A big Thank You to our Volunteers!
While summer is officially over and school has begun here in South Florida, here at the garden the early September subtropical heat is still brutal. Our nursery is filling up with seedlings; we’re preparing our fields for new plants, and the new season is beginning! We’d like to take a few minutes, though, to thank all the hard work by our GrowCity Youth, our adult interns, and our garden volunteers throughout the spring and summer.
Even throughout much of the summer heat, our adult interns came out to keep our garden growing. Alta weeded the mint patch and prepared the herb garden for its summer covering of mulch. Dom trimmed back the tall grasses and weeds to make our garden paths visible and helped Pepe clear and plant a new banana circle. Wis divided and relocated clumps of lemongrass. Pepe and Pilar watered our fruit trees and our few summer crops — eggplants, okra, a few habaneros, sweet potatoes, seminole pumpkins, and our herbs.
Our Volunteers are Amazing
The garden would not exist without our amazing volunteers. Our 2018-2019 season adult interns (Alta, Dom, Kyshali, Will, Wis, and Sunny) spent six hours each week with us throughout the season, providing much of the labor needed to plant, grow, and harvest the garden, while learning about growing veggies, greens, and herbs in the challenging conditions of South Florida. We also thank those who came out to weed with us, water seedlings and baby transplants, move mulch, engineer and troubleshoot our aquaponics area, and those who spread the word about the garden within our community. (If you’d like to join us as a volunteer or adult intern, please contact Tracy or Chris.)
We’d especially like to thank five groups who came out for Saturday summer work days over the past few months, making a huge difference:
• Adults, children, and CSA folks joined our GrowCity Youth for a morning of lopper, bow saw, and machete work eliminating exotic invasive on the garden property — and discovering all kinds of interesting insects along the way.
• Florida House alumni (pictured above) brought a large group out to the garden to cut down brush and pull invasive vines out of the trees along the edge of the garden.
• Volunteers from Christ Church in Pompano’s On Mission Together program weeded and cleared the GrowCity Youth field, pulling spent crops, weeds, and expanding the garden area to add more space for growing greens and veggies next season.
• Our May Saturday workday group prepared a field, added drip-tape irrigation, moved many, many wheelbarrows of mulch, and planted a field of seminole pumpkins.
• Our June Saturday workday volunteers made amazing progress in the start of an entirely new field area. They pulled and dug weeds taller than they were, trimmed back brush and invasive vines, and created a beautiful new space for our fall planting of tomatoes. We celebrated by enjoying TFF summer fruits together — bananas, mangos, figs, june plums, and the very first fruits from our cashews!
Come out and join us Saturday, September 21, for our first Volunteer Workday of the new 2019-2020 season at the Fruitful Field (9 a.m. to noon).