March information from GROW

Hello Fellow Gardeners -

Well yesterday was the First Day of Spring and, the snowfall notwithstanding, spring is marching this way.

1. With that in mind, I thought the following might interest you.

Enter to win one of three prize packages chock full of gardening goodies — each package has a retail value of $1,000 and includes an assortment of tools from Ames True Temper, product from The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, and a gift certificate to NGA's Garden Shop. Check off what type of gardening you do: home, community, or school, and fill in the rest of the fields. You may enter only one category. Enter by April 30.

I need to see what the requirements are for the community gardening portion - it may be a good fit for our Garden Club. But in the meantime, all of us home gardeners could participate and hopefully one of us will be a lucky winner.

2. Eric and I had the pleasure of attending the Sodus Garden Club's lecture on "All about Bees". Mary Moss-Sprague, a master gardener and an avid bee-keeper, gave an excellent lecture on honeybees, how we can entice them to our gardens and just a little bit about colony collapse. Afterwards we enjoyed refreshments (I think Eric and I ate our weight in delicious cookies) and had a chance to meet the gardeners in Sodus.

Eric is interested in starting up beekeeping again (he was involved when he was younger). If anyone else is interested, please talk to him at eric.herriman[at]xerox.com.

3. Eric and I attended the Learning Fair last Saturday. We showed off the Fiskar video, as some of our members were able to see. Penny brought her table-top photo gallery that drew people in and we got a good response from the parents who attended. All of our brochures were taken and three people signed up to receive further information about the Garden Club.

4. Eric spoke to Mike Orr about the greenspace. Mike plans to move forward with the greenspace and there is some money alloted for it. No meeting has been set up yet. If you are interested in being involved in the discussion, please talk to Eric at the above email/phone number.

5. Last (but definitely not least), a reminder about our March lecture on Tuesday, March 25th on Landscape Design. I had the pleasure to meet one of the speakers at the Learning Fair and this is going to be an amazing event. I will be sending a message to all our past attendees and I'm hopeful that we will have as good of a response as we did to the February event.

Happy Gardening!
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Fiskars Grant Update

Dear Fellow Gardeners -
Well the news is in and, unfortunately, we were not one of the finalists for the Fiskars Grant. Here is a link with the final winners. http://www.fiskars.com/content/garden_en_us/Garden/community/project+orange+thumb. They had over 500 grant applications with over half of them being school organizations.

I want to thank everyone who took the time and energy to help us put this grant application together. It was a great experience to work with our community leaders and we put together a fabulous grant application. It was impressive that we were able to turn the application around in such a short period of time (less than a month from start to finish!), including the video of what we planned to do with the Green Space. I know, as we go forward, that future grant applications will get easier and we will be more successful.

The good news is the Mike Orr has always planned to move forward with the greenspace, regardless of whether we won the grant. The grant application will be a great jumping point for us to start working with Mike in building the greenspace for downtown Williamson.

Happy Gardening!
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What's going on with the Williamson Garden Club!

Hi Fellow Gardeners-

1. The grant application is in the mail. A BIG thank-you to Eric for putting all the parts of the grant together and into the mail. Now we just wait to hear the (good) news :)

2. The high school students, Noah and Evan, did an excellent job on the video. They worked really hard and turned it around in just a few days. Eric and I were really impressed with their professionalism, hard work and dedication to this project. We are planning on writing a letter to their advisor regarding the excellent work that they did for us.

I would also like to recommend that we extend honorary Garden Club membership to the two students, as our way of saying "Thank You" for all their hard work. Please let me know what you think about that idea.

Here is a picture of Eric with one of the students, Noah. http://www.williamsonchamberofcommerce.org/WilliKids.html

3. Kris Jorolemon reminded me that she is looking for photographs, news clippings, etc. for the scrapbook that she is creating of the Garden Club. If you have any to share, please let her know.

4. Finally, is there interest in viewing the DVD that we submitted to Fiskars? I know that we have at least a couple of snowbirds and could wait until our March or April meeting to having a viewing, if there is interest. The video is about 10 minutes long.
Happy Gardening!
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