Editor’s note: Please share this post with other members who may not subscribe to our blog, as well as other gardeners in the Sault area!

Greetings Hort Society members and others who love gardening! The growing season is in full swing, and it’s getting hot, hot, hot out there! Before we head into the holiday week, stop and ponder these opportunities to get a bit more involved in your local Hort Society.

Flower and Vegetable Show

Do you think you have to be a master gardener to enter a flower and vegetable show? NOT TRUE! Everyone has to start somewhere! And we hope YOU will start this year. It’s fun, and you could win a prize courtesy of Station Mall!

So what is a flower and vegetable show? It’s a wonderful educational and social activity for gardeners. Our flower and vegetable show allows our members to display samples of their beautiful floral and vegetable produce, as well as creative arrangements; to spread the word about the joys of gardening with fellow Saultites; and to have great conversations about gardening and gardening trends.

So when is this happening? This year’s SSM Hort Society Flower and Vegetable Show will take place on Saturday, July 26, 2014 at Station Mall (Sears Court).

And there’s more….We even have a non-member category! Do you have a friend, child or grandchild who might like to get creative? Please encourage them to enter in this category!

To enter our show, get entry cards from Jane (705-949-5395), Veronica (705-254-3116), or Abby (705-946-2936). Would you consider committing to maybe just one entry? If each person who reads this post enters just one flower, vegetable, or arrangement, our show will be a SMASHING success! You still have plenty of time to think about what you’d like to enter!

For details of our show, including time to drop off entries/when judging will occur, all the categories for entries, etc., visit our Competitions page.

We would like to give major kudos to our WONDERFUL sponsor, Station Mall, who provides great prizes for the People’s Choice Award and section winners. Thank you so much, Station Mall.

Guess what….We are already thinking ahead to next year’s Plant Sale!

We had so much fun with the 2014 Plant Sale that we can’t help ourselves; we are already thinking ahead to 2015! Several of us met earlier this week to discuss what we can do now to make for a better plant sale next year.

One thing all members can help us with is to take a look in your gardens and see what’s PHAT (Pretty, Healthy, And Tempting) and could be divided. It would be enormously helpful if you could note the colour of any potential dividees NOW….Perennials are far more valuable if we know what colour the blooms are.

This is a particular issue with daylilies and irises, which come in a huge range of colours and are often-donated but rarely labelled with colour, but it applies to many other perennials as well. We’d be especially grateful if you’d consider saving us a more unusual variety or colour.

So…get yourself a permanent paint marker from Michael’s and some ID tags (cut up vinyl blinds from Habitat From Humanity Re-Store work well) and start labelling as your plants bloom.

While we can do plant rescues now if necessary, it would be better for the plants as well as our busily gardening members if we could come get plants in the fall. Dividing plants for us and dropping them off with one of our plant-overwintering volunteers would be especially awesome!

Email us if you have plants to offer up later this summer. Later this summer we will be posting a list of what members will be making available on our website so we can try to fill in gaps.

Heading down to the Canadian Locks on Canada Day? Check out the beautiful blooms our canal greenhouse committee members have produced!

Our society has a committee that runs the Parks Canada greenhouse down by the locks. The members of this committee produce herbs and flowers for our plant sale and for the gardens around the Sault locks site.

If you are down at the locks for Canada Day or any other day, be sure to stop and smell the flowers so lovingly produced by your fellow Hort Society members!

Many, many thanks to our Canal Greenhouse Committee members for all their hard work and service to their society and to the community!

Clay, clay, go away!

Clay soil is the bane of many Sault gardeners’ existence. If you are struggling to garden in clay, we’ve got some help for you! One tip, from Nome Buckman, a gardening expert in the eastern UP of Michigan, is to build raised beds. She says that clay is great for raised beds because the root tips are always finding a nice moist layer underneath. However, with raised beds, you may need to install irrigation or do more watering.

Not willing to build raised beds? Canadian Gardening has a great article with lots of tips for improving clay soil here. Their tips include NOT adding sand unless you really know what you are doing….Sand can actually make clay soil worse by turning it into brick-like material. Canadian Gardening recommends adding lots of organic material, applying mulch (prevents a hard crust from forming), and avoiding walking on clay soil. And roto-tilling clay is not advisable….It makes clay soil even worse by making its already-fine particle size even smaller. Be sure to read the entire article for more tips!

Lovely layering leads to lots of plants!

When the clematis shown at right was planted, two of the stems were partly broken.

Before the Hort Society presentation that covered layering earlier this spring, the gardener would’ve snipped off those broken stems.

However, this time she laid the cracked stems on the ground (still attached to the main plant) and piled dirt on the broken areas.

Those stems are the ones on the left, and not only are they growing strong, they are actually more vigorous than the stem that did not crack (one the right)!

Here is another example of successful layering—this variegated dogwood plant is a child plant that formed when a branch from the mother plant (the bowed branch at the left) grew down towards and into the ground and sprouted roots and stems.

The gardener snipped the branch and dug up the child plant and moved it (she actually divided it, donated half to the plant sale, and planted the other half here).

However. the gardener observed that the branch that connected this plant with the mother plant looked a wee bit odd, because the leaves are growing in the opposite direction of those on the other branches. So she decided to stick the snipped end of that odd branch in the ground…And she’s waiting to see if roots grow down from the stem tip; hopefully she will get yet another plant out of the deal! Another layering success story.

If you have some nice shrubs in your yard, why not try layering to see if you can produce some plants for next year’s plant sale? Here’s how to propagate via layering

Happy Canada Day, everyone!