Giving Thanks for SACG’s Volunteers

Before we enjoy our Thanksgiving feast of roast beast tomorrow, let’s remember to give thanks for those folks who made our feast possible, especially the volunteers at the Stoddart Avenue Community Garden.  After all, where would we be without Cathy to haul me and our large items (like fruit trees) around, Frank and Barb to haul construction debris to the local dump, college students to carry, weed, harvest, plant, haul, Ezra to mow and water, Ken to lock up, Rayna to prune, and high school students to spread?  We should be especially thankful in 2015 for Amy Thompson who recruited volunteers, carried bags, saved places, picked up litter, planted trees, planted and pruned flowers, and unloaded trucks.  This is just a sample of all of the hard work she put in this year to be our Volunteer of the Year for 2015:

·        Brought monkey bread to refresh our volunteers on Opening Day and donuts on our closing day;

·        Transplanted raspberry bushes on our Opening Day and weeded our south flower bed without even having to be asked;

·        Saved my place in a long line of community gardeners at Franklin Park Conservatory so that I could quickly pick up our Earth Day celebration supplies and Scotts Miracle-Gro donations and then helped me to unload the truck back at the Garden;

·        Helped to unload a truckload of top soil from Kurtz Brothers that had been donated by the City;

·        Recruited an Earth Day volunteer and helped to plant a fruit tree and move our blueberry bushes and turrets from the north to the south side of the Garden;

·        Cleaned out the neighbor plot so that we could add new soil to it;

·        Pruned daisies and a lot of other flowers;

·        Helped me and some neighbors to unload the landscaping stones donated by GreenScapes in August and to load up the truck with construction debris to be taken to a local dump;

·        Weeded flower beds;

·        Weeded Kaci’s plot after she had abandoned it to tall weeds weeks earlier;

·        Cleaned out one of the kids’ beds and pruned our entire northern flower bed on our closing day and

·        Plans to help me plant spring-flowering bulbs when it gets cold next week J

While we value all of our volunteers, there’s usually one or two each year who do so much more than everyone else (before they burn out like the grumpy Garden Manager):

2009:  Dwayne Penny

2010:  Frank and Barb Cater

2011:  Charlie Kall

2012:  Cathy Alexander

2013: Sabrina Reynolds-Wing

2014:  Susan Tomlinson

We could not do all that we do without our hard-working, dedicated and reliable volunteers.  After all, as Kipling’s famous poem recognizes: Gardens are not made by singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.