Project One: 

       Two hundred pounds of pinebark flying down the highway, along with it 12 specialized Arcadia variety blueberry bushes, 50 pounds of fertilizer, and over $625 worth of supplies. My chauffeur/laborer/Dad was driving hurriedly to make it back to Fort Myers before nightfall to unload the supplies that we had spent all day driving, shoveling into a trailer, and in general sweating to get. All of this effort in preparation for more work. I was in charge of fundraising, planning, and building a self-irrigating blueberry patch for my old elementary school as part of my Eagle Scout project. This whole project was the last step in a long chain of events leading to the ultimate goal of achieving the rank of Eagle Scout.

            Several weeks before this, I went through a lengthy process filled with endless stacks of paperwork to the project approved, and an even longer process to raise funds for it. I was at first timid about going out to businesses in full uniform and doing a slightly glorified version of begging, but soon exhaustion and boredom led to courage. I called a dozen businesses, drafted out letters for just as many and drove all over town looking for anyone with connections to irrigation and planting supplies. Thankfully this was not entirely in vain as I managed to secure plenty of drip tubes and other such equipment from various sources, whom I later thanked with nice neat plaques and a kindly worded letter. The tax deductions for donations probably didn’t hurt either. The easiest part by far was finding a place to get the plants from.

        In Fort Myers even the coldest of days are still sweltering, so blueberry bushes aren’t a typical sight. Luckily for me and 500 students however I happened to have a connection with someone working with a university to create plants capable of growing in the warm Southwest Florida climate. My Uncle Jarod had been farming this new variety of plant called the Arcadia blueberry for several years, and just a few hours north of me. When I told him about my project he offered to help out by donating as many plants as I needed. The thing that makes these plants so special is that they are created to need less than 150 chill hours. Chill hours are the amount of cold time a plant needs to start the process of making fruit, and in South Florida, those hours are few and far between. By reducing the number of hours and bumping up the chill temperature required a plant can produce in more places than ever before.

       The actual project itself was split up into two days. On the first day I took charge of my troop and set up several teams with differing tasks. One was to begin shoveling out pinebark, another was to weed out the area where the plants would be put, and the last team went around with wheelbarrows picking up weeds and throwing them away. Once the pinebark was unloaded and the area weeded, I had the older scouts begin to till the pinebark into the soil to give the plants the right pH balance. I oversaw the entire operation making sure no one got hurt and that everyone followed instruction. As the Eagle candidate I’m not supposed to do the work, but instead I lead by example. I clearly demonstrate what’s a weed and what’s harmless, how high to mound up the dirt and pinebark mix to allow for rain to drain off, and how to operate the tiller safely. On the first day there were almost no incidents, I say almost none because one of the youngest scouts was about to eat a whole habanero but was fortunately stopped by an older scout. The story could have ended there, but the older scout and his father had a conversation that went a little something like this, “What’s that pepper he was going to eat?” “A habanero.” “I bet you won’t eat that.” “I bet I will.” We all gave him credit for eating it, but it seemed less impressive when he spent the next several hours gagging and the week regretting it.

        The second day was less eventful, but just as successful. I showed the troop how to take the blueberries out of the transport pots and carefully introduce them into their new home.  While the scouts planted, I gathered up the adults to make repairs to the rest of the school’s garden. They worked the power tools to build new planting boxes to replace the old rotten ones. With the garden set up and blueberries planted I showed the rest of the scouts how to set up the irrigation system so it would run automatically, delivering half a gallon of water to each plant twice a day.

As the final part of my project I presented at the school’s open house to show the science club how to harvest and care for the plants. Since they didn’t need to water the plants or apply pesticides it was pretty straight forward. I really enjoyed being able to talk about the work we did and how the project was put together. When parents and students came out to talk I the look of joy and surprise on their faces was priceless. Most of them had never seen a blueberry plant in person, and now they’d be able to harvest them every spring.