Week 5: Chickens! and Volunteers!

It finally happened people. We have chickens again. Robert Sharp has donated 3 chickens to our cause and we will be raising them for the rest of the summer. If you recall last year we were overzealous and all 14 birds died in a week. We are hoping that we do better this year. We have already been blessed with an egg! We are still looking to get a bigger coop from Robert but with all of the rain this keeps getting postponed. We have added tree limbs to the fence to deter the chickens from jumping out and boards with cement blocks in front of them to prevent dogs from getting underneath. we have added straw to the ground to act as a diaper for the chicken poop so that it does not stink and can be used as compost. It is under a large tree o keep the chickens shaded from the sun. The three ladies are named Mary Brown, Juanita, and Bojangles.

We have officially gotten our first volunteer for our gardens. Her name is Debbie Renfro and she works with us Tuesday and Thursday mornings. She and her husband were missionaries in Kenya for the past many years and when they moved to Marion our interns from last year made them feel welcome by stopping by and delivering some of our produce. She had us over the other night so that we could meet her husband, eat cauliflower crust pizza, and watchBack to Eden. She is such a blessing and we hope to have many more like her in the coming months and years.

We are helping out with the community gardens on Tuesdays now and to start off we helped mulch at 30th and Cary gardens. Beth Ann is the instructor for this garden and she is very helpful.

It rained a lot this week which was good for our plants as well as the weeds. Our corn and okra are poking out of the ground and our strawberries are doubling every time we harvest. We weeded much of the week so that we can help our baby plants grow. Many of our rows were seeded with older seed so they are not coming in as well as we would like. We will probably reseed these rows to remedy this.

Thank you for reading our blog. We hope to see you out here sometime soon! Zach Arington

Garden Manager