If you are interested in volunteering with the PNA Village, there is an opportunity to volunteer this Friday, May 31 from 9am-1pm at the Spring Campaign Gardening Party. No gardening experience necessary, click here for more details.
What is this event like? Here is a missive from community member Elena Louise Richmond:
I have an enormous yard and most of it is garden. As I have gotten older, it’s been harder and harder to maintain. For a while some neighbors planted and weeded some of the front garden because it had the sun they wanted for their peppers. But they moved and took their good strong backs with them.
Five years ago my friend Tim approached me with the jaw dropping question, did I have any large gardening projects he could undertake? He had recently moved into an apartment a few blocks away and missed having a garden to dig. Our partnership was born. By now we have a magical fairy world of a garden out there with perennials, vegetables, berries, a small orchard, even a little woodland area with jack-in-the-pulpits and trilliums and my latest project, a cat cemetery cum succulent garden.
We are both in our mid to late sixties and I have a train wreck for a spine so we really can’t keep this up. Enter the PNA Village. Last fall for the Fall Gardening Day we drew up a wish list of everything we could think of we needed done: pruning, hauling, weeding, shoveling out a compost pile, reducing tree limbs to manageable sticks, digging out ferns, even taking in patio furniture.
Tim shook his head at the list. “They are never going to get half of this done.”
Five energetic and young(!) people bounded into the yard and went to work. In an hours’ time they had tackled everything on the list and we were scrounging for more things for them to do. As they said, “We quit after an hour and half. Until then, we work!”
We had much the same experience with the spring gardening crew except they did it all in 85 degree heat. Even if you don’t have A Tim (and I would wish that for everyone,) you can have the Village on Garden Days. I am lucky to have both.
