Not Too Proud to Beg: SACG's Earth Day Celebration

Tomorrow, the Stoddart Avenue Community Garden -- like much of the City of Columbus -- will be celebrating Earth Day a little early.  The Easter holiday weekend makes next weekend a little impractical and having it early means that we get an extra week to use the gifts showered upon us: like FREE JENI'S ICE CREAM of your choice to every volunteer.  We are not too proud to beg for volunteers to help us move mountains (literally) at the SACG.  It will be dry, and suitably cooler than our Opening Day last Saturday (when we were all in t-shirts).

If you come volunteer with the SACG (starting at around 9ish and ending noonish) tomorrow, Saturday, April 13, you will get at least one (and possibly more) of the following free gifts

·         A free yoga class at Yogaheartfeltstudio on East Fifth or can of Ensure protein beverage.

·         $8 coupon off a general COSI admission for a family of 4 that is good for the rest of the year

·         A voucher that you have to use by April 28 for:

o   Free scoop of Jeni’s

o   One free shareable item at The Crest Gastropub

o   One free coffee at Roosevelt Coffee House

o   Half off a dessert at Harvest Pizza

·         A large Earth Day t-shirt to the our best volunteer who can fit into it

I will also be bringing donuts and my famous chocolate no-bake oatmeal cookies.

We have a lot to do in just three hours, but many hands make light work:

1)      Reinforce and refill the platform raised beds;

2)      Spread wood chips around those raised beds;

3)      Plant a honeycrisp apple tree to round out our fruit orchard and a milkweed bush to feed monarch butterflies;

4)      Top off the compost in our raised beds and plant lettuce, broccoli, kale and collards in the neighbor bed;

5)      Rake the rest of the wood chips away from the southern fence and strawberry patch;

6)      Distribute compost in the plots whose gardeners did not add much to their plots last year (such as Marcel’s, Alyssa and Carly’s);

7)      Clean up the flower beds and transplant volunteers into better places;

8)      Mow the lawns;

9)      Paint the rain barrel and some fence wood;

10)   Hopefully, dig some more post holes along the south side and hang a few braces; and

11)   Fill the damaged strawberry patch with donated top soil and compost and then transplant strawberries and raspberry bushes to fill in bare spots.

12)  Possibly spread mulch (donated by Ohio Mulch) and compost around our fruit trees (i.e., apples, plums, peaches, apricot and elderberry). 

13) Picking up litter in the neighborhood and alleys

Be there or be square;-)