We Love Community Service Days

May 11

Yesterday, May 10, 2024 we were pleased to host 15 young students from Columbus School for Girls. They were here for a community service day and they really rocked it! We love community service days!

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Weeding, Planting, Wind Turbines, and Saving Baby Rabbit Pups

While these young people were here, they helped a great deal with helping clean Mezzacello Urban Farm up for our Annual Hands-On-STEM Fundraiser which was to take place the next day. We divided the group into three teams: Weeding the formal gardens, and pollinator runway, Weeding and setting the potager garden beds, and building and repairing Vertical Axis Wind Turbines. It is a credit to their school that they are such dedicated and effective teammates and partners.

The formal garden weeds were dispatched and burned quickly (mostly invasive thistle and Japanese honeysuckle. The potager garden was riddled with african violets, stickweed, and dead purple nettle, and the violets and nettle were shredded and the stickweed burned. The potager garden team found garden snakes and they added burlap covers to the beds to control weeds and hold in moisture.

The Wind Turbine team had the benefit of having a few members of the CSG Robotics Team (Murphy’s Outlaws FIRST Team 677) on that team. They worked quickly and efficiently and built two complete turbines. That was a huge help and I was very grateful!

The most amazing thing though was that while the formal garden team was feeding dandelions and dead nettle to Baby Mama rabbit, they discovered she had had her pups! They also discovered that she had accidently kicked three of them out of her nesting box and cage! Sadly two of them had perished, but one was still alive and they rescued that pup!

All four remaining pups are squirming safely in their bed of mama’s fur and she is milking them regularly. The ladies and I quickly devised a better, higher back to the nesting box and that rabbit family is safe. Service days indeed!