Happy Spring! It’s hard to believe that it’s right around the corner. This winter has been cold and miserable and I’ll be glad when it can all be put behind us. Of course it’s too early to be doing much outside, but we can certainly get ourselves prepared for the first nice day where we can pounce on our flowerbeds and get to work. It’s a great time to start seeds indoors, though, and many catalogues are now available.

Our February meeting was well attended and our guest speaker, Dan Cooper, was very informative. He spoke to our group about low maintenance gardening and I know I certainly learned a lot about native plants and water wise gardening that I can hopefully put to good use this year. The Early Bird winner was Jenny Elgersma and she won 2 tickets for our upcoming bus trip to Whistling Gardens & Bonnie Heath Lavender Farm in July.

Our guest speaker for our March general meeting is Jackie Lynch who’ll be talking about “glorious grasses for all seasons and reasons”. Grasses can be a real challenge especially if you have a small garden like I do.

Due to reasons that will be explained in full at this upcoming meeting, we are not going to be having a booth this year at the Home & Garden show, nor will we be having a float in the Mudcat Parade. So our first big project for 2014 is going to be our plant sale on May 10th at the Optimist Hall parking lot. We’ll need donations of plants to sell, and we’ll need volunteers to help out the evening before and the day of the sale. The plant sale is very important as it is our biggest fund raiser of the year. Hopefully we can set another sales record this year!

We still need volunteers to help Maura in the kitchen at the general meetings. This coming meeting is covered but we still need help with April. Please let Maura know if you’re able to bring some snacks and help out with kitchen duties.

Our partnership with the Dunnville Secondary School continues this year. We have a couple of trusty students who volunteer at each meeting to help with setup and cleanup. They certainly make things easier for us old folks. We are also going to be working with the Rotary Club for the first time to guide them with plant purchases to improve the landscaping around Muddy the Mudcat.

Don’t forget to take a moment to check out our website. Minutes and newsletters are archived there, and our agenda for the year is there along with photos of trillium award winners, garden walks, and the Mudcat Parade.   A full list of our sponsors is there as well. Without the support of our sponsors we wouldn’t be the strong, successful horticultural society that we are today. Also, if you’re interested, gardenontario.org is the website of the Ontario Horticultural Society. Here you can see what’s going on with the rest of the horticultural societies and garden clubs in our district (Niagara district 9) as well as the rest of the province.

Garden Tip of the Month: March is a good time to take stock of your garden tools and equipment. Sharpen spades and trowels, oil rusty joints (the tools’, too), get seed trays ready, and watch for robins. As soon as you see one you’ll know that spring has officially arrived.