Bradley Cepeck joined Boy Scout Troop 270 in second grade. Now a senior at Pembroke Academy, the 17-year-old used his Eagle Scout project to give young and old community members a way to grow their green thumbs.

Through conversations with the Pembroke Library, Cepeck decided to create three large raised garden beds out of old metal air conditioning boxes.

“The library is an organization that I love,” he said. “I’ve been coming to this library ever since I was a little kid. So it seemed like a great organization to give back to because this type of thing is all about giving back to the community. And one of the ideas that was proposed was to create garden bed planters so that they could start a gardening club for the kids during the summer.”

Library director Ryan O’Hora hopes the raised beds will help launch a gardening program involving middle school students and senior residents.

“Middle schoolers are always looking for some fun way to learn and really show their skills because they’re so capable and so knowledgable,” O’Hora said. “We don’t have a garden club in Pembroke, so I was trying to think of ways that older citizens who are maybe retired would want to share their knowledge of gardening that they’ve learned with younger kids.”

The library aims to spread a love of reading and encourage curiosity.

“A lot of people go into gardening and they say ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ Then they say, ‘How do I learn it?’ We’ve got so many great gardening books here, whether it's specific to New Hampshire or specific to New England, and we also have a lot of children’s books about gardening, so hopefully we’d be inspiring kids to check out a few books and start reading more and sparking that curiosity,” O’Hora said.

He expressed gratitude for Cepeck’s dedication to building the raised beds.

“We started making the boxes over the summer,” Cepeck said. “We had these metal air conditioner boxes at a construction site that were going to get thrown away, and we decided to recycle them, repaint them, and add a wooden trim on top. Just make them look real nice.”

His father works in the construction business, so Cepeck had someone to guide him throughout the process.

“It was great to see him trying to use tools and maybe struggling for a couple parts then figuring it out. To see him do it for the first time was fun,” Bradley’s dad, Brian Cepeck, said.

The Eagle Scout project centers around leadership. Cepeck spent an evening last week installing the raised beds in front of the library. He directed a group of other scouts as they took measurements to make sure the beds lined up, dug out the grass, and then filled in the dirt.

“He’s done a really good job doing exactly what he needed to do,” Cepeck’s Eagle mentor and former scoutmaster Steve Palleschi said. “The projects are meant to teach kids to be project managers. They’re not meant to do the work, they’re meant to work with other people to do it.”

O’Hora enjoys seeing people working together at the library.

“I think the library is a great community resource to uplift other people, and we really enjoy that kind of collaboration, where someone can say, ‘You know what, I really want to do this project,’ ” he said.

Beyond the gardening initiative, which he hopes to launch next summer, O’Hora seeks to get people outside more.

“The community would really benefit from an additional outdoor space,” he said of the lawn in front of the building where Cepeck installed the raised beds. “This is a really great greenery spot that maybe eventually would be a nice space to be fenced in. If there was a perimeter for more greenery, people could just sit out and relax and maybe read or enjoy other people’s company. We do a lot of children’s programs, too, so it would be really nice to just have an outdoor space.”

He also hopes to soon add a bench to the outdoor area. Since last November, Pembroke residents have been bringing bags of recyclable plastics to the library as part of a collection project with the goal of reaching 1,000 lbs. The town’s participation in the NexTrex Recycling Challenge will hopefully earn them a bench made from recycled materials once they reach their target.

“I really want an outdoor space that people can use,” O’Hora reiterated.

Rachel Wachman can be reached at rwachman@cmonitor.com.