Enloe Food Ark: Gardening Pt.1

After vs. Before

Well we've all been through transformations in our life: whether it be in personal style, eating habits, grades, makeup, attitudes, perspectives, etc. But yesterday, 7/28/14, a crew of 6-8 people tackled the wild and untamed Enloe garden that was passed down to me and my club, The Food Ark, from Concert and Mr. Brent Miller. I wished not to leave you suspense to see the final reveal, so I have placed the "After Vs. Before" picture in such a way that it would be the very first thing that catches your eye in this post. Now, you can really see the difference, eh? 2 hours and a very enthusiastic work crew surely makes conspicuous progress.

I know... I warned you...

Monday morning sure is sluggish so walking down the halls of Enloe, my current high school, with my work crew of 3 other students - Celia, Daniel, and Molly - I continuously warned them about what they will see, just to save them from shock. Looking back, I think just letting their bodies fill with shock and voraciousness to get started would have been completely plausible, however, there is a risk that they will see such a challenge and not be inclined to hurdle over the large gap of getting started. In all actuality, I'm more than satisfied with the progress and hard work that my group put in! It was more than I could have ever imagined.

Thinking about using the fences as a lateral surface... Got to get approved by Wake County for that to work though...

After a brief introduction and pep talk, we started getting down to earth (I'm full of puns, hahaha). Everyone knelt down at once on both sides of the strip of weedy land and started yanking those stubborn monsters out of the land. Stress-reliever = weed pulling. That really got everyone to start going at it harder. Hey, might as well get all the stress out now than to have it pile up inside you during the school year! Always thinking ahead.

Within 30 minutes, we cleared half of the garden of weeds. You surprised? 23ft x 7 ft cleared in just half an hour? I'm not. The group worked in perfect synchronization without a word to be said beforehand about teamwork. It was glorious. Each person would make their own little/huge pile of pulled out weeds and then after a pile grew to become a 2ft cube, one person would come around to each pile and pick it up and throw it over the fence. I know what you're thinking; it's not littering... just simply... fertilizing the ground below :). Once again, making use of everything.
 

As we picked, we noticed that there were still vegetables hiding inside the monstrosity of a weed bed that we violently plucked at. We discovered Romain Lettuce, Okra, Jalapeno Peppers, Green Bell Peppers, Raspberries and an exotic Chinese plant that was unknown to us at the time because it just began sprouting. We decided to leave it there in hope to have some nice delicacy to top our dishes with in the future.

The only place that we didn't need to touch due to the pristine condition it was already in was this area. As you can see, on the bottom left hand corner of the picture, there's an abundance of Rosemary bushes and neighboring it is lots and lots of mint. A couple of the students who came with us didn't know that there was such plants on this earth. The other student and I each took hand fulls of mint in between breaks and popped them into our mouths to act as natural refreshers. To be honest, I'm nothing close to being knowledgeable about growing plants. I have just done a bunch of research about the properties of such plants for health purposes but I am in no means an expert on the dissemination and budding of plants so I'm glad that there are other students who are apart of my club who already are very experienced in this field. And of course, there's Maurice Smalls, my mentor, who brought his son with him to garden, more like tidy up, with us!

The final product! We added a layer of mulch to the garden, but now, looking back, I believe that wasn't the smartest idea due to the fact that the mulch that we used was the leftover treated/painted mulch used for flower gardens and landscaping. Think about the chemicals in the mulch from the paint seeping through the plant, and because the plant performs osmosis imagine it then hiding in the fruits that we harvest later to eat. Then imagine the same nasty and toxic chemicals making their way through our mouth down into the stomach and being absorbed either by the stomach or the small intestines where it will then make its way into our bloodstream and cause mutations to the cells that the chemical-contained blood feeds. Well, now you have certain diseases that you should not kid with like cancer stacked up fighting against your body. That's scary. Well, my lecture is over (not ever over) about that. That's why organic is so important and healthy. These plants will not be classified as "organic" if I keep the mulch sitting there. AHHHHHHH!!

Now enjoy a series of relaxing photos after reading the above, frightening, paragraph. :)

 

Luckily, we have another gardening/cleanup day coming our way in the very near future so we can fix the mulch problem. This time, we will be tackling the courtyard and the existing but abandoned greenhouse.

We all make mistakes. But how we react to them determines success or failure. But if the path you took turns out to have the latter as the destination, success will be determined by how you react to failure.