Upcoming Events

Happy June, neighbors!  Milkweed and oakleaf hydrangeas are in full bloom!

 

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THANK YOU, CAPERS, for coming out in droves to support our annual Plant Sale fundraiser — We are so grateful for your support!!!   

We always accept empty plant pots, red solo cups, and *plastic* venetian mini-blinds to cut up for plant tags for use in our plant sale.  Please drop either anytime in the driveway at 1121 River Bay Road.  Thanks for helping us to reduce and reuse!

Tuesday, September 1st at 7pm:  Members’ Sharing Slideshow, including pictures, triumphs, and lessons learned by our Members.

Tuesday, October 6th at 7pm:  speaker Dan Benarcik on Design Principles of the Pros Applied to the Home Landscape (co-hosted with Annapolis Horticultural Society)

Sunday, October 18th at 6pm: Annual Harvest Dinner Potluck celebration of a successful harvest and another splendid year gardening together

All meetings are held in the Cape St. Claire Clubhouse meeting room (1223 River Bay Road, 21409) unless otherwise noted.  Questions?  Phone Catherine at 410-212-1944 or salca01@comcast.net, or reach us at capegardenclub@gmail.com.  New faces always welcome!

Read more about our year’s events and speakers.

2020 Secret Garden Tours

Staying in groups smaller than 10, and wearing masks when we came close to one another, we still hosted our annual Secret Garden Tours at 3 award-winning gardens right here in the Cape.  Such perfect weather, cool and bright, for our tours this June.  Such beautiful plant combinations, such charming garden sheds, such oases of calm these stunning gardens afforded us.  Thanks to all who participated, and thanks to our hosts for allowing us to visit!

Hydrangeas & forest grass

Mophead and Oakleaf hydrangeas side by side

A shed to brag about, with a working waterwheel!

Such perfect weather this year!

Bay-wise certified, daylilies, hostas, & hydrangeas

Asiatic lilies, daylilies, Loropetalum

Fragrant honeysuckle, hydrangeas

Hydrangea, giant leaves of butterbur

Milkweed & Oakleaf Hydrangea

2020 Virtual Plant Sale

Read a review in Around Broadneck here.

When COVID hit in March, we knew we couldn’t leave our quarantined Cape neighbors without spring flowers and vegetables this year, not on top of everything else!  Barred from hosting an event at our normal Clubhouse field site, we quickly came up with a new plan.  We potted plants all of April per our usual timeline, at potting parties and Members potting at home, and our Club’s tech guru built an online ordering site using Shopify.

Working as a team, we had a smashing success of a plant sale at one of our Member’s driveways, with curbside pickup for our customers.  Many thanks to all the Members who schlepped in potting soil, who donated and potted plants at our potting parties, who potted from home, who built the virtual sale site and provided tech support, who dropped off ladders, crates, and shelving to build space for all the plants, who helped place plant orders, who helped unload them safely upon delivery, who picked up refreshments, showed up to work a shift, who delivered plants to those customers wanting delivery, who stayed late to store tender plants under tarps and in the garage in our unseasonably cool spring, who stayed to help cleanup all the tables and and shelves and ladders afterward.  Thanks to our neighbors who let us put tables on their grass, who dug and donated plants for our sale, who came out in record numbers to purchase and curbside pickup their new plants, who took the time to appreciate our efforts.  Thanks to local businesses Blue Rooster, Cape Dunkin’ Donuts, Graul’s, and Trader Joes Annapolis, who generously donated refreshments for our volunteers.  What a fantastic team effort!  And our customers noticed!  Here’s what they had to say:

• “Awesome job! Thanks for doing all this.”
• “We walked by earlier. You all are doing amazing. Thank you!!!”
• “Thanks just picked my stuff up. Looks great. Wish I would have ordered more!”
• “Effortless pickup, the whole thing was so well done. Thank you. Can’t wait for warmer weather to get these guys in the ground!”
• “I’m new to the community, so this was my first experience, but y’all knocked it out of the park! Congratulations on all the hard work that was put into this.”

Plant Sale Leftovers now available

Thank you, neighbors, for supporting our sale so enthusiastically and picking up your orders last weekend!

We loved seeing you all smiling with anticipation as you took home your plants!
For those who missed it or want more, we do have lots of varieties available — please visit us to see what’s left, no need to pre-order.
This week: Weds 3-6pm, Thurs 12-6pm, Friday 12-6pm. We take cash or paypal.
If you’re interested, please email capegardenclub@gmail.com for the location address. Thanks, neighbors!

Some of the fantastic plants we still have available: blue lobelia, solomon’s seal, black eyed susan, sensitive fern, spiderwort, lily of the valley, hosta, milkweeds, chrysanthemum, bearded iris, cherry tomatoes, and comfrey

2020 Plant Sale is OPEN!

Our 2020 PLANT SALE is OPEN!
ORDER NOW

Ordering site will remain open to all through May 6, followed by curbside order pickups from a Cape residence May 8-11.  Leftovers sale in Cape May 12-15.

Email capegardenclub@gmail.com with any questions — thanks for your support!

Some of the fantastic plants we have available on our 2020 Virtual Plant Sale: Vriginia bluebells, lily of the valley, 7 Camellia cultivars, milkweeds, hosta, native columbine, native woodland phlox, and herb & veggie starts of all kinds!

45th Anniversary Dinner

Tulips & cake mark our 45th

Lenten roses accented by paperbush

A feast of stews, salads, and sides

With foliage like this, who needs flowers?

Feasting together

Our founding Member Doris Clair

Our Members gathered together for our annual Anniversary Dinner celebration, bringing a potluck of delicious foods and gorgeous plants together to mark 45 years of gardening fun and fellowship!  We were especially happy to honor our founding Member, Doris Clair.  She and our other founding mothers began the very Garden Club that continues to give us all so much fun learning and growing together.

Happy 45th, Cape Garden Club!

 

Winter Seed-Sowing Workshop

Our Members dodged winter storms and gathered together inside to winter sow seed.  Using translucent food containers, seed starting soil, and a variety of seeds from Sample Seed Company, we made miniature greenhouses.  We also enjoyed painting rocks for our gardens — a fun and cozy way to stick it to old man winter.  And within a month, the first seedlings germinate, outside, in the winter wet  — amazing!

Wreath Workshop 2019

Happy Holidays from the Cape St. Claire Garden Club!

Another year, another wreath workshop!

Members of the Garden Club enjoyed a fun and festive evening together, enjoying delicious hot cider & refreshments while working together to create beautiful wreaths made of fragrant fresh evergreens clipped from our very own gardens.  Combined together into bundles, then pinned onto straw and metal wreath frames, we made them for display right here at the Cape Clubhouse & Guard shack, as well as one for the Broadneck Library.  Two more will be hung at the Statehouse in downtown Annapolis, along with wreaths contributed and made by many other area garden clubs.  We are so happy to help beautify our community for the holidays.  Wishing all our neighbors in Cape and beyond a warm, colorful, fragrant, and festive holiday full of friends and family.

Team Work: Bundling Greens

Affixing to wreath forms of straw and metal

Cape Community Service

Several Members of the Cape St. Claire Garden Club spent a couple hours early last Saturday to help Town Manager Ryan Anderson with his capstone project for his Watershed Steward certification.  Together with our neighbors, we raked up several trailer-loads of fallen leaves from the drainage ditches on Hampton & Chestnut Tree.  While fallen leaves are fabulously nutrient-rich mulches in our garden, great to leave in place for the plants and the wild things, in our drainage ditches they are excessive nutrient loads on our waterways, causing algae blooms and fish kills.  Working together, we can keep these excess nutrients from running into our cherished Chesapeake Bay watershed.  Ryan hopes his project will inspire us all to clean leaves out of all our neighborhood storm water conveyances.  Each person’s effort makes a difference!

Members Pictured: Larry Jennings, Bill Rappaport, Audrey & Larry Lengbeyer.  Not pictured: Becky & Roy Benner, Rose Mary Stocker.

Mushroom Log Workshop

The Garden Club met in November for our much-anticipated Mushroom Log Workshop with Michael Judd of Ecologia Design.

We learned that mushrooms are the fruits of fungi (mycelium) that break down fallen wood, and that fungi have preferred woods on which to feed.  We then used, as fungi habitat, fresh logs generously donated by Richard’s Tree Care.  Mr. Judd supplied two varieties of mushroom spawn for us – oyster to live in poplar logs and shiitake for the oak.

After hearing his instructions, Members adjourned to drill holes and hammer spawn pegs into their own logs, before going outside to daub hot wax over the holes.  Each of us nailed a tag into base of our log to remind ourselves later what variety we used and when we created the log.

This winter we’re to keep the logs in a basement or unheated garage, inside a plastic bag with a small venting hole.  In the spring, we’re to unwrap and place the logs outside, keep them moist by watering every 2 weeks if needed, and watch daily for the mushrooms to emerge.

We all enjoyed a delicious spread while we drilled and hammered, and we were thrilled to welcome many new guests & even 5 new Members.  This workshop may have to become an annual Garden Club offering!