The Home Depot team did a great job on Thursday digging most of the holes for plants as well as actually planting many of them. They set the stage for a productive work day on Saturday. Saturday was actually the second day of “finish” landscaping at the Harvard Way project. Once again, we had Mike and Dusty from East Hills Community Church as well as a Beatrice who is joining the Habitat family and will soon be working on her own house! Beatrice brought along her brother to help her out getting a head start on her sweat equity.

Joining us were a trio of Girl Scouts working on their sustainability projects. What a great group, pitching in on one of the hottest days of the week to do some backbreaking labor. Even the moms, Michaela and Gina, stuck with us and worked hard to make the landscape pop! Hannah, Elizabeth and Emma just kept trucking along, spreading what seemed like a ton of mulch after getting the drip lines installed. The red bark mulch pops, doesn’t it?

Thanks big time to Perry from the Habitat ReStore for picking up the Chinese Elm tree from The Home Depot for us. Instant shade! Of course it took Dave, Mike, Hurles and Joshua to move it into the hole but it was the perfect finishing touch. The Home Depot team had excavated the hole to the perfect depth while they had access to power tools on Thursday. That was a huge help.

Work moved along beautifully until everything stopped short when Beatrice got a boo-boo on her finger. Kathy provided quick first aid, (once she was able to actually find the microscopic boo-boo on Beatrice’s finger) and we all had some fun at Beatrice’s expense then back to work. We finished up for the day right around noon and stood back to admire our work as almost on cue a hummingbird appeared and began feasting on the flowers. Great timing. What a beautiful way to end the day.

We probably have one more day of work on the landscaping, doing some finishing touches on the irrigation connections and spreading the rest of the decomposed granite into the body of the yard to help control future weed growth and make the yard as low maintenance as possible for homeowner Louis. This has been an incredible transformation for both Louis and the neighborhood.

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