The Garden Club took a field trip to the Fullerton Arboretum on April 29. Two excellent docents gave us an informative tour of the gardens, with the history of the various plants and trees. The tour was followed by lunch at the Phoenix Club in Anaheim. Everyone enjoyed authentic German fare and beer to go along with it.
On May 9, we had our annual a great success. The sale raised $1620 that will go towards scholarships to veterans enrolled at Saddleback College in programs in agriculture or landscape architecture.
Our sincere thanks to Kathie Jones of Dana Point nursery for her generosity for making our plant sale such a great success. Our community landscape contractor, Harvest Landscape Enterprises, also contributed many plants for our sale.
Thank you Harvest.
Thanks to Jerry and Linda Koppang and Gunjan, Carmen, Francine, Tim, Jeanne, Deni and Nadine for their hard work in organizing the plants in categories making purchase easier and to Karl for his job as cahier. The Sweenys donated a plant that is a hybrid of potato and tomato plants and is called Ketchup and French fries.
As usual, many ladies volunteered their time and energy to provide a lavish spread. Our thanks go to Carmen, Karen, Marty, Peggy, Carol, Grace, Suzanne and Deni. It is the commitment of so many members that makes the Club such an important part of the Niguel Shores community.
Let us not forget we are still in the midst of a severe drought, something to remember as you tend to your garden till the rains that are being promised, come this winter!
Dr Ross Cameron of Sheffield University used to work for Defra, experimenting on how reducing water regimes could be used by commercial shrub nurseries to produce more compact, floriferous plants.
He has observed how the whole physiology of plants changes when you cut down on water. Plants respond by closing their stomata (pores on the leaf where oxygen, other gases and water move in and out) for much longer during the day. They cannot make so much energy and so growth is reduced, but they survive.
As long as you slowly wean a plant onto a drier regime many of them will adapt to these drier conditions and still look fine. They will just not put on new growth.
The next get together of the garden Club will be a barbeque party at the Bluff, on June 19 at noon.
“Finally, I realized how really dry California is, when someone snatched bottled water from my hand and NOT my IPhone!”
—Laks Sehgal
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