Strathcona School Garden

There have been plans afoot to do some landscape gardening in the kindergarten playground of the school that my nephew goes to. A landscape architect had drawn up plans, a promise had been secured of plant donations, our friend Tom had offered a dump truck of soil from Harper’s Gardening Centre, where he works.

I put the word out throughout the neighbourhood asking for some volunteers to come with shovels and wheelbarrows to help. I fully expected that it would look like a scene from that mawkish Worlds Most Extreme Home Makeover (or whatever it’s called – can’t watch that saccharine spectacle) with a hundred hopped up helpers. Alas, come Sunday morning, it was only the five of us.

First we pulled out a lot of dead plants and weeds, and broke up the ground where the soil was meant to go. What was there was hard and lifeless. Some of it looked like bags of portland cement had been poured into the ground as fill.

5 cubic yards of rich soil from the kind folks at Harper’s Gardening Centre.

Then came the back breaking task of shoveling it into wheelbarrows and wheeling it into place.

We hung up a bag to make it easier to put all of the dead plants, garbage and abundant pine needles in.

Besides putting soil into beds, the two pine trees were also pruned of a lot of low hanging dead branches.

Shoveling all that earth was a task and a half, but it felt good being able to help. Nothing will be planted until the spring, but it’s ready to go when it rolls around.