As part of his Duke of Edinburgh journey, Hitchin student Javier has been volunteering at the Triangle Garden’s Sunday Garden Club. As well as helping out physically at April’s session, he’s also written a blogpost to share his experiences and hopefully encourage more young people to volunteer.
“Today at the amazing Triangle Gardens we were replanting snowdrops around the gardens to make it look nicer and to spread the snowdrop population around.
We signed in and put our belongings in these lockers in a part of the garden next to the pavilion and grabbed the equipment that we needed. The equipment included some rakes, shovels, trowels and kneeling pads because when planting snowdrops, it was more comfortable and didn’t get so messy.
Since we were a big group, we were split up; one group went around the small pond, and our group went near the river and along the side of the fence which was facing the pond.
In order to replant the snowdrops we first had to dig it up from the ground and needed to separate them approximately halfway. Half went in the wheelbarrow to be planted in another part of the garden and half we put back in the ground by standing it up straight and piling the soil around it so it would cover the root. We then repeated this several times until we had a wealthy bounty of snowdrops in the wheelbarrow.
We then travelled over to a part of the garden overlooking the exit and I had to plant snowdrops there, it looked really good because that part of the garden had so many different coloured plants. It was like a festival of colours but with plants and adding the snowdrops made it complete. We couldn’t find any more space for the snowdrops since we had collected so many so we went next to the pond and as there was more space for the snowdrops to flourish and to populate.
After we had finished we had a small tour of the surrounding gardens and Steve pointed out a lot of cool and interesting things. For example we found wild garlic which smelt exactly like garlic, he showed us Egyptian walking onion, strawberry mint, a Judas tree, some edible flowers and different types of trees like apricot, nuts and almond trees.
After the delightful tour of the gardens we carried all the equipment back towards the place where we left our belongings. We then said goodbye and took our leave.”
Thank you Javier for helping to dig and divide our snowdrops, and spread the word about your experience as a volunteer!