Hard at work in HCC Community Garden
LH Today covered one meeting that addressed efforts to create a new White Rock community garden, what would be our area's third such garden. You can read that article here.
Meanwhile, the Highlands Christian Church garden, known as the Betty and Jimmy Baker Memorial Garden, is celebrating its first year in existence and quietly flourishing.
When ground was broken in December of 2008, on land behind the church on McCree Road, the garden's 30 plots filled up quickly and the following spring yielded good crops.
There have been problems, though not political, that the gardeners have faced. They’ve been contending with rampant bermuda grass and fire ant infestations.
On January 23rd, after a number of delays due to weather, Garden Coordinator Gene Carlton arranged a work day.
About 20 folks, young and old, arrived that morning to clean out beds and shovel a four inch thick layer of mulch into all the pathways and areas surrounding the plots.
Volunteers had the help of a rented Bobcat and a small tractor.
Prior to this process, Carlton, his wife Lucy, and church employee Dale Bryant covered the entire area with a thick weed barrier material in a process that lasted several months.
Additionally, at the end of the summer Carlton hired Ron Hall, owner of Ron’s Organic Dynamics, to organically treat the many fire ant mounds - and the treatment worked.
Says Carlton, “Some of the mounds were one foot high and two feet across! Ron used 340 gallons of a product called ‘Aunt B Gone’. About four weeks later I dug up some areas where mounds had been and they were no ants.”
