Good Deeds in Southern Gables
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Last Friday we wrote about some pretty special local students coming to do some pretty special work. They were volunteers from Denver Christian School, raking leaves for our Southern Gables senior and disabled residents. What a beautiful day it turned out to be!
Starting out after assembling at their Lakewood campus with their parent chaperones, the students spent the morning and part of the afternoon raking leaves. They were doing it for people they didn’t know, and they were doing it with hustle and smiles. It’s a fall task that we’re all used to doing ourselves, and it’s not often anticipated with pleasure. At some point, for many people, it just gets to be too much to handle. But think of the energy and power of youth! Channel 9 News reporter Tom Cole came out and captured some of that energy for the Friday evening news. (It will start with an ad, but that’s OK. At the end of the video press esc, X, pause, or stop to read the rest of the story.)
Among the responses we received from neighbors was this one:
I can’t thank you enough for placing me on the list to have Denver Middle School students come and pick up leaves for me. What a blessing it is to me. I suffer from many health issues and in the past I would just cry from pain and being overwhelmed from having to do that by myself. Not to mention, I have a pretty big yard.
A big part of our leaf-raking project here in Southern Gables is collecting the leaves and taking them to our neighborhood farm, the Fleischer Family Farm. On Friday Ken Fischer’s dump truck “Ol’ Blue” and Greg Abelein’s big pickup truck worked all afternoon bringing truckloads of bagged leaves to the farm. There, our Southern Gables volunteers wrangled the bags from the farm gate out to the fields where they will be put to rest. It was a lot of hauling:
534 bags of leaves raked from 44 homes.
Farmer Paul describes what will happen next.
These leaves will go on top of the cover crops growing in our fields then after a good soaking rain or snow, they will be covered with silage tarps for the winter. This provides an incredible amount of organic material for the life in our soil to feast on and to continue to thrive through the winter. I tend to think of it like a rock we would all look under as kids and find all types of creatures. We are trying to mimic this on large scale. Then come spring we will add additional compost on top of the cover crop/leaf mix and have some incredible soil to grow great food for you all next season.
Paul tells us that he won’t be taking any more leaves. You might already know though, that you can take them to the Lakewood Greenhouse at 9556 W. Yale Avenue, right around the corner from Southern Gables, November 16-25. All the details for that are here: Free leaf recycling for Lakewood residents. They will be put to good use there too, and keeping them from going to landfill with the trash is a good thing. You can also rake them into your garden and flower beds like Paul does at the farm.
Here are some pictures of Friday’s action. Love those kids! Enthusiastic. Cheerful. Helpful. Involved.
Southern Gables volunteers who picked up and moved the bagged leaves to the Fleischer Family Farm were Greg & Monica Abelein, Jeff Bair, Ted Block, Erwin Bunzli, Marci DeMott, Ken Fischer, Lisa Huntington-Kinn, James Johnson, Bruce Loftis, Bruce McDonald, Liza Patty, and Doug & Judy Whitten.
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