The Gardening club has picked up their trowels once more.

The  club partnered with The Home Depot’s volunteer foundation, Team Depot, to create a peace garden at Susquehannock.

Team Depot donated numerous house plants, seeds, dirt, seed starter trays, a watering can, a heated grow pad,  a grow light, tools, and multiple galvanized tubs with custom wooden lids to the group. The club is using the galvanized tubs as indoor plant stands in the main lobby for now until the spring when they will be used as raised bed containers outside.

Team Depot is an initiative taken by volunteers of The Home Depot that focuses on the community to improve homes and lives of veterans, assist with natural disaster aid and much more.

Ellie Richardson from the Team Depot initiative reached out to Principal James Sterner to propose the idea.

“I saw that Susquehannock was the closest, and I reached out to your principal,” Richardson said “We provide materials and volunteer work to local communities around us.”

Gardening Club president Dinah Masafu was excited for the donation of new house plants and galvanized steel stock tanks.

“We were told Home Depot [was] coming, and we would help them with planting and decorating around the school,” Masafu said. “They came and donated all these tools to us, which is awesome because all of our previous tools had been brought by our teacher advisers or us.”

With limited space due to the recent construction, the Gardening Club has had to travel  outside to the elementary school where they meet to plant in outdoor wooden beds previously crafted by the wood shop students two years ago.

“Our gardening beds are by the elementary school playground, but with construction being finished, they are getting moved to the front of the school,” Masafu said. “We get to use those big bins as garden beds eventually.”

Sterner hopes for a continued partnership in the future.

“I believe Home Depot is interested in continuing the partnership, [so] we will see where things go,” said Sterner. “We don’t have a greenhouse here at the high school, but we want to support the interest of the Gardening Club… we’ll see where the partnership goes, there are some potentially exciting future opportunities.”

The peace garden, dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr, was the idea of Team Depot.

“Home Depot tries to do a partnership with a local school for MLK day,” Richardson said.

Peace gardens are a great way to honor those who have left a mark on our world, such as King, as they bring communities closer together, and overall promote a sense of belonging and involvement.

“Home Depot shared that they were interested in making a Martin Luther King day of service project, specifically a peace garden,” Sterner said.

With big ideas planted for next year, it’s only a matter of time before more beautiful flowers will appear outside the school.