Jourdan is quite the gardener, and for his age, he's an expert. He decided to help in the garden at the Oregon Food Bank for his service hours for his Citizenship in the Community merit badge.
The food bank has a garden where volunteers come and plant, weed, harvest, etc. the crops for those in need. Last week Jourdan, Julia and I weeded two HUGE rows of beans and replanted seeds where previous plantings had failed. Julia got to help clean out the chicken coups. She collected eggs too! After that, the rest of the gardening was boring, as far as she was concerned... but she helped anyway.
In the above picture, Jourdan is holding one of his many buckets of peas.... in the background, you can see part of one of the two rows of beans he weeded and planted last week. This week, Jourdan and I left Julia with Grandma and Grandpa while we put in another 3 hour gardening shift. I don't work in my own garden for 3 hours at a time, so it's strange to do that in another garden. This time, we picked peas.....for 3 HOURS. I couldn't have imagined picking peas for 3 hours, but we did. Jourdan and I filled up 3 five gallon buckets worth of peas (which was about 1/2 of Thursday's harvest. We took all the peas harvested that day, packaged and weighed them. All together we had 86 pounds of peas which we were told has a grocery store price of over $600.
I have to apologize for the next photo. Jourdan's eyes are totally closed. If you live in the Northwest, you understand the phenomenon of being slightly "allergic" to the sunshine. (Eyes will react by automatically closing upon exposure to direct sunlight!) In fact, the first week we came, it was drizzly and the ground was more like a swamp than a garden. It was nice to have a chance to work with less soggy soil this week.
It has been funny to watch Jourdan share his gardening "expertise" with grown adults. The other volunteers have discovered that he grows dahlias (45 varieties - about 150 individual plants) and now come to him for advice with their dahlia questions. We've got one more shift to do for his merit badge, but I'm sure he will want to go back again even when he's done. He's really a hard worker, and it's nice to see him so willing to help those less fortunate. 
4 comments:
I think that's really neat. What a cool service project. I can't even fathom the amounts of peas -- 3 hours, $600... WOW!!
Awesome! We are really looking forward to doing some of these things with you all. Although, 3 hours of picking peas might be a bit more then I can expect my little ones to do. Strawberry picking on the other hand.....
yes bry had on 2 left shoes and I was the one with my high heels off by the end of the night. It was sooo hot record breaking and I know the feeling of closing eyes in the sun all our wedding photos had to be taken over and over cause the sun was so bright! He still looks darling and what great kids!
what a great thing you guys are doing! I'd only have half buckets because I'd be eating the rest, how can you resist peas!
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