Service Learning Reflection 15 and 16

 

Heartland Gardens is a not-for-profit organization where I completed my service learning portion for this course.  It is a single acre located off of McGregor Blvd that you could not even notice if you didn’t know it was there.  Everything that is cultivated in this garden is organically grown and distributed locally.  The garden offers classes about anything from proper composting to fungi growth and sustainable gardening.  One great thing about this small business is that they exchange volunteer time for money toward their classes.  Every hour spent volunteering in the garden counts as five dollars toward a class.

The 10 hours that I volunteered spanned over two days; during which time my roommate and I completed the construction of a rather large spiral herb garden.  The garden was a mere patch of dirt when we were first told what we would be doing.  The men who worked at Heartland Gardens helped us with the measurements and drew out the lines in the dirt where we would need to begin digging.  With their help, we dug a spiral about 6 or 7 inches deep into the ground.  We then laid a relatively thin layer of shells in the spiral that we had just dug.  We spent the rest of the first day filling it to the brim with palms to create a cushioned walk way.  While the palms were a fabulous idea, there never seemed to be enough.  Every time we reached the top of the garden, we had to run around it and compact it down, then add more.

During the second day we traveled with one of the Heartland Gardens Employees to a rock quarry to collect truck loads of rock.  The rock was then layered on top of the existing palm passageway to create and aesthetically pleasing and functional path around the garden.  As we only had one truck and it required a great deal of rock, this process took all day. We were informed by founder Ben Pino that they were going to build the soil up in the center and make it slowly decline down the spiral.  This would allow for a multitude of herbs to be grown in the same garden.  Water craving herbs would be kept closer to the ground while the drier weather herbs could be kept toward the top of the spiral.

This garden is doing so many great and innovative things that people from ECHO were actually there to exchange ideas and enhance both of their locations.  It was encouraging to see the collaboration between the two organizations and made me hope that more people would be encouraged to start backyard sustainable gardening.