But first, here’s one pic from last Wednesday’s Community Dinner. Mike, the man on the left, is a new Green Acres Village friend who has so far gifted us with 60 bags of leaves, and says there’s more to come. We are using leaves as final winter cover for our gardens.

Note puppy Shadow eyeing little Oliver, his best bet for food scraps.

Oliver’s parents, Logan (bottom left) and Carissa (bottom right) both participated in our first two flash mob jobs, with one of them being to sheet mulch their front yard just before Thanksgiving.

Rebecca sent out the call for this week’s flash mob job. Who could come, and when? Four of us responded, but then one, Dan, had to drop out the night before due to a sudden need to travel south to his hometown of Booneville. So that’s just three. Hmmm. Could we do it? Rebecca sounded a bit discouraged. I went into my cosmic cheerleader mode. “Well, let’s just the three of us do what we can. Not every occasion has to be a quickly moving flash mob job. The essence of resiliency is adaptability!”

So we went ahead. And, guess what? Aaron, who had been here overnight, decided to pitch in. Ah! Four! No problem. We should be done in an hour.

And yes, that’s almost exactly what it took, once again, one hour from start to finish, with the first 15 minutes spent peeling tape off the cardboard . . . Grrrr. . . I argued against taking the time to do that, but Rebecca prevailed. Glad she did. Now we won’t be picking up tape every time we work in this garden.

And after, what a mess! Which we then dutifully picked up.

The owners of this house both work, so they weren’t with us Friday morning, but they had shown us where they wanted the new garden, to be just where the garden was years ago. They bought the place recently, and asked if we wanted to permaculture their back yard. YES!

Their house sits directly across the street from our DeKist house, which held Wednesday night’s dinner; we also have another house right next to it, facing Overhill. The roof solar supplies both our houses. Hard to see here, but notice the new greenhouse out of the old garage behind the big tree which, leafless in winter, will not block the sun’s warmth on seedlings inside which we will start in January.

Here we go. The cardboard is down. Now for the horse manure, which Rebecca gets free from a horse farm a few miles outside town. Aaron begins the process.

Followed by Leah (left) and Rebecca.

They begin to dump the manure, and I rake it to a depth of about three inches.

Meanwhile, Leah has placed some of Mike’s leaf bags strategically around the perimeter.

Miraculously, we had just the right amount of cardboard and leaves, and, almost enough manure (only need about two square feet more). Then, the leaves. YES!

Mission accomplished!

Where’s Aaron? I ask, wanting him in the leaves photo too. Leah: “Oh, he had to go sell his baby goats.”

Yep, four people working hard and having fun, laughing, eating bits of dark chocolate for energy. One hour later, DONE!