Limahuli Gardening II

This morning I worked in the Limahuli Garden again, an excellent volunteer activity I recommend. (Also see earlier post, Limahuli Gardening.) Today there were three other volunteers and under the direction of gardener Nicole we cleaned out some rock-enclosed sections of the upper garden that had for years been overgrown with ferns.

Before

After

 

In two mornings at the garden now I have almost entirely been working to kill (unwanted) plants, but that just shows that you don't need a "green thumb" to volunteer there. The ferns we removed were a native species but so aggressive that they needed to be excised. It made a huge difference: for the first time you could see the outlines of the rock enclosures clearly. Now that these areas are visible, the garden staff will figure out what to do with them: leave them as is, plant them out, or something else. Nicole had a great idea of planting with native grasses, but in any case now they can make an informed decision. We removed a bunch of overgrown grass from the rock-enclosed area on the left and down over the embankment (out of view of these shots), again revealing the terrain so they can figure out what to do there.

Surprisingly, the garden has very little in the way of utensils and supplies, for such a lavish collection of plans. We did not have rakes, or tarps to carry the ripped out plant material. Later I helped Nicole re-stake some plants that had been blown over in this weeks winds and we had to scavenge previously used gardening tape strips, never material not being available. Assuming I can regularly work in the south shore garden I may buy a few things and attempt to donate them so we have decent equipment to work with.