Volunteer Day - so much to do!

Lots flowering now!

Our May volunteer day was lovely - the sun was out but not too hot, and the weeds were ripe for pulling. A bit over-ripe actually, and going to seed, so all the more reason to pull them.

Matt, Sarah, Aditi and I showed up at 10, and as I expected, there was a homeless encampment (still) in the back of the garden since last week, despite my trying to get them moved before they destroy more plants.

I called Police Non-Emergency and asked them to come move the residents along (yes, I know - it's not a solution!) but the resident left before they showed up. When they did show up, they told us we were doing the right thing... and really nothing more can be done.

Recology Ryan

We moved all the belongings to the street, in bags and called 311 to get them. Ryan from Recology showed up in an hour and took everything away.

Next I repaired the brand new dog poop bag station, whose $300 top part had been bent so someone could steal the probably $5 of bags inside. Nice.

If it breaks again, dog people: what's the solution here? You use the garden daily - I think it's time for you to be involved in the handling of poop. Shall we have a special dog owner's meeting to discuss?

Wonderful Cardoon

Then we got to weeding. Aditi and Sarah headed down to tackle the insane weeds at PRG. Matt and I took on PG.

We weeded by the cherry plums, and planted a nice big Furcraea selloa var. marginata we've been growing on, and made a nice group of three. Well, the middle one was damaged by a homeless fire, but it's slowly starting to recover.

Then we moved down to the bottom pathway, and removed mountains of weeds from that area. The Romneya coulteri (Matilija Poppy) is absolutely going berserk and yeah - it's a native. so we want to keep it, but it needed a real haircut to give the plants nearby a chance to live.

Furcraea selloa var. marginata

Nate and his two kids showed up and let me know he's still faithfully reading the blog. Interested in stats, I looked up and saw that we have on average about 75 people visit the site each day, and 236 yesterday alone. Hi everyone! :) Not a bad readership for the blog.

Matt!

And at the end of the day Matt cut down some of the cactus that needs to be moved before the building next door is demolished. This is a very tricky job as they have 3-4" long spines that are very sharp. Good job Matt.

He also moved an Agave scabra from the cactus wall to the new Furcraea group  looks great.