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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Youth In Action!

Our team here at EYA has been busy down in the Youth Garden; trying to get the plots ready for the upcoming growing season. Having built many new raised beds using a stack of donated lumber, we soon realised that we were going to require a huge volume of growth medium to fill them and a small army to shift it!

Thankfully both wishes were granted almost simultaneously. West Creek Farms agreed to provide us with a huge quantity of their organic soil enrichment, containing aged fir bark and mushroom manure, at a discounted price. They were able to deliver all 15 yards on
Saturday morning and drop it all off on the street beside the Youth Garden. Now I don’t know if you have a sense of just how much 15 cubic yards of soils is, but, as someone who is pretty new to this gardening game, my heart just about stopped when this truck rolled up and started unloading. Yup, every inch of that compost material was destined for our garden.


Lucky for me, in addition to the 15 cubic yards of soil, I also had 15 bright and eager high school students from Burnaby Mountain Secondary School coming down to volunteer with us. The students belonged to a group called Youth In Action, which participates in various
community service and volunteer projects. After a brief introduction to the garden and the importance of good soil structure & fertility, the students assembled themselves into teams to carry out the various tasks. One team started raking the leaves off the tops of the beds, another started adding fertilizer and lime to the bed surfaces, and the third team got dug into that huge pile of compost material.

Pretty soon it was all hands on deck as everyone focused their efforts on getting the soil off the road and into the garden. To give you a better sense of the task at hand:
A fully loaded, full size pick-up truck will hold about 2.5 cubic yards of material, so we were attempting to move 6 pick-up trucks worth of material. What did that really mean to us? Well about 135 wheelbarrow trips and lots of team work!

It felt good to watch the compost pile shrink and the energy and determination of the team meant that it all happened at quite the pace. After a great deal of work, our garden beds were beautifully filled, the street was cleared and our team was still all smiles! A massive “thank you” goes out to Youth In Action for all their help in preparing our plant beds. I can’t wait to start planting!

- Claire W

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