Take Part In ‘Spruce Up Day’ Saturday At North Main And Auburn

The daylong planting marathon is this Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day, and will be a massive beautification project for the roundabout at North Main and Auburn streets.

The main component needed this Saturday will be a big volunteer effort.

Here’s a look at the scope of the project on Spruce Up Day.

On May 11, Friends of Veterans Memorial Circle will be bringing in:
• the equivalent of 2,520 bags of dirt and 337 bags of mulch
• over 6,200 flowering plants (annuals and perennials).

With volunteers, they will be planting almost 5,000 square feet of ground.
• Center of the roundabout
• 4 wing walls (one at each of the roundabout’s quadrants)
• 4 end caps
• 2 median strips (north and south on Main Street)
• 25 sidewalk flower beds along Auburn Street between the roundabout and the Rock River.

To transport all this, Friends of Veterans Memorial Circle will have lots of heavy equipment (and operators for each vehicle):
• 7 front-end loaders – 2 on tractors; 5 on skid-steers
• 1 dump truck
• 3 trailers
• 1 side-by-side utility task vehicle.

This morning on the WROK Morning Show, Ernie Redfern, a retired business owner who is an Army veteran, and Helen Karakoudas Redfern, a former community newspaper managing editor, stopped by to tell us all about Spruce Up Day: