Oakland Gardens Members Clean Up Weeping Beech Park (07/21/2025)

On July 21, 2025, AYLUS Oakland Gardens Members went to Weeping Beech Park with Maureen, Ada, and Matias, from 8:30 am to 11:30 am, to clean up the park as their 177th event. Our members used a wide variety of tools to remove as much litter as they could.

At the start of the event, our members were supposed to mulch the many trees in that park. However, the NYC Parks Department ran out of mulch. Instead of just cancelling the event, our members made the decision to clean up the park instead. Our members used grabbers to pick up the many cigarette butts, bottles, plastic wrappers, and tissues everywhere. The magnetic tips of the grabbers were used to pick up bottle caps. However, picking up the small items was very tedious, so we started using brooms and rakes. Rakes could push the litter into a pile while leaving most of the leaf litter behind. This made it much easier to grab the garbage. The brooms could push the litter into a tighter pile.

When they made a large multitude of small piles, some members used shovels to scoop up the piles and drop them in the garbage bags. Even though this was a great idea, some of the garbage could not be pushed onto the shovel. To fix this problem, we used the rakes to push those pieces of litter onto the shovel and keep them there as they poured it into the bags. In the end, our members filled up 7 bags full of trash.

When we finished cleaning up the park, Maureen prepared hot dogs for us. Our members were very grateful for the delicious hot dogs when they finished. We would like to thank Maureen, Ada, and Matias for helping us on this event and Maureen for bringing us the amazing hot dogs.

Our Volunteers: