I don’t know what month we wanted to have a third or fourth workday. I just remember sending out an email asking if anyone was planning on coming out. Jen answered that she was planning to and she was the only one. Enthusiasm seemed to be low. We held a meeting the day before the work day. There was some confusion about the time of the meeting….Mr. Ben and I showed up in the morning and Ms. Paula thought the meeting was in the afternoon. Well, the two of us didn’t say much. We briefly mentioned the water situation and was waiting for the town to put down a water meter and decided to cancel the work day because of the forecast storm.
Well, after the meeting it should have occurred to me to send out an email canceling the work day. I should have done it because I was the email person but I never thought about the work day not once after the meeting. Never thought about Jen and Ms. Judy who was planning to come and I knew they would come from Pensacola in the pouring rain because they have done it before. Well, I apologized but I never saw those 2 again. Novice mistake #3. Always follow through and be consistent.
A week or so later one of the maintenance guys handed me a pot with a plant. It looked like a bean plant. I recognized it because I had already murdered some the month before. The guy said it was left outside the gate. I found out later that Jen had left it that rainy day.
At the end of July we had a visit from Ms. Beth Bolles from the Extension office and she gave us good advice about our garden and we decided to make a pumpkin patch. Mr. Ron Partain from Bondurants tilled the ground for us. So my mom and I started planting seeds right away. We rushed because we were already late in sowing the seeds and pumpkins take about 90 days or more to mature. It was hot even in the early mornings. It was difficult to water because of the size of the plot and because the sandy soil won’t hold any moisture. We fertilized and watered and the vines looked healthy at first but when they started flowering some of the vines looked weak and brownish. There were ants in the flowers as well.. Then I noticed the bees were getting scarce so I tried hand pollinating. It worked somewhat and little pumpkins started forming. There wasn’t a lot but we were happy and waited for them to turn orange when an early cold snap came our way. I think we were able to harvest about 5 small pumpkins.
So….that was the end of our Hope Garden. We held no more meetings. We had retirements and moving on to new jobs and everybody else just busy or have lost interest. I still hung on to hope.
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