My 5yro and I spent about an hour pulling weeds (mostly crab grass) at The KFB Cultural Garden this morning. I had a great time with her as we chatted about her first week of kindergarten at Briggs and about how God created the plants that makeup the Carolina Fence Garden on S. Dargan Street in downtown Florence. I demonstrated for her how the rain garden and the permeable pavers help with storm water runoff and reduce pollution in our city. At her age she doesn’t really get all that – like our garden I am just planting a seed – but she did say that the rain barrels were pretty (and they are!) 🙂
Afterward we decided to walk through the gardens we helped with at The City County Complex. We chased some of the eastern tiger swallowtails, she was upset that we couldn’t catch them and take them home. When I explained to her that these butterflies have made this their home because they like the flowers she helped plant she agreed that we don’t want to take them from their homes. There wasn’t any work to be done because the City does a great job at maintaining those beds for us, but we enjoyed walking through the area and reminiscing about all of the fun we had while we were working on that project. She eventually got bored and said that was ready to go home to her iPad, but I love that she takes such pride in the work we have done our community and I enjoy the time we spend together maintaining the green spaces and gardens we’ve helped create. I look forward to seeing her grow more and more with a sense of community and pride for our city.
Our next project is one of our annual cleanup events, and one of the first projects that my family participated in with Keep Florence Beautiful back in 2010… the Magic City Pride Downtown Cleanup. My older children still proudly wear their ‘I Believe in Downtown Florence’ T-shirts 🙂 – the Florence Morning News covered the event here. This year’s cleanup will be held on October 27th, 2012; the weekend before the SC Pecan Festival. As one of the hosts for the festival the City of Florence puts a lot of work into prepping our city for this event, an event that brings people from all over the southeast to enjoy our area. The KFB board decided to plan this years cleanup just before the festival so that we can help clean things up and prep our city for visitors. If you are interested in helping volunteer for this event or if you or family want to get involved with the Keep Florence Beautiful organization please email us at kfbboard@keepflorencebeautiful.org. We will also place more info here on our website and in our facebook group as plans progress.
Thanks for reading and have a great week!
Tara Durden
Keep Florence Beautiful Board Member
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