CityView Magazine

CityViewNC.com | 23 E ach season marks a new beginning for Sally Augustine. An avid gardener since childhood, Sally and her family will enjoy a fall and winter bounty of arugula, kale, spinach, onions, beets and carrots. As a registered nurse, she values and enjoys involving her daughters, Nancy and Gwyneth, in the process of a healthful seasonal harvest. A native Pennsylvanian, Augustine has embraced Fayetteville's growing zone and finicky soil. In addition to testing and fertilizing for an optimal vegetable yield, she will fill planters with pansies, decorative cabbage and mums. Beneath fall foliage, she likes to hide daffodil and tulip bulbs for a spring surprise. is month, she will tuck in Limelight hydrangeas and narcissus bulbs for winter to provide a seamless transition to warm weather. When Augustine isn't planting at home, her hands and heart are in the dirt of Friendship Community Gardens, a Fayetteville nonprofit with a mission of planting, growing and harvesting healthy food options for local residents while creating space for racial and disability reconciliation within our community. Augustine, a member of the organization's board, plans to fortify the soil for a fruitful spring with a groundcover crop of crimson clover. "e bees and pollinators love it," she said, "and it has a beautiful deep red blossom to add to fall flower arrangements." Augustine is excited to report that FCG was recently granted funding as an official Monarch butterfly waystation. Soon, volunteers and staff will plant native milkweeds near their beehives on Ellis Street to offer a sustenance haven to some of the hundreds of millions of butterflies that migrate between the U.S., Canada and mountains of central Mexico. If you'd like to know more about volunteering with Friendship Community Gardens, visit www.fcgfaync.org. Meanwhile, the feeling of fall is approaching the rest of us in Fayetteville, as well. It might be 90 degrees by noon, but the fleeting deep chill of the morning soon will prompt us to officially abandon summer in a flurry of activity. e sun-bleached gourds, soggy from a month of porch baking, are being swapped for fresh, crisp pumpkins. We will teeter dangerously so that we can lasso and suspend all manner of fake spiders and skeletons from gable and dormer. Wistfully, gardeners have plucked the last rosy tomatoes from leaf- strewn plots and will till them under, knowing that with a little luck, they will pick collards for anksgiving. Fluffy mums and pretty pansies herald in the fall season in colorful fashion. These were photographed at Pate's Farm Market off Raeford Road.

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