First Day of Summer

The calendar may say that the first day of summer has passed already, but at Smokey House Center summer started today, June 29th. Over thirty youth circled up on the lawn to kick-off eight weeks of summer work and learning. There wasn’t an idle hand to be found as a rainbow of t-shirt colors – sky blue, kelly green, tangerine, banana yellow, white and lime – were donned for the first time. The gardens and fields were lit up for a holiday as crews got down to business. The gardens saw a lot of attention under a clear sky morning, 74 degrees and breezy according to the Field Studies crew’s observations. Tomatoes were trellised, corn and onions got a good weeding, and shuffle hoes were rocking back and forth through the pepper plants. The soft chatter of crews weeding wasn’t the only morning sound as the carpentry crew put shovel to earth and broke ground for a new wood shed. Like all good sheds it started the day on paper but it wasn’t long before tape measures were being pulled tight from stake to stake and the outline of the new foundation became clearly visible. After a relaxing lunch on picnic tables provided by the hard working landscape crew, folks seemed ready to get back down to work. Up at the pole barn firewood was changing hands as it got stacked for the winter, giving the yellow crew a good lesson in planning ahead. Almost invisible in the grass the lime colored t-shirts of the Field Studies crew camouflaged them well as they hunted for insects in their new role as entomologists. The youth couldn’t have asked for a better start to their summer journey and it showed, as they boarded onto the bus for the evening. A crew leader passed on a message to a coworker “It’s going to be a great crew, so much got done already just today.”