Our Grandview Garden Club Holiday Potluck Dinner — December 14th!

For our GGC December meeting this year, we will be hosting a Holiday Potluck Dinner, 6-8, Thursday, December 14th. It will be held in the Grandview Room at Trout Lake Community Centre (3360 Victoria Drive). 

Please bring:

• Food to share — appetizer, main, salad, dessert — whatever you like, with serving utensils. We will have access to limited kitchen facilities, but it would probably be best if you could figure out a dish that doesn’t require an oven or too much fuss.
• Your own plate, silverware, and a glass or cup.
• Whatever you would like to drink. (Note: No open alcohol is allowed at Trout.)
• Your partner, if you like…

No need to RSVP! We just hope to see you there!

________________

Note: We will not be having a January GGC meeting this year. Our February meeting will be on Zoom (details to follow closer to the date). We will finally meet again in person for our March meeting; the date and venue will be announced as soon as we figure it all out. 

Any questions? Send an email to grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com. 

Season’s Greetings, everyone! See you at our festive Potluck!

Penny Street

 

Grandview Garden Club Xmas Party Potluck

 A GGC Christmas Party

Instead of a regular meeting in December, we are going to have a potluck Christmas party. 

Time: 6 - 8 pm  

Date: December 14th (our usual second Thursday evening) 

Place: Grandview Room, Trout Lake Community Centre, 3360 Victoria Drive

More information will be coming soon. We hope to see you there. 

We also thought you'd like to know about the Handmade Sale taking place tomorrow, Saturday November 25, in the basement of Grandview Church at First Ave and Salsbury. 

One of our Garden Club members, Shawn Preuss, will be there selling her beautiful woodwork, including bowls made from fallen trees in our neighbourhood.

November Meeting

 Hi. 

We’ve had a bit of trouble securing an appropriate meeting space at Britannia for our regular second-Thursday meeting night, so this month we’re going to be meeting via Zoom. (Now that it’s dark by 5:00 p.m. — boo hoo — at least it’s easier to be able to meet via Zoom and not have to venture out.)

Our November speaker is Daniel Mosquin, and he’ll be talking to us on two topics, "Native Plants" and “Garden Photography Tips”. We’ll be meeting this Thursday night (November 9th), at 7:00 p.m.

Here’s the link! Remember that Zoom start time is 7:00.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89696094312

Daniel Mosquin is currently the Research and Biodiversity Informatics Manager at UBC Botanical Garden, where his duties include teaching the plant sciences coursework for UBC's Horticulture Training Program. He is also an accomplished photographer, using his camera to seek moments and places where some measure of beauty is to be found.

His presentation will focus on why gardeners should consider using native plants, with an emphasis on highlighting particular native plants for Lower Mainland gardens. Woven throughout will be Daniel's observations on these plants in wild habitats and how to use them in gardening situations.

He will follow his native-plant talk with a second, shorter presentation giving you composition tips to improve your photography, illustrated with photos of plants and gardens from his travels. 

See you Thursday!

We’re also hoping to organize a GGC holiday potluck supper. We’ll let you know as our plans progress.

And do let me know if you’re thinking you might want to take over the GGC communication responsibilities. I’ll be happy to meet with you and go over what’s involved.

Cheers,

Penny

GGC October 4th meeting reminder: "The Complete Talk on Groundcovers"

GGC tomorrow night!! Wednesday, October 4th!!

See below. We're co-hosting with Seed to Sky and meeting at 7 pm. It's Gary Lewis and his presentation "The Complete Talk on Groundcovers,"  in the Lower Hall of Cityview Church at East 28th and Sophia.  Please enter from East 28th.

He will be bringing a few plants to sell, so please bring cash if you think you'd like to buy some.

Penny Street

grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com

https://grandviewgardenclub.blogspot.com

From: Elaine Spilos <espilos@telus.net>
Date: Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 1:05 PM
Subject: Subject October 4th meeting reminder: "The Complete Talk on Groundcovers"
To: <seedtosky@googlegroups.com>

Seed to Sky and Grandview Garden Clubs are co-hosting this month. Gary Lewis is presenting on "The Complete Talk on Groundcovers,"  in the Lower Hall of Cityview Church at East 28th and Sophia.  Please enter from East 28th.

Wednesday, October 4, 7 pm

Gary, our presenter, is an avid plant person, the author of The Complete Book of Ground Covers, a sought-after speaker, and the owner of Phoenix Perennials in Richmond.  We are thrilled to have him with us.

He will talk to us about the functional and aesthetic value of groundcovers, and inspire us with his beautiful photos of these valuable plants.  

Please remember to bring:

• a mug for tea
• a donation for the draw table or refreshment table
• a pillow/something soft to cushion your chair (if you get a metal one)
• $5 drop-in fee for non-members (of either club)

We would appreciate some Seed to Sky helping hands arriving early at 6:30 to 6:45 to help set up chairs and the tables.  Thank you in advance.

Seed to Sky members, another reminder, this time about the quest for a logo for our club.  Thank you for the interest that has been shown already.  Please submit your design by December 6, the date of our last event of this year, to espilos@telus.net on behalf of the executive.  

See you on October 4th, 7 pm!

Elaine Spilos

Seed to Sky Education Coordinator

 

                                                                    

                                          

Our September Meeting — A Farm Visit

 

Hello friends,

We’ll be having our Grandview Garden Club meeting on Thursday, September 14th, in person. And we’re doing something a little bit unusual this time.

We will meet at 5:00 p.m. at Katherine Oblock’s South Burnaby farm.

Katherine is inviting us to hold our September GGC meeting at her farm. September is usually a good month weather-wise, so let’s just hope the weather cooperates....

Those of us who have already visited her farm know how impressive it is, and since we didn't have a field trip this summer, this is a good opportunity to do that and also support one of our own members. 

Katherine says: 

Come join us for a fun & informative talk at Big Bend Urban Farms! Katherine Oblock will be providing a tour of this unique 2.9 acre piece of ALR land in South Burnaby, which currently has 8 different urban farming projects & a small community garden on-site. Once the site context has been established, we will learn more about the specifics of what Katherine & her husband J.P. are growing, how they are applying their values of land stewardship in this unique urban/rural/intensive agriculture environment & what they have learned over the past 2 seasons.

After the talk, we will each use fresh flowers from their field to make a small seasonal floral arrangement to take home. Please bring a pair of secateurs if you have them & a clean jar to put your floral arrangement into.  

The address for the farm is 4972 Byrne Rd. Folks can park on Byrne Rd. & enter the farm through a woodchipped driveway next to a purple shed with a red roof.  

A few safety / housekeeping notes regarding the farm: 

• Please wear closed-toed shoes that are good for walking on uneven surfaces
• There are bees & wasps on site, if anyone has a serious allergy, please come prepared
• It is a working farm with some hazards - please stay on designated paths & please don't wander into other people's fields
• We have a simple sawdust composting toilet available for folks to use if need be
• As always, please dress for the weather!

It might require a bit of car-pooling and bringing some extra chairs, but this will be a great way to round out the summer. 

Please let us know if you are coming at grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com— Katherine needs to know how many guests to expect — and if you need a ride or will provide a ride for others. If it’s easy for you to take along a chair or two, please do.

Cheers,

Penny

This Thursday, June 8th, Vicky Earle

 We’ll be having a Grandview Garden Club meeting this coming Thursday, June 8th, in person! We will meet at 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre, which is right across from the Info Centre at Brit on your left if you’re walking west from the Drive, before you get to the library. 

Note the time is 7:30! (There’s another Brit program in that room until 7:30.)

This month's speaker is Vicky Earle, a natural science, medical, and botanical illustrator. She delights in connecting people to nature through art. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in medical illustration and biocommunications, she moved to Vancouver. She has worked in health care for thirty years. She is now dedicated to sharing natural history stories that take place evry day all around us. Her goal is to help foster curiosity and an affinity for the natural world by encouraging people to follow their own art practice.

Vicky's preferred medium is watercolour on paper, occasionally using metalpoint and mixed media. She has kept sketchbooks throughout her career and began a dedicated sketchbook journal practice in 2014. To see her current projects and artwork, visit her website at drawinnature.com and follow her on Instagram @drawinnature.

She has recently published a new book Exploring Vancouver Naturehoods: An Artist’s Sketchbook Journal and she will bring copies of her book to sell.

Because this will be a face-to-face meeting, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so do bring your friends.

As usual, we’ll have tea and cookies and door prizes. Try to remember to bring your own tea cup and a sample of something from your garden that is looking splendid on the day of our meeting.

This Thursday (May 11th), Egan Davis!

 Hi Folks,

We’ll be having a Grandview Garden Club meeting this coming Thursday, May 11th, in person! We will meet at 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre, which is right across from the Info Centre at Brit on your left if you’re walking west from the Drive, before you get to the library. 

Note the time is 7:30! (There’s another Brit program in that room until 7:30.)

This month's speaker is the first speaker we ever had at Grandview Garden Club, the wonderful Egan Davis.

His topic will be "Plants that Thrive in Adverse Conditions”.

Gardeners have always grown plants in tough conditions, but with extreme weather associated with climate change there are more extreme horticultural challenges. Egan will discuss how to find solutions for growing landscape plants in the most adverse garden conditions. Rather than focusing on a list of good plants for tough locations, Egan will analyze principles associated with plant establishment and ecological systems.  

Egan Davis has a lifelong passion for horticulture. Currently, he is the Parks Operations Manager for the City of Richmond. As a horticulture instructor, Egan has taught the Horticulture Education Program at UBC Botanical Garden, in the UBC Urban Forestry Program and through VanDusen Botanical Garden’s Adult Education Program.As a horticulture practitioner, Egan has had leadership roles at VanDusen Botanical Garden, Park & Tilford Gardens, and in the private landscape horticulture industry. He is active in the industry on various committees and boards and has participated in local and international projects. Egan’s practical background and rich understanding of the plant world inform a unique and innovative perspective on the horticulture industry.

Because it’s face-to-face, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so do bring your friends.

As usual, we’ll have tea and cookies and door prizes. If you remember, bring your own tea cup and a sample of something from your garden that is looking splendid on the day of our meeting.

Cheers,

Penny, Moira, Christine

Penny Street

grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com 

Hardy Plant Study Weekend!

 

Grandview Garden Club Plant Sale, May 7th!

 

April 13th meeting & Figaro's Garden Workshops

 Hi Folks,

We’ll be having a Grandview Garden Club meeting this coming Thursday, April 13th, in person! We will meet at 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre. This is right across from the Info Centre at Brit on your left if you’re walking west from the Drive, before you get to the library. 

Note the time is 7:30!

Our speaker is GGC member Betsy Jones, artist and Master Gardener. Betsy studied Graphic Design and Communication Arts at Douglas College, and has twice been invited to Stiwdio Maelor in Wales, UK as an Artist in Residence. She will share some of her botanical art as well as her experiences in Wales, including her visit to the printmaking department at the beautiful University of Aberystwyth and to Bodnant Garden, an exceptional 80-acre National Trust property. Because it’s face-to-face, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so bring your friends.

We’ll have tea and cookies and door prizes. It’ll be just like the old days, pre-Covid!

Also, I received this timely message from GGC member Andrea Bellamy, below, and thought you all would be keen on some of the workshops Figaro’s will be offering this spring. (Apologies if you’re already on Fig’s mailing list and receive this info twice…)

Cheers,

Penny

Penny Street

grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com

Hi Penny,

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone at my first meeting with the club next week, but in the meantime I wanted to introduce myself and let you know about some upcoming events that may be of interest to members. I’ve recently joined the team at Figaro’s Garden (a dream job, really, after nearly two decades in post-secondary education coupled with a similar length of time doing garden writing and teaching). Part of my role at Fig’s is to organize workshops, and we’ve got three coming up this month:

• Houseplant Repotting Clinic - April 12
• Earth Day Tree Walk - April 22 (Free; marks the launch of our new Waste-free Growing line of products* and the kick off of our East Van Tree Mapping project**)
• Small-Space Tree & Shrub Workshop - April 26 The first in a series of small-space gardening workshops)

*A line of products packaged in responsible, plastic-free (and in some cases, refillable) packaging. The 21 products include indoor, outdoor, and specialty potting soils; fertilizers and amendments; and bird seed. 

**Hartley, the owner of Figaro’s Garden, has had the idea for an East Van Tree Map simmering at the back of his creative brain for years. Think of it as a map of interesting, rare, and unusual trees around the neighbourhood — kind of like those Hollywood Stars maps, but for stellar trees. If members know of any outstanding, publicly viewable trees in Grandview Woodlands, we’d love to hear about them.

Thanks, Penny! Please share part or all if appropriate.

Cheers,

Andrea

Upcoming Events and Activities

Hello and Happy Spring (as of 2:24 p.m. March 20th!) —

Save these Dates!  If you put them on your calendar now, you won’t forget them.

Thursday, April 13th

Our next Grandview Garden Club meeting will be Thursday, April 13th, in person & face-to-face, 7:30, at the 55+ Room at Britannia Centre. The speaker is GGC member Betsy Jones, artist and Master Gardener. Betsy studied Graphic Design and Communication Arts at Douglas College, and has twice been invited to Stiwdio Maelor in Wales, UK as an Artist in Residence. She will share some of her botanical art as well as her experiences in Wales, including her visit to the printmaking department at the beautiful University of Aberystwyth and to Bodnant Garden, an exceptional 80-acre National Trust property.  Because it’s face-to-face, we will be allowing $4 drop-ins, so you'll be welcome even if you aren't a member for 2023.

Saturday, May 6th

Grandview-Woodland Area Council (GWAC’s) Annual General Meeting. Attend! Or you may want to run or could encourage a friend to to run for the GWAC board. See the GWAC Website for details. 

Also Saturday, May 6th

The Seed to Sky Plant Sale, 11;00-2:00, Cityview Church, 4370 Sophia Street (at 28th) – A great selection of plants, including perennials, herbs, and veggie starts. Cash only and bring a container to carry your plants!

Saturday, May 13th

VanDusen is hosting a small plant sale this year, 10:00-4:00, at Bloedel Conservatory Plaza at Queen Elizabeth Park, featuring food plants for humans and pollinators. 

Sunday, May 14th, Mother’s Day 

Grandview Garden Club’s Annual Plant Sale will take place at our usual location on Rose Street. A large selection of unusual plants, perennials, herbs, annual flowers, and veggie starts. Cash only and bring a container to carry your plants!

Sunday, June 18th, Father’s Day

The East Vancouver Garden Tour of a dozen or so splendid private gardens in East Van. Tickets are $20 and will be available at Figaro’s, online, and through Britannia. For more info, email or visit the website.

Our March 2023 Meeting

We’re hosting this month’s Grandview Garden Club meeting on Zoom. The meeting will start at 7:00 p.m. to accommodate our speaker, entomologist and wasp expert, Rob Longair who will be joining us from Ontario.

Rob has spent almost half a century studying insect behaviour, ecology, and diversity, including doing field research in Canada, the western United States, West Africa, and Belize. He developed an appreciation for what E.O. Wilson called “the little things that run the world” during an undergraduate degree at Queen’s University and has focused on insects ever since. He is particularly interested in the behaviour of solitary and social wasps, although he concentrates on solitary species, which are less likely to sting him. After retiring from a faculty position at University of Calgary, where he spent 27 years teaching a wide variety of courses, his favourite of which were field courses, he returned to the Ottawa area where he grew up. He now lives on an acre and a quarter, which he has allowed to revert to meadow from its formerly manicured state. He currently volunteers at the Canadian National Collection of Insects and Arachnids in Ottawa.

Here’s a description of Rob's talk, “Wasps in the Garden: The Furies, Pest Control, or Just Doing Their Best To Make More?”:

For many people, the sight of a wasp brings nervousness or, at worst, sheer terror. Will it sting me? What good are these things, anyway? Tonight, we’ll see if we can answer those questions and a few others. What, exactly, is a wasp? How do they help maintain populations of pests (real pests) in the garden or fields at numbers that allow us to grow what we want, at least most of the time. We’ll take a look at some species of wasps that lay their eggs in other insects, some that make nests by themselves and store food for their young, or the most familiar, and most feared, that live in groups of mostly sisters and feed their young with vast quantities of insects, many of which would be eating our flowers and vegetables. No, they aren’t all our friends, doing just what we want. And yes, we’ll even mention those big, disturbing hornets that have recently been identified not too far from Vancouver.

Zoom start time this month will be 7:00. We will be meeting on Zoom and our meeting link will only be sent to current members. If you'd like to join before the meeting, we'll send you the link.

(Note: this will be our last meeting via Zoom for the time being. Next month we will return to in-person meetings at the Britannia 55+ Centre. Our start times then will be 7:30 P.M. because there’s another Britannia program in the space that ends after 7:00. Once we’re meeting face-to-face again, we can resume the $4 drop-ins so people who aren’t yet members can come to the occasional meeting. We had to suspend drop-ins during Zoom/Covid, so it’ll be good to have them back. Do bring your non-member friends from April onward.)

Cheers,

Penny

PS - Our GGC Annual Plant Sale will be on Sunday, May 14th, at our usual venue on Rose St. If you are dividing plants or starting seedlings this spring, please pot up any extras for the sale. We’ll provide more details in our April meeting message.

Please note: We will not be able to accept plant/soil donations from any members who live in the Japanese Beetle regulated area west of Clark Drive. 

See this map: https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/japanese-beetle-regulated-area.pdf

And plan ahead to join us for our East Vancouver Garden Tour. We’re once again having it on Father’s Day, which, this year, is Sunday, June 18th. Please note it on your calendar and we’ll tell you more about it soon.

grandviewgardenclub@gmail.com