SACANDAGA GARDEN CLUB - By Barbara Henry

Our luncheon and auction was a huge amount of fun. Lanzi’s on the Lake put on a delightful lunch enjoyed by everyone, thank you Lanzi’s. Carol Reutzel and Fran Varcoe created gorgeous centerpieces for the tables and favors for everyone. Our auctioneer Terry Moeller kept everyone laughing and bidding up the items. Congratulations to Anna Johnson who won the beautiful quilt created by Ruth Ralston. Thanks to Anna Johnson, Michele Acquaro and Wanda Smith for their great efforts in organizing this event. We thank everyone for your support of our programs. Watch this column for dates of our presentations on Wildflowers and Orchids in March and April both to be held at the Northville Public Library and open to all.

Keep on eye on your houseplants now that the days are short and the sun is in short supply. A rinse every month or so for non fuzzy leaved plants or so will keep aphids and mealy bugs under control. Hard brown lumps on stems are probably scale and you’re going to have to scrape them off, they do like to cling. If you see a few leaves dropping or yellowing, don’t despair. It is most likely due to the lower humidity in our houses now that the heating season is well under way and also because of the lower light levels. Gradually the plant will get used to the new conditions. Be careful not to overwater your plants. If your potting soil doesn’t have good aeration it can hold water and be a wonderful breeding ground for fungus. Then the fungus gnats move in and if you have ever had a cloud of little black flies hovering around your soil you know what I mean. If this happens, cut down on your watering and let the plant dry between waterings. Mostly, this will solve the problem but if it doesn’t, you may need to repot with a sterilized potting mixture that is amended with perlite which gives aeration to the mix.

When the catalogs start to come in towards the end of the month get a glass of wine and sit down and plan what to add to your garden. If you are not sure that you are going to do much in your garden next year, just remember that just an hour of weeding burns around 340 calories, digging also uses about 340 calories and using a power mower uses around 300 calories. More good reasons to get out there and get our hands dirty!



Our next meeting is on December 1 at 10:00 a.m. at the Bradt Building when Janice Taylor will lead our workshop for wreath making for Christmas displays. We make wreaths for many of the public buildings in Northville and our surrounding towns. We have lunch together and after lunch we have a business meeting to wrap up this calendar year before our hiatus in January and February. On December 8 we have a party to celebrate the holidays and that is held at the Northville Public Library.

Our club partners with the Federated Garden Clubs to offer a full scholarship to cover camp tuition for one week for a student age 12-14 at the DEC program at Camp Colby in Upper Saranac Lake. Locally, recent recipients of this scholarship have been Carissa Henderson, Emily Krom, Arthur Hoffman and Megan Frasier. Students who are interested should submit a letter stating why they wish to attend the camp, along with a letter of recommendation from a teacher to us at POBox 675, Northville, NY 12134 . The deadline for applications hasn’t been announced yet but it is usually around the second week in January so get them in early.



Enjoy the holidays everyone and remember that ‘a garden is a friend you can visit anytime’.

SACANDAGA GARDEN CLUB - By Barbara Henry

Jeanine Loya introduced us to the wonderful world of cactus and succulents at our last meeting. We had a wonderful presentation in the beautiful meeting room at the Northville Public Library with delightful decorations and refreshments provided by our club members, Virginia Conover, Margaret Furco and Terry Moeller. Jeanine brought many plants for show and tell and she was very generous in giving away a lot of plants for us to pot up and grow. She is an acknowledged expert in her field and it was fun to listen and learn about her subject.

There are a few clean up chores still left to do in the garden. The summer veggies will have been frosted by now and should be pulled up and put in the compost pile. We did have some instances of late blight on tomatoes and potatoes late in the season and if you had any plants affected these plants should not go in the regular compost pile. Although late blight pores are killed off by our winter freezing temperatures, they can still live on in potatoes that are left in the ground. If you had late blight try to make sure you get every small piece of potato out of the ground and next year, plan to plant the crops in a different place.

As you finish raking up the leaves, pile them up in an out of the way place and leave them for a year to make leaf mold which is a wonderful addition to the soil in our gardens. If you don’t have a place to put them, you can leave them in bags. It isn’t a good idea to pile them on the garden as is, maple leaves in particular tend to mat down and prevent air and water getting through. Oak leaves take forever to decompose so they are better being composted rather than spread over the beds. If you can shred some of your leaves with a lawn mower it is a great idea to add a couple of inches of that to your veggie bed.

The more you can do to improve your soil, the better your veggies (and other plants) will grow. Consider getting a soil test so that if any remedial action is necessary you have time for additives to work. For example, if your soil needs lime, it can take six months for an application of lime to change the ph of the soil. A healthy plant needs very little in the way of additional fertilizer. Weakened plants send out signals that insects and bacteria recognize and they swarm in to take advantage, then we have to reach for the insecticides but if we provide a healthy soil the plants will be in good shape and we won’t have to use insecticides. It is particularly important for those of us who live near the lake because we don’t want fertilizer and pesticides to run off into our lake.

Cut back your non woody perennials but do leave seed heads from cone flowers for the birds. Ornamental grasses with their wonderful plumes look lovely through the snow and provide sheltering places for many ground creatures. As you do this, collect some of the seed heads to use in dried arrangements over the holidays.






Until the ground freezes you can still plants spring flowering bulbs. You can also pot up a few to enjoy during January and February. The smaller daffodils such as the Tete-a-Tete are a good choice to pot up. Sometimes in our warm homes it is hard to keep the taller narcissus bulbs from flopping over when we bring them inside. You can also plant crocus, aconite and chionodoxa in the pot of daffodils to have a succession of flowering bulbs. . Remember to chill daffies for about 14 weeks and when you bring them in, bring them into a cool spot perhaps by an east window until they green up. I buy hyacinth bulbs for indoor bloom every year. I leave them in a paper bag in my unheated garage and in December start bringing them in three at a time. I have vases that I pop them in and just grow them on in water. You need a vase with a neck so that the bulb stays above the water and it is just the roots than grow down. Oh how I love that fragrance in January.

Before the weather turns really cold take a moment to clean out any seed starting pots you used. A solution of bleach (nine parts water to one part bleach) is a good choice for cleaning up any pots or garden equipment. You need to clean up seed starting pots to make sure that any spores of the dreaded damping off disease are killed otherwise your little seedlings next year could just fall over and quit on you.






Our next meeting is on Thursday, November 10 when we have our annual luncheon and auction which this year is being held at Lanzi’s on the Lake in Mayfield.






As always, I love to hear from you and our address is POBox 675, Northville, NY 212134.

SACANDAGA GARDEN CLUB - By Barbara Henry

We had a delightful meeting to start off our garden club year. Jean Sweet, a Master Gardener of Fulton and Montgomery Counties, talked to us about planning and planting our bulb gardens. Jean showed us photos of the wonderful display of tulips she has in her our garden and showed us how to use color displays to make the best impact against our houses and landscape. The ideas she gave us and the photographs she showed us led to a great discussion of what we do in our own gardens and since it is now prime bulb planting season I think all of us came away with a determination to plant at least a few bulbs to cheer us up in the Spring.

Back in August I mentioned that I hadn’t seen many butterflies this year and I am pleased now, in September, that I am beginning to see a few more of them around. Actually now I have many, many Monarch butterflies, for some reason far more than I normally see. But amongst them I do see some of the other varieties. I had a lovely letter from Anna Froeder and she tells me that she too hasn’t had as many butterflies this year. She did tell me that it is the Ruby throated hummingbird and not the Rufous that we see in the Northeast. She checked with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and discovered that the Rufous is the most northern breeding of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska while the Ruby throated is the sole breeder in eastern North America. Anna wanted us to know about the Cornell lab which offers wonderful information on birds on-line at http://www.allaboutbirds.org. So check it out for great photographs and range maps. Thank you Anna, I loved your letter and thank you for the great information.

I hope you will all join us on Thursday, October 6 in the upstairs meeting room of the Northville Public Library at 1:30 p.m. Jeanine Loya will be giving a presentation on Cactus and Succulents. Jeanine is a member and past president of several Cactus and Succulent Societies and she and her husband maintain a 25’ by 25’ greenhouse with an extensive collection of these plants. Some of which she will bring for show and tell and some to raffle off to a few lucky people. We will have refreshments afterwards and a chance to chat with everyone.






On November 10 we are planning our annual luncheon and auction which this year will be held at Lanzi’s on The Lake in Mayfield. This is always a fun event and if you would like to join us contact any of our club members or drop me a line. The more the merrier!






You can contact us through P.O. Box 675, Northville, NY.

SACANDAGA GARDEN CLUB - By Barbara Henry

One of the downsides of writing this column is that I have to think a month ahead. During the lovely days of August I have to think ahead to September and that is the beginning of Fall and the heating season and winter is just around the corner. So it takes a lot of effort on my part to think ahead to the cold weather!

Betsy Emery hosts the visitsacandaga.com website and she posts this column every month including lots of lovely photos. Also all the previous articles are archived if you need to look back at something. When I sent her last month’s column she sent me a link to http://www.visitsacandaga.com/Butterflies.htm. It shows butterflies for our region and has wonderful photos. Check it out. It is a very interesting website for our area so visit it regularly. Thanks, Betsy for all your hard work on the website.

It’s time to bring the houseplants back indoors. Give them a rinse to get rid of any hitchhikers and keep a close watch on them for a few days in case you missed any stragglers. Take cuttings from your coleus and begonias to enjoy new plants indoors throughout the winter. Let your amaryllis plants dry out completely. I take the bulb out of the pot and lay it on its side in a sheltered area so it doesn’t even get any dew. Then it comes inside in a cool, dark place until November or December depending when you want to bring it out again to bloom. Watch for frost warnings and be sure to dig up your tender bulbs such as dahlias, cannas and tuberous begonias. They store well in some vermiculite in a cool dark area.


It’s hard to think about saying good bye to the veggie garden and particularly those lovely tomato plants but you can cover them during a light frost and very often we get a couple of weeks of good weather after the first frost. Before the first hard frost why don’t you pick your tomatoes and put them in cardboard boxes. Keep them well separated and they will ripen slowly. You need to keep an eye on them because some will start to rot but it does keep your tomato harvest going for a few extra weeks. Still you have your broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprouts that actually taste better after a frost. And lettuce and radishes are nice to have back in the garden after the hot weather.

The Fall garden looks lovely with the mums and asters now in full bloom. The big mums that we buy now from the garden centers are in full bloom and probably won’t survive the winter because they don’t have enough time to establish a root system to take them through but they are a lovely way to have color in the garden right up to the last minute. It’s a good time to dig and divide perennials now because unlike the mums which are just beginning their bloom season, perennials are beginning to shut down so see where you have some bare spots or where the daylilies, for example, are just getting to big for the area where you put them.

My favorite occupation at this time of year – as I am sure you all know by now! is planting spring blooming bulbs. I do moan and groan when the boxes of bulbs come in and think why on earth did I buy so many. But come spring it is all worth it. We will also be planting daffies at our Blue Star marker planting at the Bradt Building.

We look forward to getting together again after the summer break and our garden club meets on September 8. We meet in the basement of the Bradt building at 1:00 p.m. and Jean Sweet, a Master Gardener will discuss designing and planting our bulb gardens. We look forward to getting together again fter the summer break


The Master Gardeners will have exhibit space at the Fonda Fair again this year so stop by and see us in the Cooperative Extension building.


I also want to give you early notice of our community meeting on October 6 when Jeanine Loya will be giving a presentation on cactus and succulents. We hope all our friends will join us in the meeting room upstairs at the Northville Library. She will have plants for show and tell and plants to raffle off.


As always, questions can be sent to POBox 675, Northville, NY 12134.

SACANDAGA GARDEN CLUB - By Barbara Henry

August is a month in which there is not a great deal to do in the garden. One of my favorite things to do is to take a walk around and see what is going on.



Astyanax

 I have noticed that there are far fewer butterflies in my yard this year and I have a butterfly friendly garden. Butterflies love lots and lots of sunshine so I am hoping with the beautiful sunshine we had in July that we should see more butterflies later in the season. Many butterflies are affected by late freezes. Many of them emerge in the early spring just as the trees are starting to leaf out but in a spring where we have a late freeze, the foliage and the caterpillars that were laid on them were frozen. The average life span for an adult butterfly is 20 to 40 days but many varieties have a lifespan less than that so with a late freeze any butterfly that survived the freeze didn’t have enough time to lay their eggs before the new foliage emerged.




Tiger Swallowtail

 Tiger and black swallowtail populations are especially devastated since they emerge very early. I have also read reports that the very bad rains this spring and early summer, along with colder than normal temperatures has probably delayed or upset their life cycle.







Such a fragile groups of insects but so wonderful in our gardens. It really is up to us to promte butterfly friendly gardens with plenty of both host and nectar plants. Also set up butterfly puddles. I have a large shallow tray filled with flat rocks. I keep water in it that is dissolved from the mineral salt blocks that are sold for deer. When ever I have an odd piece of fruit I put it in the tray to let it rot and this is all gourmet food for the butterflies.




Black Swallowtail Catterpiller

 If you have access to horse or cow manure, try putting a scoop in shallow spot in bright sunshine. Keep it almost wet and you will be surprised how many butterflies love this treat.






Early in the year I did see many butterflies, moths and bees. But now even the Rufous humming bird is a scarce sighting. This little bird is the only variety that we see in our area, the Rufous humming bird breeds farther north than any other species of hummingbird in the world.



Rufous Hummingbird

 Did you know it has an excellent memory for location so it can find flowers from day to day and even from year to year? Some birds return a second year to a place where a feeder was the previous year, even though that feeder may not be there now. They love the color red and love to check our large swaths of red flowers.






Aside from just enjoying our gardens and reaping all the harvest, there are few things we need to remember in August.

Change out the water in your bird bath weekly and keep it filled. Make sure you have as little standing water as possible because that becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes. You can buy products to add to your water to kill the larvae and they usually last about 30 days. I have rain barrels in my garden that I use for supplemental watering for my veggie garden and I treat those barrels throughout the year. My pollinator friendly garden does attract more birds and they help keep the mosquito population down. In fact I was bombarded early one evening a month or so ago by birds, I think swallow or purple martins. They were swooping over my yard and the water in the bay feasting on the insects.

Keep up with deadheading your annuals so they don’t turn their thoughts to seed production which is their natural life cycle. Watch your containers; by this time of the year their roots probably fill the containers so you may need to water daily. Containers will also need more in the way of fertilizer especially if you use liquid fertilizer. That’s only available to the plants for a day or two before it leached out by rains or watering. But don’t fertilize your perennials now, we want them to start maturing rather than put on new growth that can be killed by early frosts.

In the veggie garden, remember to pick your crops early.

Cucumbers and squash should be picked at six to eight inches. If you get hit by the squash vine borer, make a longitudinal slit up the stem and dig out the culprit then mound over the slit with soil and your plant will recover.






Our Garden Club reconvenes on September 8 at 1:00 p.m. at the Bradt Building. The topic will be a very timely one – Planning and Planting a Bulb Garden, led by Jean Sweet, a Master Gardener of Fulton and Montgomery Counties.






As always, any questions or comments can be sent to us at P.O. Box 675, Northville, NY.

SACANDAGA GARDEN CLUB - By Barbara Henry

Oh my goodness, looking back I can remember a cold windy day in early June when our club went to visit Tom and Kathy O’s perennial gardens in Ephratah. Anna Johnson was all bundled up in a blanket she keeps in her car – smart woman! Still, the rains held off and Kathy greeted us with a hot cup of coffee. Their gardens are lovely, both sun and shade plants in wonderful combinations so we could see just what might work in our own gardens. I picked up several pots of a cranesbill geranium which makes a lovely mounded plant and blooms most of the summer. Those went in my front yard where I am trying to create a cottage/wildflower garden to encourage more birds and insects. I have had lots of butterflies so far this year and I hope they will use the parsely plants I have dotted about to shelter the chrysalis for next year.



Did you go see the flower show we had at the library – our members are so talented, the arrangements were spectacular. If ever you need help with any type of table design or designs for the holidays and are not sure how to go about it, do give one of our members a call. We are all happy to help in any way.

There is an upside to all the rain we have been having; my peonies are full of blooms this year and the astilbe are putting out many more flower heads, in another couple of weeks they will fill up the border with their color. All this rain also means I don’t have to go out and put more water on my water loving plants such as the cardinal flower, the Joe-Pye weed and the filipendulas. The cardinal flower does like to be wet most of the time but the others do well with an extra bucket of water now and then when the rain doesn’t cooperate.

However, you might want to keep a close eye on your tomato plants because all this rain could bring on early blight. If you see the bottom leaves start to yellow, then brown and fall off then early blight may be the cause. Feed them with a fertilizer with high nitrogen, or use bloodmeal, and that should stop the problem. Tomatoes are heavy users of nitrogen – think of all those leaves as the plant grows.

Now that most of your planting is done, it is a great time to walk around your garden and see how the plants are growing and perhaps what may need to be divided later in the year or what combinations are doing well and what is not doing so well. As you are walking around take a pair of scissors with you and continue to deadhead your spring flowering bulbs. Don’t tie up your daffy stalks, instead use daylilies or hosta or phlox to camouflage the foliage as it ripens. Mark areas where you need to add more bulbs so that when you plant in the fall you don’t dig up previously planted bulbs. Now matter how many times I tell myself to keep good records I can guarantee that I will spear an existing bulb when I start planting in September. My bulb catalogues have started arriving so I am walking the garden and making notes of what I need to order to fill out the bulb display.

Keep up with the weeding, the more you get it under control now, the less problems you will have later in the year. Watch for phlox and hollyhock seedlings for example, they will pop up in the most unexpected places and you can leave them and enjoy them or transplant them to a more convenient area. I have some lupine seedlings that I have no idea how they got where they are, those I am transplanting to my front garden. Lupines are best transplanted young, they really don’t like to be moved when they are bigger. Forsythia and lilacs should be pruned at this time of year. If you have large plants take out one fourth of the largest canes, these will be the older canes and this will encourage new growth for next year, keep your shrubs down in size and maintain a good shape to the plant. A light haircut to azaleas is beneficial too.



The garden club is taking a couple of months off to enjoy the summer months with friends and families visiting us. We are planning our program for the coming year and will meet again in September.



As always, questions and comments can be sent to POBox 675, Northville NY.

THE TAOIST TAI CHI GROUP OF NORTHVILLE

Terry Frank opened her house to our Tai Chi group in June so that we could all get together and say a huge THANK YOU to Margreet Monster who has been the leader and very patient instructor of our group for many years.



We meet at the BCON building every Monday and Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. Margreet leads us in yoga and Tai chi exercises for a half an hour and them we perform two sets of the 108 moves of Tai Chi. Margreet gives private instruction to beginners and those of us who want and need to perfect our moves at 8:30 a.m. Come see what we are all about.



Since ancient times, Taoists have been renowned for the cultivation of health and harmony in both body and spirit. To make the benefits of this tradition available to people everywhere, Master Moy Lin-shin, a Taoist monk, founded the International Taoist Tai Chi Society in 1970. Since then, members in 27 countries have found the Taoist Tai Chi™ Internal Arts of Health to be profoundly effective for people of all ages and abilities.



Margreet, we are so lucky you are willing to share your time and your knowledge and, from all of us, a very big thank you.