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By NATHAN HOWELL | Staff Writer 

HELENA – The Helena Beautification Board has set its annual Spring Planting Day for April 24, where board members and community volunteers will come out to fill flower baskets to make the beautiful.

According to Board Chair Kim Edwards, they put on the planting day every year as a way not only to fulfill their mission of city beautification, but as a way to teach volunteers basic planting skills that they can carry with them into their own gardens.

“This is an amazing community event,” Edwards said. “It is all about enjoying a day of giving back and planting. We talk about the right and wrong ways to do planting. There is a lot of education involved in the process.”

On April 24, volunteers will meet at the Caboose Welcome Center where they will be taught exactly how to fill the baskets and plant all of the new plants for the season.

“You’d be amazed at the amount of people who do not know, or never learned how to plant,” Edwards said. “They come out to these events to learn those things in a community setting.”

Edwards said that they would be planting things like dragon wing begonias, calibrachoa, dichondra and sweet potato vines.

Staging for the planting day begins the day before on Friday, so that when volunteers arrive on Saturday everything is ready to go. Edwards said that some teams would be focusing on filling the soil, and others would go behind them with the plants. The overall process is expected to take a few hours.

Aside from the visual benefit, the planting day is also a crucial part of maintaining the economic development of the city, according to Edwards.

“The effort that we put forth on these planting days directly impacts economic development,” she said. “What we do has visitors coming to see the city, attracts new residents and overall adds to smart economic growth in a beautiful way. We have people asking us all the time what kind of plants they are, because they find them so beautiful.”

Volunteers for the planting day will meet at the Caboose at 8 a.m., where they will then be instructed on what to do. More information can be found on the Helena Beautiful Facebook page.