Hi everybody1

This Saturday is shaping up to be a big day in the orchard. Not only is it Stewardship Day, but it’s also our annual plant sale, thanks to Gisele, who has grown a wonderful collection of seedlings for us to sell.

We’ll also be offering an orchard tour during the sale, led by Sarah and Ellie.

As many of you know, several recent stewardship days were rained out, and the pollinator garden has become a little overgrown. The good news is that all that growth means we have lots of plants to divide and sell. The challenge is that we also need to tackle some maintenance before seedling trees, rootstock suckers, and weeds take over and make the garden harder to care for in the months and years ahead.

So we’re launching:

Operation Save the Pollinator Garden

If you can, please join us at 8:00 a.m. for an extra hour of garden cleanup before our regular stewardship session begins.

Don’t worry if you’re not an experienced gardener. We’ll show you exactly what to do, and there will be simple tasks for everyone.

Some of the jobs will include:

Pulling out seedling trees
We’ll show you what they look like, and your mission will be to remove them from throughout the garden.

Pull out invasive motherwart
This stuff spreads like crazy but is super easy to pull out.

Shorten the Goldenrod
Beneficial insects love this plant. It can get far too tall. If we shorten it at this time of year it will be beautiful later in the summer and we will not have to stake it.

Cutting back cherry tree suckers
The ornamental cherry trees produce lots of suckers that are easy to recognize once you know what to look for. We’ll show you how, and you’ll cut them back to ground level.

Shaping the dogwoods
This is the perfect time to reduce the size of our dogwood shrubs, so we’ll need a few volunteers to help with that.

Meanwhile, Gisele and others will be dividing plants for the sale. Garden divisions may include:

• Black-eyed Susans
• Beautiful yellow-green hostas
• Lambs Ears
• Milkweed (if we can successfully dig some up)

We’ll show everybody what needs doing, and we’ll work together to get the garden looking its best for summer.

Schedule

8:00 a.m. – Operation Save the Pollinator Garden begins (Giselle and Susan will arrive at this time. Come early if you are able to join us.)

9:00 a.m. – Regular Stewardship Day starts (We will continue to do our work while a few volunteers man the plant sale table)

9:30 a.m. – Plant Sale opens

We’ll also need volunteers to help Gisele set up the sale table and to help staff the table during the morning. Chatting with community members and signing up potential new volunteers is also part of this job.

If you’re inviting friends or family to the sale, please remind them to bring cash, as we won’t be able to accept e-transfers or card payments.

If you can’t come early, that’s absolutely fine. Just join us at the regular stewardship time. Every helping hand makes a difference.

I am really looking forward to seeing everyone in the garden. Here’s hoping for beautiful weather, lots of visitors, and a fun day together. I can’t wait to play in the garden with you all and kick off the summer season in the best possible way.

See you Saturday!

PS. Thank you to Caroline for keeping an eye on the the trees! One of our struggling apricot trees is looking gorgeous this year thanks to her TLC and the cherry trees will soon be ready for harvest.