And there’s so much more to discover about our activities. Come join us
in our efforts to learn all we can from one another, share plants, have fun,
and just do our small part to help keep Fox Island beautiful!
For any questions please contact: Marian Fry (253)
905-2697
Sand & Soil Garden Club Plants Daffodils
One
weekend last November in 2006, the members of the Sand & Soil Garden Club planted over 100
daffodil bulbs at the Fox Island Nature Center. Spring is nearly
here, and the bulbs have begun to come up. Stop by the Nature
Center soon, and enjoy all of the springtime color.
Thank you Sand & Soil!
Below:
March 17th, the daffodils are blooming!
Above: Sand & Soil members including
Sheila Spinn, Margaret Wickline-Peters, and Marian Fry and many others
at the Nature Center.
The Sand & Soil Garden Club
Established in 1979
Meetings 2nd Thursday of each month
September thru June
11 a.m.
Chapel on Echo Bay
400 6th Avenue
Fox Island, WA 98333
Pot luck luncheon following each meeting
Membership fee: $10.00/yr
CALENDAR OF
EVENTS 2010-2011
Sept. 9 - Propagating Worms - Speaker: Ryan Misely, Pierce County
Oct. 14 - Controlling Noxious Weeds - Speaker: Jeanne Ring, Pierce County
Nov. 11 - Field Trip - Washington Park Arboretum
Dec. 9 - Holiday Activities/Gift Exchange
Jan. 13 - Hardy Ferns
Speaker: Kate Burki, Gardens Manager, Lakewold
Gardens; Member Hardy Fern Foundation
Joint Meeting w/Fox Island Garden Club at Fox Island Yacht Club
Feb. 10 - Garden Pest Control - Speaker: TBA
Mar. 10 - Tomatoes - Speaker: Hal Goodell, tomato gardener par excellence
Apr. 14 - Field Trip - Three Stops in Puyallup
May 12 - Peonies - Speaker: Sue Goetz, Entrepreneur, The Creative Gardener
Jun 9 - The Cottage Garden - Speaker: Sally Cross, Sally Cross Landscape
Designs
$10.00 Membership fee.
Contact: Marian Fry 549-2616
Anyone with an interest in gardening is welcome.
The Dirt on Sand & Soil Projects
Sand & Soil Garden Club gives the Fox Island cemetery a new face.
In June 2010, the club members completed their revision of the front garden
of the Fox Island cemetery. The club voted in late 2008 to propose to the
cemetery board that it be allowed to take on the project. Permission was
granted, and planning started in 2009 to correct a visual traffic hazard for
persons entering and leaving the cemetery driveway, and to beautify the
site. The berm was regraded and newly planted with low bushes and perennials
to enable drivers to watch for approaching traffic. Members of the club, and
teen volunteers from our island churches are volunteering to help the
cemetery board keep the site weed free.
SAND & SOIL SEASONAL MUSINGS
If you are a gardener of any kind or extent, have you spent any time
thinking of WHY you are a gardener? Do the "roots" of your gardening reach
way back in time, perhaps to your childhood, maybe when you accompanied a
grandparent to the back yard to pick some ripened fruit or veggies, and were
impressed by some part of that experience? Or has your gardening arisen out
of a need to supplement grocery buying with some home-grown produce? Maybe
you just want to "connect with the earth" in some way, or smell one of your
own flowers that you have nurtured.
I often think about my initial gardening experience in 1997 at the ripe
old age of 67 - truly! At first, I remember, months after moving to a new
house in a new section of the country, broke, and suffering from major
depression, I just looked at an empty, brown yard with thatched grass and
hundreds of dandelions and other weeds, and thought "I can probably do
something with that." Honestly! I didn’t have a hoe, a spade, or any other
garden tool that I likely would have known how to use well, anyway. If you
think I’m making it sound too elementary, you don’t know me. I had never
even mowed a lawn since I was a teenager, and hated it then.
I started with a butcher knife. I am blessed with a poor back, so I got
down on my hands and knees, neither of which were too friendly with the
ground, and started chopping at weeds. I pulled up large areas of thatched
grass, then chopped and smoothed the soil in the areas I had devastated.
Over the weeks, I acquired a few hand tools, a couple of books, and began to
feel that I was making a difference. I believe that was what really brought
me around. I was making a quantitative difference, one that I could see at
the end of a day’s work. I began to plant sections with grass, and watered;
planted a couple of plants that were interesting to me, and watered; did
more things, and watered, watered, watered. At that point, I didn’t know you
had to do special things with terrain that was nothing but sand and rocks,
to make it hold water.
All this time, I was becoming acquainted with a Turkish neighbor, whose
main joy in life was deriding me for watering so much, and laughing at the
fact that I did most of my gardening on my hands and knees. As it turns out,
however, I’ve had the last laugh. He’s long gone, moved away, so he doesn’t
hear my inner laughter, but our specimen garden now is filled with trees,
bushes, and hundreds of flowering plants, flowers, and ferns. There was
something about the fact that I was making a difference, a beautiful
difference, that made me want to persevere.
What’s your story? More later.
Warmly,
Miriam Fury
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