Friday, September 30, 2016 – Tear out flower beds, Mow at Carthage

Today was a long day of work. Sis. Johnson worked in Nauvoo and continued to tear out more beautiful flower beds. She pulled about half of the flower beds from the “Women’s Garden” behind the Nauvoo Visitor’s Center.  

Next Sis. Johnson went to the Lyon Drug herb garden and pulled most of those beautiful flower & herb beds. These are the very same flower beds we watered yesterday. But, today they are gone!  Sis. Johnson pulled and hauled away so many flower beds she had to make three trips to the compost pile to unload. 

Sis. Johnson has pulled a lot of flowers. But more significantly, Sis. Johnson did all of the driving including backing up the big trailer to the compost pile. I say it is significant because yesterday was the very first time she has ever backed up a large rig like this. The rig is a large 10 passenger van with a 20ft long tandem trailer on the back. Today she did it all three times, perfectly; you can add “Trailer Backer” to her list of new skills she has acquired since she’s been on her mission.

I spent my whole day in Carthage cleaning sidewalks and mowing the Visitor’s Center Lawn as well as the Bushnell House lawns. Neither location has been mowed since last week but the grass is growing so slowly it didn’t look overgrown at all. Normally I mow all of the lawns every 4 to 5 days because the grass grows so fast but there has been no rainfall for three weeks and the weather is much cooler now so the grass isn’t growing very fast.

My last job was at the visitor’s center. I cleaned the sidewalks were all of the terracotta planters used to sit. They left a muddy circle and white calcium ring on the sidewalk were each one sat for so long. They also had roots that had gone down through the drain holes on the terracotta pots and into the brick sidewalk below. I used a hoe to cut off all of the roots. After a thorough sweeping and blowing with the leaf blower, the sidewalks looked a lot better.