by Helen Speigleman, Community Resident
Originally published in the Kensington Cedar Cottage Neighbour, November 2014
If you take a walk through Copley Community Orchard (located on a sloping field just west of Nanaimo Skytrain station) you’ll see six new wooden benches like the one pictured here.
The comfortable benches all have beautiful views of the orchard and the surrounding landscape, and they’re already being used regularly by neighbours and people passing through. An energetic team of young people from Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood House (http://www.cedarcottage.org/ ) played a big role in creating these benches. They presented themselves one Saturday morning last summer and offered to help out at our work party. Not only did they water thirsty trees and weed blueberry beds, they also assembled and installed all six of our new benches!
It was hard work in the hot sun, loading and hauling one metric tonne of chipped rock for the foundations of the benches, as well as using power tools to construct the benches from pieces that had been cut in advance.
Amy Wong, Michael Wong, Justin Li, David Liang, Jasper Deng, David Cao and Shawn Thai stuck to their tasks with good humour and patience. By the time we broke for lunch, the benches were ready to use.
Working up an appetite!
After the project was done, the kids confessed they were surprised by the task they were assigned, but that they did not mind it. Recently the kids said they have come back to the Orchard to sit on the benches and to show them off to their friends. They called the bench-building “an amazing experience” and offered to help out if we want to build a garden shed.
They also suggested they might help us build some traps to keep pests away from the plants – and maybe some fences!
Everything coming together with power tools!
Shovelling gravel to prepare the base for the benches.
The final product. Benches ready for sitting.
The benches were made possible with a 2014 Greenest City Neighbourhood Small Grant and a generous donation of a gallon of eco-friendly wood stain from Greenworks Building Supply at 79 West 3rd Avenue, a store that specializes in ecologically designed products.
Wayne Fung offered up his backyard woodworking shop to help build the prototype bench and then he and George Spiegelman cut out and sanded the pieces ready to assemble. Rick Jang was on hand to guide and support the young volunteers on the day of the construction. What a great team!
Originally published in the Kensington Cedar Cottage Neighbour, November 2014