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A Very Efficient Saturday for the Youth Tree Team
Over the summer, the Youth Tree Team worked through the week to water hundreds of trees around the city.
To make sure those trees continue to get the water they need, we now work on Saturdays. Each Saturday, we split up into three crews. My crew has worked to water two parks, Washington and Oscar Charleston, between the two there are 500 trees.
To get the work done, we meet at 7a.m. That gets me, and I would venture to guess the others on the YTT, up a bit earlier than normal on a weekend, but it also gets me moving on what would otherwise be a very unproductive Saturday.
In the early morning it is still dark on our ride to the park. At this point the crew is usually fairly quiet, but once we get out the hose, fill the tank and make our trek to the first set of trees the energy level takes a turn. The pace starts to pick up and everyone on the crew is on board with getting the work done as efficiently as possible. I think I have said it a thousand times, but I continue to be amazed every week at how quickly we manage to knock out the work.
There are probably several reasons for this:
- The youth are always coming up with new ways to make the process even more efficient. We are all grateful for this because it usually means a shorter distance to the trees and with 40 pound buckets of water, every bit helps.
- It also may help that the weather has been beautiful. I think we can all appreciate the recent, cooler temperatures. Over the summer it got extremely hot in the middle of the day and we all know what's coming in the next month or so.
- We also have a few more hours to work, eight instead of the five we had each day in the summer.
- All of this, along with Carly's riddle for the day to keep us occupied as we lug our buckets from tree to tree and we always manage to finish Oscar Charleston and start on Washington before lunch.
That's about 250 trees watered and innumerable bits of litter picked up.
The rest of the day flies by with pizza for lunch and a few hours to finish watering the remaining trees in Washington. With a little help from the other crews, we get to all the trees and before we know it, it is time to head back to KIB. And believe it or not, since the summer we have even come up with a more efficient way to do that.
~Molly, Youth Tree Team Leader
