April Newsletter

South Bristol Gardening Club AGM

April 2016

Great to see those of you who were at the April meeting, it was a particularly chatty one!

The club trip to Kiftsgate and Hidcote is being finalised. The coach journey will be £10 per head (this may be subsidised for members depending on how well the plant sale goes) with entry to Kiftsgate at £7, and for Hidecote will be £12 unless you are a National Trust member in which case entry will be free. You will have to bring your cards as proof.

We will have to enter the gardens as a group so I will organise a timetable closer to the time, but for now please remember to put your name down on the sign up sheet asap! If we have numbers earlier it makes the planning bit much easier on the day! Guests are of course welcome and spaces are very much on a first come first served basis!

Details of the Ebenezer Gate pocket park were put forward, but it looks like we will be unable to help with the care of the park going forward so we will let Tom know.

We have decided to put together a trip to Hestercombe Gardens in the summer as we all had such a lovely time with our speaker Claire Reid the head gardener there. It will be a less organised trip as we can all pile down there with car shares and go in as individuals. The gardens are £11 to go in which includes a voluntary donation to the development fund for the gardens. Clare has offered to come and show us round a bit if we let her know when we are going. I am going to suggest either Tuesday 2^nd August or Sunday 7^th August? Any thoughts?

Can I please remind everyone that any cheques payable still need to be made to Southville Gardening Club as the cogs that make the bank go round are large and slow to turn! Please bare with us while this change goes on and probably best to check with Elaine before you write anything out!

The Plant sale is approaching fast and it would be so great if we could make it as good as last year. Plant donations are really needed as is donations of your time to help man the stall, even just 30 minutes will make a difference! It’s a fun activity and if you work on the stall you get first dibs on all the lovely plants that have been grown for sale!

Please don’t forget that Bedminster secret gardens is coming up on 24^th April, programmes are available at various outlets such as the southville centre, windmill hill city farm and of course our own Matthew!

Our speaker this week was a one of horticultures real gardening gentlemen. Don Everitt has many years experience in gardening starting from when he trained as a young man at RHS Wisley. He came to share his impressive knowledge with us on flowering bulbs and lilies.

He showed us many examples of where bulbs are a very easy way to get colour in to the garden. Starting with lilies we were spoilt with many tales and interesting snippets, such as the only edible member of the lily family is asparagus and the fastest growing plant of record is the mythical Espirit Yukka Lily which has evaded his sight for many years.

We learnt of their structure of 6 petals, 6 stamens and seed pods that come in 6’s, a very regimented plant, and that the ideal planting depth is 6 inches. Lilies are very easy plants in so much as they will grow just about anywhere except bog (and in the case of asiatic lilies who are fussy not to be too alkaline). They also suffer from very few pests except for the new predator, the lily beetle, and our old foe the snail.

We were given the very useful tip that lily pollen can be removed by using any spare velvet you have lying around, but failing that sticky tap dabbed on will do the trick!

We were then whisked through the flowering bulbs as super speed as our time started to tick away, passing through our garden favourites until we had to wrap things up in a haste. So many tales were told throughout it was hardly noticeable we had run over on time as Don had us enthralled with his recollections and funny anecdotes.

Thanks again to Don for a very entertaining talk.

Next month we have Sara Venn joining us for the low down on what Incredible Edible have been up to with the urban food trail so come and join us to find out more.

See you next month

The Team.