Trees for You and Me!

Hop on your bike and cruise the bike trail that runs along I-205, and just south of Hogan Road you'll see a pretty little ridge with oh, I don't know, about 156 new trees planted on it. Wait five to ten years and prepare to be amazed! The vision of many, many people led to a Friends of Trees project to create the I-205 forest right along that very same spot. Improving on the damage done to the surrounding neighborhoods when the highway went in, everyone is now pitching in and planting trees!

Friends of Trees really is something special - planting in neighborhoods and in green spaces and teaching the ins and outs of raising happy, healthy trees. And lots of 'em. We did a bit to help the effort on Saturday, February 20 in the sparkling sunshine. Two take-away tips: 1. When planting trees be sure to loosen up the roots that have wrapped around themselves in the pot (this wrapping is known in the business as "the spiral of death") and 2. Be sure to not plant the tree too low in the ground - the poor thing might drown and rot, and we can't have that. Happy planting!

The magic of elbow grease

Wednesday, February 10, Return Servers returned to the Children's Book Bank. It feels like home by now! If any of you readers are in need of a calm and happy space to refuel your spirit, this is it. Come to clean and repair donated books and look out over the stacks of books ready to go to their new homes with deserving kids! With just a little scrubbing and a bit of tape, it's amazing how much we can make a old book seem new. It just doesn't get much better than this.

Building Houses, Filling Holes

Saturday, January 18 was our first Habitat for Humanity build day. Five of us met at Jubilee Commons to you know... build a house! Or, houses. Habitat is working on a new phase of homes at the Gresham site and we got right down to it. The task assigned to us that looked most like what you might expect was attaching boards to the tops of the foundation walls. The glamorous side job was filling a hole. A very large hole, with very wet and heavy dirt. Both tasks were tackled with equal enthusiasm, and I'm sure both were equally appreciated. I may venture to guess that one task was slightly more strenuous than the other, but it probably wouldn't be right to say so. We took a good break walking down the street for Don Pedro's for lunch, and Porter the dog was on site to keep spirits high. Our efforts were also recorded in this Oregonian story. This was the Martin Luther King Jr. service weekend and we thank all the volunteers who chose to observe the holiday with their time, hands and hearts!

OATS!

Having visited the Oregon Food Bank four times now, we've learned that we can never know what to expect. Sometimes we're fishing recalled peanut butter out of donated items, sometimes we're sorting through soup, beans and cake mixes, sometimes there's Asian pears as far as the eye can see, and sometimes... there's oats. January 5th we arrived to find several 1,600 pound bags of donated oats needing our attention. As you can imagine, the oats needed to go into smaller family-sized bags. There were also a few boxes of turnips that needed similar treatment, but that's another story. We had the best time with the oats! Two heaping scoops of oats equaled two pounds, and there were scales on our table so we could verify that we were providing Oregon Food Bank quality with every bag. Hair nets, aprons, gloves and sleeve guards were required. Our assembly line had things down to a science. We finished our first 1,600 lb bag and made an impressive dent in a second before our visit ended. You can see by the photo, but all together the volunteers with both oats and turnips processed 10,076 pounds of food, which equates to 7,751 meals and (my favorite statistic) 121 meals per volunteer. It's amazing and wonderful that something as fun and satisfying as scooping oats with friends can actually be meaningful. We send those oats and turnips to those who need them most - with our best wishes!

Back at Snow Cap

December 19, 11 from Return Serve prepared food bags for Snow Cap Charities. It was a big day of packing a well-rounded assortment of food into the bags that get distributed to families in East Multnomah County. There were eggs, there was milk, fruits, vegetables, pasta and cereal. We also had team working on filling soup bags. The food goes in the bags and the bags go in the boxes and the boxes are loaded onto pallets. In just two short hours we accomplished a lot, but then the Snow Cap folks surprised us with lunch! It was so nice to sit and chat with those who were there, but we certainly didn't expect it. Thanks so much to them for letting us come back to help, and for cheering our holiday season even more by the work they do every day.

Pickin' Persimmons!

As the winter chill was settling in, the persimmon harvest was ready! November 21, Return Serve helped the Portland Fruit Tree Project (PFTP) on one of their many harvest parties. PFTP works with volunteers and owners of fruit trees to make sure our urban fruit harvest doesn't go to waste. Trees get registered, and volunteers come, pick, sort and go! I absolutely saw the resemblance between our group and a giant locust swarm, but the trees were still healthy when we left, and the owners seemed more than happy to have us. Half of what is picked at the harvests goes to the Oregon Food Bank and half goes home with the volunteers. Many of the people we were working with are avid food preservationists and they were very, very excited about their plans to turn our persimmons into muffins, cookies, bread and chutney. This was among the last harvest parties of the year, but we'll catch up with PFTP earlier in the growing season from now on!

Beating all previous records...

Our second time to Multnomah Public Library to help them add Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to each and every book. Today we were in the children's section! It was helping the library and hanging out with kids' books all in one. (= Heaven) We were in pairs, working with our own "crash carts" equipped with all the supplies and technology required. The task involved putting an RFID sticker in the front cover of a book, scanning the existing bar code to match that data to the new tag. Hand the completed book to your partner, he or she swipes the spine tag with a yellow Sharpee marker, and you're on to the next one. In 2.5 hours, we converted 1,602 books. Not too shabby for a rainy Sunday morning.