Nature's Amazing Work is All Around Us!

Escalante Community Garden has so many more lessons in store for us than just planting, weeding, watering for that delicious harvest. It's nature at its finest and all we have to do is look a little closer to find other amazing lessons.

Saturday was Volunteer  Workday in the Garden; we were building a wall around the wildflower area when Donnie, one of our IHELP crew found two "lizard" eggs and gave them to Gretchen Reinhardt, our premier volunteer and teacher .  Gretchen was so excited over them as she planned  to bring them to school on Monday to show her class. She put them somewhere safe and went back to work. A short time later Gretchen went to check on the eggs to make sure they were still okay when suddenly one of them basically exploded and a gecko was born. The gecko immediately slid down a hole in the table it was on and onto the earth below, looking for a safe haven.  Georgie joined Gretchen at this point to find the gecko and take pictures of it and the remaining egg. The result is shown below; that gecko came out of an egg exactly that same size only minutes before this photo was taken--truly, truly amazing.

Now it was time to watch the second egg as everyone wanted to see it hatch. It seemed the gecko was having somewhat of a difficult time so I helped out a bit with a small crack and then to remove the sac it was in and voila, another gecko.  This time I got it on video--incredible.

So many lessons learned, but one of the main ones is, if you don't come to help out in the Garden you miss so many great things plus make friends with some pretty special people, enjoy a potluck and get your picture taken.

Welcome Geckos to Escalante Community Garden,

Dave Tally
Escalante Community Garden Coordinator
August, 2012