

Love the outdoors? Love sharing what you know about the natural world with others? CELT is currently accepting applications for a part-time Education Coordinator. Our Education Coordinator works with the education committee to offer educational programming to our community in a variety of formats and to a variety audiences. This is a super fun, hands-on position for the person with experience in environmental education, teaching, natural sciences or related fields. For more information, visit our website .