One Step At A Time

We had more great progress out in the gardens today and thankfully the rain held off until later in the afternoon. Note my play on words with the blog title and the image above (taken in the Japanese garden). It's nice to see such great teamwork with so many activities going on out in the gardens; many of them challenging as they are in the same areas. We're still on track to have the Holiday Lights Show (HLS) up and ready in the next two weeks and garden clean-up will continue until the snow flies. Our network of cords, lights and displays has become challenging but again, everyone is working very well together and I'm amazed daily at how much work is accomplished. Below is a nice shot of the arched bridge in the distance and some other images from today.

'Born's Gracious' "skeleton-leaf" silver maple (Acer saccharinum) - woody tree

We had great gardening volunteers today like Kay (above) and Eva (below) tidying up multiple areas. Kay focused on leaf and debris clean-up around the annual beds east of the building and worked well with Pat doing his last mowing in that area as well. Kay had many cartloads of debris returned to the compost pile. Eva spent most of her time in the azalea/rhododendron garden which hadn't been tidied up yet this fall. She did a nice job in an area with some of our toughest slopes to access. Those blue pipes behind her in the image below will be a nice part of the HLS... Ron K. (second photo down) accumulated a pile of leaves from the woodland walk garden the size of a small Volkswagon which Bill O. later picked up. Bill also collected leaves from many areas this afternoon. The third photo down shows Vicki and Steve, who along with Carol and Jim (fourth photo down) did a great job running lights to about 75% of our milk jug luminaries. This is an art and science and all four did well. The fifth photo down shows these four volunteers starting out in the shade garden. Maury ran errands for us and we also saw Bob T. and many others today.

The grounds crew had a wide range of tasks today. Larry winterized some of our water features, helped run cords and assisted with other HLS tasks. Big John put up more displays, hauled donated HLS trees to their future locations, pounded lots of stakes in advance of securing displays and worked on some other tasks as well. Janice continued decorating the Japanese garden with our new LED lights and helped with some other projects. Cindy spent most of her day gardening in multiple locations and did help with shifting around some luminaries for the volunteers. She came back with plenty of cartloads of debris too. Pat worked on HLS tasks both inside and out, push mowed and also collected leaves and debris in various areas. Cheryl spent the bulk of her time tidying in the fern & moss garden which greatly benefited from her attention. I helped organize our morning volunteers and continued to run cords in multiple locations. We had a very productive day and this is a nice pace for finishing out the month. Most of the grounds staff will finish their 2013 season in the coming weeks. Below are more photos from today.