Hey everybody
I returned from the Baltic sea on Wednesday. Thursday morning, jet lagged, I woke up at 5am with a feeling I should go visit the garden.
I got there and the wildflowers were doing great but the weeds were out of control. I spent about an hour pulling them up. I was wondering how I was going to ever get through this Sisyphean task. How many volunteers and how many phone calls was it going to take?
At 6am I was about to leave when a sanitation truck pulled up. The driver told me to leave the gate open.
Why? I asked.
“Because we got a complaint about the weeds. We’re going to clean the whole thing out.”
I explained to him that we were in the process of starting a community garden here. I told him we had a licence from HPD. I showed him the wildflower plots. As the rest of the crew showed up I brought them into the conversation too.
For the next 3 hours, together, we removed all the weeds from the periphery and the winding cracks in the asphalt. I removed weeds from the wildflower beds. They cut the refuse fine so we could make a mulch pile. We gathered up what little trash was left and put it in the truck. Sanitation workers; Eric Stephens, Mike Wolf and Maurice Rucker were happy and proud to be part of this.
The flowers were spared. Mandela Garden has never looked better.