Sabrina, Tom and Zephyr arrived with home-made pear muffins and went to work. Tom raked out all of the garden beds and composted the waste. He then disconnected the smaller rain cistern from its downspout. I turned to pruning and cutting back the middle flower bed and southeast flower bed. Sabrina emptied the shed, cleaned all of the tools, organized the shed contents and re-filled the shed and then pulled all of the tomato stakes and cages and tarps and similarly reorganized and stacked them. Not finished, she then pulled the bags of mulch and garden soil, and pruned back the invading raspberry bushes. The shed area has never looked better.
Mari arrived and finished pruning and cutting back the front
flower beds and rose bushes. She then
turned to helping Rayna prune the raspberry bushes on the west side of the
Garden.
Do you know what made this? |
Rayna arrived with a home-made cake and was put in charge of
pruning back the raspberry bushes. Her
time-proven method: cutting back
everything to the fence line and then cutting out any dead branches. I then turned to bagging the brambles she cut
out. This was easier said than done
because it was windy and difficult to get the brambles into the lawn waste bags
without getting hurt. I started to cut
them down in manageable-sized pieces. During this exercise, she came across two
cocoons of mysterious origin. We aren’t
sure what bug created them or what to do with them. Were they created by hungry praying mantises? Protective garden spiders? Destructive caterpillars? Do tell if you know!
Barb then arrived and began pruning the south flower
bed. She and Frank had already removed
the Garden sign earlier in the week and will be removing the gates in a few
weeks.
I turned to transplanting raspberry seedlings that Rayna and
Sabrina had cut out (when they left the fence line). I filled in all of the empty places on our
fence line, but still had many seedlings left over. I filled a bucket so that any community
garden may take some seedlings for their own edible fence. Many
seedlings went to the yard waste bags. Please contact me asap if you’d like some
seedlings.
Tom tried to flip our compost, but the bins were
overflowing, so he tuned it a little. He
then poured the rest of the zoo compost around the flower beds. Sabrina,
Tom and Zephyr then headed out to an event at COSI, so the teen volunteers
finished stacking the tomato cages and covering that space with tarps (to
protect those supplies from the winter weather) and stacking our extra bags of
soil and mulch. Before they left, I gave Sabrina a picture
collage of her volunteer efforts throughout the year which made her the SACG
Volunteer of the Year. In addition to
our mandatory work days and performing her chores, she also came on many extra
days to help me maintain the garden and single-handedly weeded the alley area
and west side of the Garden.
Like
last year, this is the weekend of the annual youth conference of the Church
of God. Last year, the theme was Collide. This year, the theme was Impact – as in
community impact. Last year, we had a
group of teenagers from Alliance. Our teen
volunteers this year were from Eaton. (I’ve
actually been there – near the Indiana border – because of the Neaton Auto plant). They arrived after lunch and none too soon.
They also took over bagging Rayna’s raspberry canes and the
flowers Barb had pruned while I turned to pruning the flowers that had been
growing along the alley. One of the
girls joined me in making our last food pantry harvest for the season (although
I might come back to harvest sage and chives since I had run out of bags). The
youth adult volunteer supervisor went through the Garden to pull the plants
after we finished our final harvest. He
was disappointed that our neighbors did not join us and I had to explain that
most of our volunteers had been there earlier and left around lunch time.
Earlier this week, Charlie hand-sanded both of our benches. Two of the girls then stained/weatherized
them.A larger group of teen volunteers was helping out Urban Connections. Cathy stopped by to tell me that they completed four hours worth of projects in just two hours. I suggested that they attack the litter in our alley, but she thought that they were burned out. Instead, a group of young men came up and carried our 16 bags of yard waste (i.e., brambles) to the alley dumpsters for pick-up on Tuesday.
Everyone took off (pretty tired) at 2:30 (after getting some
cake and donuts) and I drove directly to the LSS Food Pantry to get there
before it closed. Then it was home to
rake seven more bags of leaves from my own yard before sundown. And some vacuuming and unpacking.
This is also the time we bestow the travelling gnome trophy
for the tidiest plot. However, Neal did
not show up for the work day to receive the trophy. We put it in his lonely, but very tidy,
plot. The trophy has spent a year in
Charlie’s plot and on Frank and Barb’s back porch. It almost seems to be a curse because the
tidiest plot often seems to go to the weediest plot the following year:-)
We started the day in the 30’s and ended it at 60
degrees. That’s November.
A job well done.
No comments:
Post a Comment