SACG Volunteers Moved Mountains for Earth Day

Or at least, it sometimes felt like it. On Saturday, 20 SACG volunteers (12 adults and 8 youths) gathered to commemorate Earth Day later this week by picking up litter, planting flowers, building raised beds along Cherry Street and transplanting strawberries before starting the planting in our own plots. Someone from the Franklin Park Neighborhood Association even stopped by to wish us luck before heading off to volunteer at the nearby Four Seasons Farm garden on Oak Street. This is what we got done at the SACG on Saturday:

• Betty picked up litter and watered our new rose and blueberry bushes while I unpacked our supplies from my car;
  
• Betty and Charlie assembled our new utility cart;
  
• Rayna and I built two new 4x6 raised beds at the northwest corner of our lot where there used to be two compost bins (and yes, we divided the yummy compost between the two new beds);
  
• Frank, Barb, Maxine, Jae, Dimon, and Joshua lugged the remaining stones and top soil and some compost over to the northeast corner and built a 4x10 raised bed for our new strawberry patch;
  
• Beth, Dionte, Quiante, Daequon, Priest, Nae-Nae, & Lance filled the wheelbarrows and carts with wood chips and filled in the spaces between and around the new raised beds;
  
• Beth, Dionte, Dimon and Joshua filled carts and wheelbarrows with wood chips and filled the spaces between the compost bins (where it's too narrow to mow);
  
• Mari weeded our front flower beds and planted some new perennial flowers;
  
• Rayna made sandwiches for all of our youthful volunteers;
  
• I dug up our volunteer strawberries which had wondered away from our existing patch (next to Betty's plot);
• Rayna transplanted our strawberries (both volunteers and the ones donated by Oakland Nursery);
  
• Rayna helped the Holloway kids plant onions and lettuce in their plot; and
  
• The volunteers picked out seeds from our considerable seed stache; and
  
• Betty, Barb & Frank helped me pack everything back up and loaded my car.
  

We started at 10 a.m and were finished by 1:30. Jeannie felt so (unnecessarily) guilty about forgetting about the work day that on Sunday she dug out all of the weeds from plots where gardeners had not yet started gardening.

Despite all of the work we've accomplished over the last two Saturdays, several members of the volunteer crew asked me for more assignments. What passion! The only other large task we have is to purchase and assemble our new shed. Hopefully, I can get it ordered and delivered this week.

Until then, we need lots of prayers and rain dances because we're an inch behind in rain for April and all of our rain barrels are bone dry. This does not bode well for watering in our new seeds or seedlings.

Funding for the soil and stones used in our new raised beds came from the Scotts Miracle-Gro Fund at The Columbus Foundation.