Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

By: Claire Tribble

The Athens-Limestone Beautification Board had the best time this past week planting the downtown flowerpots. The kids from Graham’s Ag classes at the Limestone County Technical School are absolutely amazing to work with! We were able to help teach and encourage these students to take pride in not only their own hard work, but their community as well. We had two different groups to work with, and they all worked hard with us. Both groups had a mixture of experience levels and schools, but these kids worked so well together.

Even though it was hard to pull such beautiful flowers, the morning class helped us to empty the summer plantings and prep the pots for the fall planting. We always hate to pull up the big, vibrant plants. The upside is that this year, the students took the plants back to their greenhouse at Tanner High School to propagate the plants they collected for us to use again next year, and to sell at their plant sale in the spring! We are very excited that they will be able to learn and experiment with starting plants from cuttings and watching them grow. Thankfully their teacher, Lauren Graham, said “YES” to taking all the plants back to work with, so they will have plenty to do in the coming weeks!

The sun decided to shine for the afternoon class! Thankfully we had plenty of muscle in the afternoon class. They helped to distribute pumpkins, pansies, and soil for each of the downtown pots. Everyone had plenty to do from holding the grass up to planting pansies. One student even operated a drone to take pictures of everyone working. The spring planting will be so much fun since these kids will be the ones to grow our plants!

With their help, I think we finished in record time. We removed plants and replanted 27 BIG pots in 3 hours! That’s a lot of hard work, but Mrs. Graham and her classes were nothing short of amazing, and we are so proud to have them help us. We can’t wait to see how their hard work in the greenhouse over the winter turns out in the spring. We are very excited that these kids can walk around the Square and know that they put in hours of hard work and dedication to help the community. We think that may be the best part of our new partnership!

By: Claire Tribble – Executive Director, Keep Athens-Limestone Beautiful