Post a Comment On: Rotary Botanical Gardens - Hort Blog

[Image] Last night was Patty Bailey's (from Patty's Plants in Milton) presentation on "Herb Gardening". As you can see by the picture above, we had a full house. I counted 94 attendees which was a great turnout although not surprising for such a popular topic. [Image] Patty did a great job as expected and there were lots of questions and comments from the group which included some members from the Janesville Area Herb Society. See Patty to the right. This was the third installment of our monthly lecture series and we've been very pleased with the attendance and positive response from the comm[Image]unity. The next couple of topics should be equally well-received (check out our website for details). Historically we've not had a lot of winter/early spring educational offerings so it's nice to build up some enthusiasm for these topics and gardening in general. I'd be lying if I didn't say that I certainly take advantage of the "captive audience" and promote memberships, events, the gardens and all sorts of good things coming up. Of course, our very own Janice Peterson will be presenting [Image]on "Heirlooms, Hybrids and History" next Thursday from 7 pm until 8 pm. To the left is Marianne (note the "bunny ears" compliments of her husband) modeling beside a container. This is the container (faux terra cotta, plastic) that we'll offer for our May 18th "Container Planting Workshop" facilitated by Becky Nickel. Participants can also bring their own container of equivalent size (and save $10 off the class fee). The nice perk of this workshop is the ability to pick from our holding yard which will have a vast array of cool plants for the container. Check out the website for details on this workshop and the others (scarf dyeing, rose care and still spots left for the April 9th mosaic birdhouse class!). There was a lot of activity at the gardens today although I was "chair-ridden" most of the time. To the right is Marianne working on our first 100 of 300 caladiums that came in yesterday. We get them early, pot them up and keep them warm. By the time we plant them in early June, they have some nice growth. A greenhouse would help but they don't need much light and are happy enough in our Horticulture Center at this point. We'll do the remainder (see below) on Monday as it looks to be a damp day. [Image] We had a nice healthy turnout of Grumpies today with lots accomplished. Vern, Dave, Bob and Jim continued work on new cedar benches and will be shifting to rebuilding portions of our Japanese garden fence so they are p[Image]oised and ready to replace the earlier removed fence once the waterfall reconstruction is complete. Bob C. and Bob T. continued spreading shredded bark around the main parking lot and Gary and Ron W. hauled out and secured all but a few of our garden benches. This is a monumenta[Image]l task but these guys came up with a good tracking system and we'll be updating our records regarding bench locations shortly. It's a sad commentary that we have to anchor and secure our benches but that is a reality as they sometimes "walk away." Dick H. hauled debris to the dump and helped with some other projects. Pat continued work on his signs and helped Maury with some projects. Janice was here to work with her volunteer group who also brought in their awesome butterfly too (see bottom photo). Bill O. was here to sweep up various gardens and we also saw Chuck, Ge[Image]orge (delivered worm castings), Kelli, Tom and many others. More butterflies have been fluttering in to the gardens as seen in this posting. We have almost half of the 34 projects and hope to have the remainder by early next week at the latest. The creativity speaks for itself and I think we'll get a very positive response from our visitors regarding these unique additions to the gardens. We had two landscape firms here today doing some work out in[Image] the gardens. DWG continues to prepare the area for our future bluestone patio (North Point garden) and we hope to see significant progress over the coming week or so. Nature's Touch was here to clean our koi pond which is a very involved process. In past years, Larry (with some help) would take care of this but it is a huge project that involves removing fish, collecting gunk, pressure washing, etc. We're happy to have someone else doing it to free up our time out in the gardens and Nature's Touch will shortly move to the big Japanese garden project. I'm off most of tomorrow to catch a "breather" before a quickened pace begins anew next week with the start of the seasonal grounds staff (sans Marianne who will be off to SC and Pat who doesn't start officially until May) and lots of looming projects. [Image]