Planting trees at Temple tiny house

Planting trees at Temple tiny house

October 06.17

by Yung-Le, Hsiao

Tiny house

Temple tiny house which locate at Temple Community Garden, is the space diagonally opposite of Johnson Hall.  It was designed by student and complete at 2017 spring. At the beginning of this activity, we cleaning up the environment by picking up trashes. Before we started to plant the trees, we weeding and creating spaces for them. It's not difficult to plant trees if you know the process step by step, however it cause great effort on digging.

composting in the community garden

For the small trees which located at sidewalk, we first dig out and replaced original soils by soil which full of nutrients and  buckets of water. Later than, we loosen root of trees, since they were fixed by the shape of containers. If we skip this step, the growth of root will limited and cause the death of tree. During these process, we also scoop out different kinds of insects and earth worms, especially beetle larvae which I have keep at pet since I was in elementary. However, these larvae will distorted trees' roots, so we just throw them to the streets and let the birds and cars do their jobs. While we were working, people who pass through such as polices or children on the bus, they seems really interesting and curious on what we were doing, some of them even came and cheers us up. These make Philadelphia a place which full of love and live.

Our last activity, was to handle larger trees which placed in the community. Basically, it was just the same process as previous, but extremely harder than before. Since the location of trees were above soils that contained lot of gravels, and they were very difficult to remove. We had spend almost two hours, trying every kind of tools to pick up those rocks.  At the end, we still solve the problems and placed the trees. 

 After all, it was a tired but interesting events, we had learn how to plant trees efficiently, also I have chance to meet people from different countries and work together with.