June 2004

The Secret Gardeners, a nursing home gardening club, met last Friday, June 4, to plant the central garden. We decided to change it slightly from a cutting garden to a semi-sensory garden. Rosemary, Billy, Amanda and two staff members, Dana and Herbie, came out to change the garden of weeds to a garden of flowers.

We got out hoes and shovels. Mary turned over the earth in the center of the bed, while Herbie and Dana chopped up chunks of grass and weeds for the Secret Gardeners to shake the soil off. Some pulled weeds.

After everything was raked smooth, we took out the goods – flats of State Fair zinnias, snapdragons, cosmos, ageratum, pots of sage, thyme, purple basil, strawflower, ornamental grass for the center, and the plants we planted from seed – marigolds and dill.

It felt good to get out into the sunny courtyard of the Care Center.

On June 11, Sonia, Rosemary and Mary met – this time to plant the window boxes outside the resident’s rooms and to plant the rest of the zinnias and snapdragons in the perennial garden.

The first chores were to water the flats of multi-colored wax begonias and petunias, dusty miller and marigolds (that the gardeners planted from seed). Then we added potting soil to the boxes to beef up the mix. Mary laid out the plants on top of the soil, and Rosemary and Sonia dug them in. The boxes were done in no time.

Next, Sonia and Mary dug in the zinnias and snapdragons into the ground. All was finished for this round, and now only the hanging baskets remain to be planted.