Summery May workday

Today's volunteer day had a great turnout from One Brick, a volunteer group that gets people in the area out to enjoy social volunteering efforts.

Thank you for coming out guys - what a difference you made!

The One Brick folks - about 15 of them including Grace, Ying, Carnley, Scott, Rebecca, Aakash, Dean, Lindsey, Amanda, Elena, Julia and Thomas - and some local regulars (Carlin, Nate, Karl and Matt)  worked on a few projects in the toasty sunshine and got a lot done.

First up the dog area got a thorough weeding (begone convulvulus!) and a big strip of carpet installed under a solid 6" of mulch to prevent weeds coming up again. Nate remade the twig border along the bed at the top there too, which had recently been torn apart by persons unknown.

Carlin performed delicate weed extraction duty in the middle back bed, which I took a team to the outside borders and we weeded them completely, and added compost.

Karl took a team to the triangle garden and pulled dying California poppies out from around the yarrows (Achillea) planted there to give them more space.

Many, many tubtrugs of weeds were carted to the compost bins, where Matt and his crew were hard at work. First the emptied one bin completely so that neighbor Jim can line it with hardware cloth to prevent rats.

In doing that, they disturbed a family of rats. I'm pretty soft-hearted so that gave me some pangs of remorse but we left the babies in a nest of straw covered over and hope the parents will remove them. Yes, they're just rats but the other option was what? Leave them to die in the open? No.

Next Matt and team wheelbarrowed lots of compost from our black plastic bags (left to heat in the sun and kill weed seeds, we hope, for the last month) to various spots in the garden and spread it.

Then they refilled the bags with half-done compost for more cooking, and filled the remaining two bins with weeds and straw and watered them well.

All in all another lovely sunny volunteer day with lots of fun stuff going on!