Maintenance Time

Today the students had a day off because of a staff development day, but that didn't keep us out of the garden! I got to do a maintenance day with two other Eckerd College volunteers. All of the students in our groups are very excited to look at the pineapple part of the garden, but lately weeds had taken over. Naturally we decided to clean up this area first. While we were weeding we saw tons of bugs, which of course means good healthy soil! We also got to see a tiny little frog hopping between the different pineapple plants. It is exciting to see so much life in this school yard garden.

This picture is of the end of our hour long weeding process. MJ is finishing up the last few weeds that were trying to hide under the pineapple plants.

There was a half hour left of our time at the garden and we started to turn over the compost piles. It is surprisingly much harder than you would expect. After a half hour I was good and tired and didn't even get a whole pile over to the next bin. The compost was also full of little bugs. I saw a cockroach, a bunch of spiders and little beetles crawling all through this decomposing matter!

Sadly bugs weren't the only things found in the compost. There were a few plastic bags that got mixed in. It seems that they must have been blown in by the wind, luckily I think I found almost all of them in my pile and disposed of them.




Have a great week everyone!
Dani