These days home and garden shows are very popular – especially when a messy, disorganized and dirty house is magically transformed into a clean and fabulous show home. Well, now the volunteers of the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard in Toronto will know what that feels like first hand. That’s because two of our volunteers are contractors who paint and renovate local homes and they volunteered to help us organize our shed by drilling hooks and tool holders into the heavy concrete walls.

And so this post is dedicated to Zsuzsa and Gabor. Zsuzsa has been volunteering in the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard since 2010 (and Gabor and their German Shepherd Horton are always rooting for her on the sidelines). In a couple of hours with the help of myself (Susan) and Lynn, the four of us pulled all the messy, mucky tools and tangled hoses out of our shed and started from scratch.

Well, it didn’t take long but it makes a huge difference! No longer is our shed a hazardous tangle of hose, tools and buckets! Now everything is neatly tidied away, waiting for the team to come on stewardship days to take care of our beautiful fruit trees and pollinator garden.

Come and join us! To sign up for our stewardship list send an email to Lynn at growingforgreen (at) gmail.com. See you soon!

This blog was written by Susan Poizner, the author of the award-winning fruit tree care book “Growing Urban Orchards“. Susan teaches North Americans how to grow fruit trees organically at www.orchardpeople.com.