OVER THE GARDEN GATE
Articles and News of interest to FGCNYS members will appear here. Please send copy and it will be online within a few days. Barbara
Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.
-Luther Burbank
NGC CONSERVATION PLEDGE
I pledge to protect and conserve the natural resources of the planet earth and promise to promote education so we may become caretakers of our air, water, forest, land and wildlife.
Reprinted with permission from Horizon Line, publication of New Horizons Garden Club
Mike McGroarty gives us 37 ways to know if you're a gardener:
1. Your neighbors recognize you in your pajamas, rubber clogs and a cup of coffee.
2. You grab other people’s banana peels, coffee grinds, apple cores, etc. for your compost pile.
3. You have to wash your hair to get your fingernails clean.
4. All your neighbors come and ask you questions.
5. You know the temperature of your compost every day.
6. You buy a bigger truck so that you can haul more mulch.
7. You enjoy crushing Japanese beetles because you like the sound that it makes.
8. Your boss makes “taking care of the office plants” an official part of your job description.
9. Everything you touch turns to “fertilizer”.
10. Your non-gardening spouse becomes conversant in botanical names.
11. You find yourself feeling leaves, flowers and trunks of trees wherever you go, even at funerals.
12. You dumpster-dive for discarded bulbs after commercial landscapers remove them to plant annuals.
13. You plan vacation trips around the locations of botanical gardens, arboreta, historic gardens, etc.
14. You sneak home a 7 foot Japanese Maple and wonder if your spouse will notice.
15. When considering your budget, plants are more important than groceries.
16. You always carry a shovel, bottled water and a plastic bag in your trunk as emergency tools.
17. You appreciate your Master Gardener badge more than your jewelry.
18. You talk “dirt” at baseball practice.
19. You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the compost pile than for cooking.
20. You like the smell of horse manure better than Estee Lauder.
21. You rejoice in rain…even after 10 straight days of it.
22. You have pride in how bad your hands look.
23. You have a decorative compost container on your kitchen counter.
24. You can give away plants easily, but compost is another thing.
25. Soil test results actually mean something.
26. You understand what IPM means and are happy about it.
27. You’d rather go to a nursery to shop than a clothes store.
28. You know that Sevin is not a number.
29. You take every single person who enters your house on a “garden tour”.
30. You look at your child’s sandbox and see a raised bed.
31. You ask for tools for Christmas, Mother/Father’s day, your Birthday and any other occasion you can think of.
32. You can’t bear to thin seedlings and throw them away.
33. You scold total strangers who don’t take care of their potted plants.
34. You know how many bags of fertilizer/potting soil,/mulch your car will hold.
35. You drive around the neighborhood hoping to score extra bags of leaves for your compost pile.
36. Your preferred reading matter is seed catalogs.
And last but not least:
37. You know that the four seasons are:
⦁Planning the Garden
⦁Preparing the Garden
⦁Gardening
~and~
⦁Preparing and Planning for the next Garden
-Author Unknown, I’d love to give credit to the rightful author.




Kalmia latifolia 'Nathan Hale'
This is an example of a plant on the FGCNYS protected plant list that CAN be shown in a standard flower show because it is a "commercially developed cultivar with the distinguishing feature evident"
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