Community Garden Clean-Up at Twin Dolphin

Louise Kaestner
Jan 7, 2025
3 min read

Community Garden Clean Up at Twin Dolphin.

Source: The Gnawnster YouTube (2025).

Community Garden Clean Up at Twin Dolphin

I thrust my head between the blinds in my darkened studio at Twin Dolphin. There is movement. My heart surges like I've stuck my finger in an electrical socket and I'm standing knee deep in muddy water. It's 9:20am on Tuesday the 7th of January 2025. I've been waiting for this day for months and they've started early.

I race down to find that my anxiety is unfounded and they are still waiting on the other volunteers. Some are Unilodge staff and some are from People Helping People. I sit down and wait. It's not too hot, yet. However, the hint of a boiling summers day lays hidden in the folds of white concrete pavers.

People arrive: a lady in a motorised gopher with a tiny dog. If I peer, I can see its viscious fangs drooling at the scent of my fear. A lady acompanies her. A couple of Unilodge staff arive with them. A few more women show up. There are garden tools: gloves, spades, forks and buckets waiting in the shade near the raised beds.

A flurry of introductions abound, after which I forgot everybodies name with a promptness that puts a mental patient to shame, a small discussion was held on how to execute the community garden clean up at Twin Dolphin. I suggested napalm. It is always my first suggestion when dealing with clearing any amount of land. The consensus decided we would get rid of what looked dead. However, no-one was willing to part with their hair and nails.

I paired up with a girl, who was a Gimli to my Aragon and we cleared a couple of beds. Between role-playing Lord of the Rings and me switching into Princess Leia, the bounty hunter from Return of the Jedi, mode and pretending I had a wookie and a thermal detonater, we got the job done. Anything that looked dead went, including things that looked alive but needed a haircut.

There was one plant, one whose name remained undisclosed despite repeated threats from spades, that refused to be uprooted. Its threads wove into the flower bed. I wondered if we continued to dig that perhaps we would unearth a balrog. It seemed safer to let it be, seeing as we did not have a Gandalf available.

There was no official declaration of completion of the community garden clean up at Twin Dolphin. At some point, everything looked tidy. It took less than an hour and a half. The ladies, and solitary fella from Unilodge, did a magnificent job of cleaning up the garden. I am excited to plant some seedlings. Furthermore, I found out that they intend to transform all the Unilodge gardens. My intentions are to document the gardens before and after, which means I will need some sort of permission to stalk each premises.