Concord Garden Club MARCH 2025 UPDATES AND EVENTS

The days are getting longer!

remember, clocks change to daylight Savings Time

Sunday, March 9th!!

President's Message

We had a light agenda at yesterday’s Garden Club Board meeting but, even so, I knew the meeting would last the full 1.5 hours. Once we get together, this great group of women make the time fly. I’m going to talk more about getting involved in running the Club next month, but for right now I wanted to point out one position I know we are looking to fill next year (our Garden Club year begins in June). We will need someone to take over as Facebook and Instagram administrator. We use Facebook to promote Art & Bloom, to share information from other garden clubs, sometimes to post pictures. We don’t post often, but in the last 90 days over 5,000 people visited our page. This is exposure we need to reach potential new members and to stay engaged with the public.

If you might be interested, please reach out to me (bgjam@comcast.net) or to Gayle Kimball (gaylekimballjd@gmail.com).

-- Gena

Upcoming Events

March Meeting

Hydrangeas & Spring Clean Up with Jess Zander

Thursday, Mar 27, 2025,

1:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Woman's Club of Concord,

44 Pleasant St,

Concord, NH 03301

Jessica Zander is a garden coach and consultant based in the Boston area (zone 6b), also doing virtual consultations all over the country and Canada.

She has been gardening since the early 1990s and started You Can Do It Gardening in 2022, to help people feel more confident about doing it themselves. With a passion for gardening and helping others discover the joy of it, she teaches skills, provides guidance and suggestions, and works collaboratively and efficiently with clients both in person and virtually to make small and large improvements in their outdoor spaces. It is one of her greatest joys to help people become more confident gardeners.

Please RSVP here

Questions? Contact Johane Telgener - jtelgener020@gmail.com

April Meeting

Speaker -- Abby Goode with the NH Humanities Council

Thursday, April 10, 2025

4:30 PM – 7:00 PM

Cocktails at 4:30 PM, Program begins at 5:15 PM

Woman's Club of Concord

44 Pleasant St, Concord

This is an interactive program that begins with a discussion of current ideas about sustainability and then examines Thomas Jefferson’s vision of American agriculture abundance. We will explore this particularly eugenic conception of sustainability and discuss what new or different versions of sustainability might prove more useful in our current moment.

RSVP here

Questions? Contact Linda Gilbert - lvgilbert@comcast.net

May Meeting

Stay tuned for information about a May presentation at Gibson's Bookstore that's in the works --

June -

Annual Meeting

Thursday, June 5, 2025

9:30-11:00am

Woman's Club of Concord

44 Pleasant Street

Please plan to attend our Annual Meeting to elect new officers and committee chairs and conduct the Club's business.

Coffee and pastries will be provided.

We will also have a plant and garden items exchange, so bring cuttings, seeds, pots and other items to trade with other members.

Program Chair: Gena Cohen Moses

Please RSVP here

Thank you!

Later in June --

Field Trip

to the Gardens of Laura Trowbridge

Thursday, June 19, 2025

11:00am

29 Cornish Road

Peterborough, NH

Carpooling at the Clinton Street Park & Ride, 10am

Laura Trowbridge is a garden designer who works primarily on the gardens of historic homes. Her own extensive gardens, developed over the past 35 years, have been featured on the Garden Conservancy Open Days tours. She has authored articles for Fine Gardening, and her work has been featured in Country Gardens, New Hampshire Home, and Living the Country Life.

She speaks regularly to garden clubs about garden design and how to incorporate more annuals and tropicals into your garden. Laura's passion for annuals leads her to change her gardens significantly from year to year. Every spring she drives to nurseries all over New England to buy new and exotic plants.

You can read more about Laura and her work at LauraTrowbridge.com

Program Chair -- Lauren Savage

RSVP opportunity to come.

Community Information and

Volunteer Corner

Ruth Perencevich reminds us that the Concord Public Library Book Sale shelves are a great place to shop for newer and interesting older books -- currently there are some wonderful gardening books on the sale shelves, which are located in the library lobby.

The UNH Master Gardener Program is offering monthly gardening workshops now through October at the NH Audubon’s Massabesic Center in Auburn, NH. If you are interested in carpooling to these programs, please send a message to the Club’s email address, concordgardenclubnh@gmail.com and we will try to facilitate.

Click here for descriptions of the workshops and registration information.

CIRCLE PROGRAM is looking for volunteer mentors in the Concord area:

Circle Program is a non-profit organization in their 32nd year that provides new opportunities to socially and financially disadvantaged girls and teens in the Lakes Region and greater Concord areas of NH. They do this by offering girls and teens a unique combination of residential summer camp, and 1:1 mentoring, all 100% tuition free. They strive to equip girls and teens with the tools they need to become confidently engaged in their community and live to their full potential.

Please visit their website, www.circleprogram.org to apply or give Lisa Berton (Mentor Coordinator) a call at 603-536-4244. She would love to speak with you about their mentoring program and send you an application!

Membership News

Garden Club member Pat Dahme is ill and has been moved to a Nursing facility. Her family are welcoming visitors -- if you know Pat and would like to visit, please contact Millie LaFontaine or Gretchen Coughlin for more information.

Gardening in March

The following is excerpted from Margaret Roach's gardening website, "A Way to Garden". Margaret writes a gardening column for the New York Times and, like us, gardens in Zone 5b.

Except in frost-free zones, there are really two March chores lists: one labeled, “If frozen…” and the other, “If thawed…” Many tasks are only to be started if and when the snow melts, the ground defrosts, and mud starts to drain off and dry. If and when. Don’t walk or work in soggy soil, or tread on sodden or frozen lawns unnecessarily. Love your soil, and protect it.

Plus: delaying cleanup a little bit is better for beneficial insects and spiders who are overwintering.

Rake debris carefully off beds that hold earliest bloomers first, like where bulbs are trying to push up through sodden leaves and such, or where triilliums and other ephemerals are growing. DELAY RAKING A FEW DAYS, to support beneficial insects. “Wait until after several 50-degree-Fahrenheit spring days to clean up again,” advised The Habitat Network (the former program from Cornell and the Nature Conservancy). Doug Tallamy agrees, but explains there is no one perfect moment that suits every creature out there, of course. Some overwintering insects, notably bees and certain butterflies and moths, are triggered by a steady stream of 50-degree days to get moving. Once they do, often after resting in leaf litter or under tree bark or even inside goldenrod galls, for example, they’re no longer as vulnerable to our spring-cleaning actions that might kill them, or move them away from their host plant.
Also target earliest bloomers like Euphorbia for immediate cutbacks. Nudge them to push anew from the base with a severe end-of-winter haircut. Even later bloomers that grow from dense, cushion-like crowns (as Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’ does) will be easier to clean up now than once they start to push.
Cut back evergreen or otherwise-persistent perennial foliage. Leaves of European ginger (Asarum europaeum), Helleborus, and Epimedium, for instance, will soon be replaced with a fresh flush. Yes, the plant will do just fine even if you leave it on, but many with early blooms are better viewed minus all the nasty old foliage.
Cut down ornamental grasses. Mice and other garden undesirables are thinking it’s the Maternity Ward in there, I fear, so off with their heads (the grasses’, that is), right by the base, ASAP.
Empty bird boxes. Bluebirds won’t accept a dirty box, and I always hope for at least one family a year. Wear a glove when you do this task; more than one nesting mouse has run up my arm in the process. Ugh.
Muck fallen leaves from water gardens. This annual ritual, accomplished gently and mindfully with endless swoops of a fish net, may dig up more than debris (like salamanders, wood frog eggs, tadpoles). I’ll get the filters and pumps running, too, once sub-freezing nights cease.
If you use mulch, order bulk mulch from a local source for delivery—skipping all those plastic bags, and all that fuel used trucking bark chips across the nation.
Seed starting. Check out this handy guide.