Earth Day at the Library

Volunteer to prepare the West Oak Lane Library garden for the 2026 growing season.

Urban gardens provide a wide range of benefits for the people who tend them and the communities they nourish. These productive green spaces support climate resiliency, a healthier environment, and health & wellness. Urban gardens like the one at the West Oak Lane Library are an integral part of a healthy neighborhood providing an avenue for food sovereignty.

Early Spring is an ideal time to prepare the garden for a season of successful growing. Volunteers will help refresh the garden at the West Oak Lane Library by building new garden beds, removing weeds, replenish soil nutrients, loosen the soil and more!

Improving soil health by increasing its organic matter (by introducing compost or adopting no-till methods) is critical. The United States is losing soil 10xs faster than it is replenished. Philadelphia has lost much of the organic matter, minerals, sand and clay that make up natural soil due to hundreds of years of urban development. Beneath our feet is lots of "rubble, debris and the history of the city".

Through this volunteer project, we will all act as environmental and community stewards, tending to the soil that nourishes the natural world and our place in it.

Refreshments provided.

In being good stewards of our planet, we will not be providing individual plastic water bottles, although water will be available.

If you don't have water bottles, we will have Black Girls With Green Thumbs water bottles available for sale.

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