Great News!! Islip Parks Department came through for us, and delivered a white painted wooden picket fence for around the vegetable garden. And the drain at the greenhouse got fixed too!
Please join us on Saturday, August 1st from 9AM to 11AM at Brookwood Hall to help install the new fence! Don’t forget to wear a hat and use sunscreen!
All the seed packets were painted and are now complete! They will hang around the fence to discourage the deer from eating our veggies. Our volunteers Denise, Dottie, Nora and Janice helped us paint the 138 seed packets, so thank you so much! We had a purpose in using blue so much on the packets. Deer see colors in the ultraviolet spectrum (meaning they see in shades of blues and violets), so we used a bright blue color that could be seen by the animals to help keep them from entering the garden. We also mounted the birdhouses onto stakes in the garden. The large birdhouses were put on top of large metal poles, so now the birds have a place to go! Small ones were put on sticks in the cosmos bed.
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This Saturday July 25th, from 9:30 to 11:30, we will be finishing the painting projects for Project Bloom. We will be installing the birdhouses Bob built onto metal poles. They will be mounted behind the small birdhouses on stakes which were placed in the “cosmos garden” behind the curly willow fence. We will also be installing the fence/photo board sign facing the playground in the corner by the vegetable garden. We will plant snapdragons in front of it. Check out the photo of Bob V. and Kathy C. posing in front of the sign by the kid’s garden.
With a public garden there can be some unwelcome visitors and the deer have become a real nuisance eating our vegetables. To help with the deer problem we will be hanging blocks painted like seed packets from a wire around the perimeter of the garden. I located some simple drawings of vegetables that could be painted onto the plastic blocks. Bob cut 138 “seed packet” blocks from leftover Trex plastic lumber. I painted 16 really quickly with one brush and a small pallette. Then we outlined in black and added the lettering with a sharpie. We screwed metal straps to the back, and hung them from the wire that Bob had installed on 2×2 posts around the garden fence. We will need to paint about 8 more of each one to fill up around the fencing.
We also made and mounted new signs for the greenhouse, the vegetable garden and the memorial garden. The church volunteers did a great job cleaning up the new Stehling Rose Bed area. We have perennials that will be planted here, alongside the pathway of pavers with daisies on them.
Please come down on Saturday morning and help us finish up these fun projects.
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