A Sense Of Community

It's not very often that a student here at ESF gets to venture off campus and into the real-life communities of Syracuse without a vehicular mode of transportation. This makes interaction with fellow residents of the city of Syracuse practically impossible. Most people I know can't even picture Syracuse as a friendly or welcoming neighborhood given all the news coverage they see about drugs, violence, and poverty and almost nothing positive. Today, however, was different for my friend Anthony and I. We were given the opportunity to volunteer within the community for ESF's Saturday Of Service at a small community garden known as the West Newell Street Community Garden. I was excited to finally get out and play in the dirt for the first time this year and it was just the outlet I needed to break away from the routine.

While we were there, we met some very nice people including the two ladies who oversee the garden, Mable (not Marble) and Jonnell, a Syracuse community geographer and an integral part of Syracuse Grows. There was also a landscape architecture graduate from ESF who has been working there for a while, named Jessie. She seemed to really enjoy helping out there and being able to apply her knowledge and skills as an LA. She helped the coordinators plan for a more native-to-Syracuse garden that would utilize some indigenous management techniques that she probably learned at ESF. It was nice to see a community garden that was under such good care and was operated in such an organized manner. Within the garden, there were raised beds that would soon be home to various vegetable and flowering plants. In the front of the garden were beds for flowering plants, behind those were beds for strawberries and other vegetable plants, to the side of those was a small plot for healing herbs like yarrow and heal-all, and the rest was for anything else they would decide to grow this spring and summer.

My initial task was to rake up all the leaves, with Anthony, that were toward the back of the garden in order to prepare it for a prescribed burning to control weeds (in a natural and more indigenous way!) and ultimately for tilling and planting. Soon after I began, Mabel could see that this was a one man job and had me instead move onto clearing all the Virginia creeper off the back fence. Virginia creeper is one of those plants that causes you to go insane, sustain all sorts of injuries (including nearly dropping a pair of garden sheers onto your face while attempting to cut it free from tree branches), and basically pushes you to the point of giving up on the plot of land in has taken over. Luckily, with some determination and a sharp pair of garden sheers, I was able to clear the fence and surrounding area of the problem weed.

After that was all done, I continued on to cut down some box elder trees that were a bit in the way, picked up trash that had hopped the fence from the parking lot/dump site of the Syracuse street sweeping company next-door, and tore up yet more Virginia creeper before calling it a day. Despite my ongoing rant about how much of a nuisance Virginia creeper is, I didn't mind doing the work one bit. The reasons being that I felt like I was putting forth an effort toward a worthy common cause that would benefit many other people besides myself, I felt it was a wonderful way to spend an otherwise boring and unproductive Saturday, and it's just something I've always done and don't mind doing again and again. Helping out a community is definitely what drove me the most though. It gave me a feeling of accomplishment and significance, knowing that I was able to meet new people and was given the opportunity to work with a community on a project that benefits a commonwealth. So, your job for this spring and summer is to follow suit and make yourself feel good by helping out others and volunteering in your community. Happy Earth Week!