Local volunteers complete year-long beautification project at animal shelter
Members of the Port St. Joe Garden Club and volunteers from the community met early on Monday morning at the St. Joseph Bay Humane Society – armed with shovels and gardening gloves and ready to tackle the last step of beautifying the shelter’s lawns.
For Melissa Juberg, the Garden Club’s secretary, and Sarah Darden, the club’s president, the project has been more than a year in the making.
“This has been a labor of love this last year,” Juberg said.
“I was able to get not only the garden club members, but the community involved,” Juberg said. “Many hands make the work go faster and that is what happened (Monday) morning. They all did such a wonderful job.”
On Monday, the 13 volunteers who responded to the Garden Club’s call to action were tasked with landscaping the Humane Society’s new “catio” – an entirely fenced-in outdoor play area connected to a window in the shelter’s cat room.
The addition will allow the cats to spend some time outdoors when the weather is permitting, without the need for constant supervision from shelter staff.
Juberg said the catio landscaping was the third and final phase of the Humane Society landscaping project, with previous phases including landscaping Faith’s Thrift Hut, the thrift store serving the shelter, the meet and greet area and sprucing up the shelter’s other garden beds.
“Almost a year ago, the PSJ Garden Club and I started a project that would be in 3 phases to create beautiful flower beds and clean up the yard areas at the PSJ Animal Shelter. Many wonderful volunteers showed up to help out.”
As the gardeners wrapped up their work at the shelter, Juberg took to Facebook to share photos and thank the crew for their hard work.
“Thanks so much to the 13 volunteers who came ready to work at the animal shelter this morning!” she wrote. “I appreciate you all. We had garden club and community members present,”
“The catio area looks amazing and we spruced up the rest of the grounds too. This completes three phases of projects over the last year.”
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.