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May 19th SpeakerCANCELLED No Meeting Doors open at 7:00 pm Speaker begins at 7:30 pm For our meetings, we get over 120 attending with a large number in retirement years. So in the best interest of everyone, it was decided to cancel the meeting due to the Covid-19 virus. Hope you understand. Here is a photo from Laurie's garden showing you how to combine different bulbs giving different heights.  Here is Edward and Jane's garden in Ladner.  | Gardening StuffThe Bees Need Your Help!!
Neonicotinoid pesticides are slowly killing bees. 75% of the world's honey is now contaminated with bee-killing pesticides. Please educate yourself and make sure you are not part of the problem.
June Gardening To Do list By Angelika Hedley General - Deadhead, water, allow biological controls to grow/live in garden Plant - Container plants - Stake floppy plants - Divide iris, spring perennials Prune - Spring bloomers - cut off dead foliage, seedpods - Thin tree fruits, grapes Plant Health - Fish fertilizer on container plants - Black spot - spray with skim milk mixture - Water as needed, deeply but not too often - Mulch, top dress to suppress weeds Club members, see your News in Bloom monthly newsletter for more things to do. Click here to see the entire calendar | Feb Speaker RecapDavid Sellers Chaos in the Rock Garden by Heather Fayers
David Sellers, a former president of the Alpine Garden Club, treated our members and guests to wonderfully informative photos of Alpine plants and the varied mountain ranges where they naturally grow. The photos were part of his lecture on constructing a rock garden with reference to fractal geometry and chaos theory. In gardening terms, this involves considering what kinds of rocks naturally occur in your area. Are they: • Glacier dropped rounded boulders? You aim to create subtle combinations of patterns, forms and chaos events. In Delta, rounded sea worn boulders and pebbles would qualify as “naturally occurring.”. Mr. Sellers used the boulders from his sloping hillside as the basis of his garden and augmented them with some flatter slabs of limestone and tufa to create compositions which resemble the surrounding coastal mountain high hillsides. He traded overgrown rhodos for additional bigger rocks from his neighbours. These he placed randomly and deeply into the slope to preserve it. He back filled with really coarse sand, added smaller and oddly shaped rocks to create a random pattern and mulched with talus like fine pebbles to promotes drainage and prevent erosion and weed growth. Good drainage, full sunlight exposure and the creation of a cool deep root run are the objectives. His theory is the largest rock “forces chaos” then the adjacent slightly smaller rocks create the “pattern” that is broken. He presented photos that illustrate how you would emulate rough peaky mountains, by tilting flat slabs on their side. You create cliff ledges by leaving them level and allowing the plants to spill over the front. Space your plants in interweaving drifts, remembering that only 1/6 shows, the rest is roots. Our humid rainy coastal climate promotes rot and mould which is hard on Alpines. Alpine plants can be hard to obtain. Join a club to exchange seeds and cuttings. Unlike vegetable gardening, the object of Alpine gardening is to grow slowly. Next time you are at Van Dusen, take some time to carefully inspect the tufa troughs created and maintained by the Alpine Garden Club. In early spring they contain colourful examples of the plants suitable for this type of garden, and Van Dusen gift shop sells a few seeds from their plant collection. For more details, members, please refer to our newsletter. |
