When I left last week, the volunteers from the Ohio Youth
Collide Conference of the Church of God were still busily working under the
supervision of their youth leader, and Cathy & Doug from Urban Connections
to remove all of the brush and leaves from the lot across the street. It’s positively breathtaking how much work
they accomplished in just a few hours on one Saturday afternoon. I only wish the youth and youth leader from
my church felt moved to improve a neighborhood less than a mile west of our
church. These Collide youth volunteers
had spread out among the City, but two of the crews were assigned to help
improve the Stoddart Avenue neighborhood and made a huge difference in just one
short afternoon.
With the help of the Collide volunteers, we moved three
compost bins last week to the north side of the Garden so that they will not be
such an eyesore to the drivers and pedestrians on East Main Street. Frank and Barb removed our gates and sign to
protect them from the winter weather. I
watered the bins and carried some of the ripe compost over to give the bins a
good start. We hope to polish their appearance a bit next year.
Despite the drought and freakish heat this year, we set a
new personal best for food pantry donations in 2012 with over 500 pounds from
our lot. While our squash suffered
from the drought and bugs, and our greens were attacked by late season aphids, our
peppers exploded and the tomatoes were quite respectable. Sadly, we never would have had so much fresh produce to
donate this year if so many of our gardeners had not become discouraged and
dropped out in May, June and July.
Of course, I have put my newfound free time to good use
cleaning up my own house, cleaning out gutters and raking leaves. It seems
that my house began falling apart around my ears over the summer and I’m so
relieved to now have some time to deal with it.
It’s been very helpful to have so much food put up over the summer to
save time cooking. And, believe it or
not, I’m still putting up food. I’m
drying herbs (like dill, parsely and the basil I still have growing in my
kitchen window), making italian farmhouse and bread-and-butter pickles out of green
cherry and roma tomatoes, harvesting kale, freezing pumpkin and drying pumpkin seeds. Whew.
No comments:
Post a Comment