Mulch Madness – Community Building at it’s Finest


Please add comments for anyone YHC missed.

Fresh off a Titan beatdown at Smithville Park, the PAX marched a few hundred yards west to the Cornelius Community Garden where they would be faced with their next mission.  Lisa Mayhew-Jones, a community leader in Smithville, provided the game-plan and instructed the volunteer crews on how to proceed. The community garden consists of roughly 70+ individual raised bed “plots”  with pathways in between, forming a “grid-like” pattern.  A sizable mound of mulch and top soil was dumped just outside the garden a few days prior in preparation for Saturday’s service project.  Volunteers with rakes were strategically placed throughout the garden while the volunteers shuttled wheelbarrow loads of mulch into the garden.  Airstream and Blackbeard were our dedicated “rakers” and “spreaders” while the other PAX shoveled the mulch into awaiting wheelbarrows.  As the morning went on, the PAX became more efficient in their loading skills as they fought the extremely “chunky” mulch with shovels and pitchforks. In the spirit of March Madness, this freakin’ mulch was as annoying as any mulch YHC has ever had the displeasure to work with and had Bobby Knight volunteered at this event, a chair would have surely been thrown. The mulch was more like kindling that boy scouts use for a camp fire!! It surely wasn’t freshly shredded cypress mulch found at your local hardware store but more of a rugged style mulch spread by lumberjacks in the Northwest.  At one point, a beaver was spotted approaching the mulch pile, took one look at the pile and scampered across Catawba, wanting nothing to do with the morning activities.

There were other local volunteers at the work site who joined in as well, both men and women, young and old, all contributing towards a single mission to serve our community.  Thanks to Goat who provided a scriptural depiction of the morning’s activities from Psalm 133:1 stating “Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity”.  

To see 14 men come together for a mission to simply serve the community was a beautiful sight to behold.  Please know that whether you were there for an hour or two,  or stayed for the full 3 hours it took to complete the mission, your impact was huge and made what could have been a full day’s activities into only a few hours.  This allowed every PAX who volunteered to be home with their families well before lunch time.

Also note the Smithville area has a deep history dating back to the late 1800’s.  Take a look at this video to learn more about the area we just served…it’s definitely worth a look (link below)

Smithville History

MULCH MADNESS MISSION ACCOMPLISHED – THANK YOU MEN! SO PROUD OF THE WORK WHICH WAS DONE FOR OUR COMMUNITY!

Humbly in Christ,

Possum