Thursday, March 09, 2017 – Clean Carthage Visitor’s Center, Youth Tour, Carthage Burn Pile, Transplant Calendulas

Yahoo, we got to go back to the Carthage Visitor’s Center this morning and clean the grounds. We spent the first six months of our mission there assigned to be the grounds keepers. We haven’t been back to Carthage since October. Sis. Johnson and I have a special place in our hearts for this sacred and hallowed place. We’ve loved our assignment to keep the grounds beautiful and to enhance every visitor’s experience and feel the spirit there.

Back in April of last year one of our first tasks was to clean out the hedge of all the leave that had been impacted in the limbs, stems and leaves of the bushes. Sis. Johnson and I worked for two week to dislodge and pull out by hand every dried fall leaf in the hedge. It was a monumental task; we loaded and hauled away over 30 large trash bags of leaves to the burn pile.

 

But back in April last year we didn’t know about the very powerful “Backpack” leaf blowers. Our small handheld blowers weren’t powerful enough to dislodge the impacted leaves. But today we brought the backpack blowers with us. I was able to completely clean the leaves from the hedge in less than an hour; a task that took us two weeks last year!

It was always our policy last year to get all of the grounds around the visitor’s center and jail cleaned, blown and finished before the first visitor’s arrived. Well, we did it today as well. We finished cleaning the sidewalk, the jail and the visitor’s center perimeters with five minutes to spare before the tour bus arrived with the first load of guests. It was close, but we had a lot of help from Richard, Scott and their grounds crew; we couldn’t have done it on time without them.

On our way back to FM we stopped at the Family Living Center to pick up and haul off a lot of downed branches that were in the street and on the grounds. I think we will be cleaning up the leftovers from last week’s winds for quite a while.

Back in the Navuoo propagation room Sis. Johnson and I finished our day of work by transplanting a tray of Calendula seedlings. Back on the flower farm in Mesa, AZ in my former life I grew a lot of Calendulas. The only color they came in was yellow and orange. However, Richard has found this variety called “Snow Princess.” I will be really interested to see “White” calendulas!

Update on Sis. Crandall:

Sister Harriet Crandall passed away last night. We will update you when more details become available.

Email from Sister Cook, Mission Secretary (See: March 8, 2017)