26 Volunteers, 83.5 Hours, and One Big Weeding Day at the Food Forest

On Saturday, September 12, 26 volunteers from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the Sierra Vista Food Forest with gloves, shovels, and buckets, and spent the day weeding. By the time they finished, they had given us 83.5 volunteer hours. That is a little over two full work weeks, packed into one Saturday.

Look at the rock-ringed bed in the photo above. On September 7, it was surrounded by grass. Monsoon season is generous to everything that grows in the desert, and that includes plants we did not put there. The young trees and shrubs in a food forest share their soil with whatever else is growing around them, and in this climate sharing soil means sharing water. Every bit of moisture a patch of grass pulls out of a bed is moisture a fruit tree was counting on.

That is why we say water first. We build swales to slow the rain down and let it soak in, and weeds quietly compete for every drop those swales save.

So that is what 26 people went after. They worked the beds around our trees, the fence line, and the areas around the swales, pulling, digging, and bagging. Kids worked right alongside the adults. Someone was always hauling a full bag off to the pile, and by the end the bags were lined up along the sidewalk.

The gallery below shows more of the day and the same spots five days apart. The field looks like a food forest in the making instead of a meadow, and the fence line is clear.

Weeding is not the part of a food forest that anyone puts on a poster. Planting gets the photos. But the first couple of years are about getting plants rooted and proving the water systems work, and a young tree that is not fighting grass for water has a much better shot at the hundred years we are planting it for.

We are 100% volunteer-run, so days like this one are how the work gets done. Thank you to every one of the 26. You can come back in a few years and harvest from what you protected.

Want to dig in?

Our workdays run about four hours, and you can come for all of it or part of it. No experience is needed, because we teach as we work. Enter your email in the footer below (or email Liz at lizpiccolo@reapgoodness.org), sign the two-minute volunteer agreement, then come join us. If your church, school, team, or family would like to do a day of service together, we would love to host you.

Can't make a workday? You can still help. Your gift covers plants, tools, insurance, the water bill, and the other costs of keeping a volunteer organization running.

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