GNOMES Garden Club September 2026

Hey everyone - Before we cover what we did in Garden Club, I want to put in another plug for our GNOME Society Nature Festival on October 24, 10-2pm.  We'll have something for everyone in the family you can check out the schedule at the link above.  There will, of course, be give-aways & goodie bags, and we're working on having food at this shindig, because what's a shindig without food?  The event is free, but donations are always welcome.

Pollinator Plant Kit pick up will be at the Nature Fest (you must pre-order by 9/23 if you want one).  

We're still looking for volunteers who are willing to help out - even if you can't make it for the whole event, we'd love to have you help out where you can. Where we need the most help: 

1) AV help with the projector - basically making sure the presentations are loaded and the microphone is working.

2) set up/tear down of tables & canopies

3) someone to float around the various tables so that people can take breaks to go to the bathroom or get food or whatever. 

If interested in helping out, please reach out to Carol at AndersonMillNA@gmail.com

We will be skipping October for Garden Club (because we're doing the Nature Festival in its place), so our next meeting will be in November.

Garden Club Meeting summary

We had an awesome time yesterday at Garden Club.  Sharon (shown below in the Hawaiian shirt on the left) provided an awesome spread of food (not pictured) and even included some citrus infused water for us all to drink!  First we did our crazy garden hats competition with young Amelia being the only one to don a fascinator.  John took home the prize with his GNOME Society themed hat (AMNA is now known as GNOMES - Good Neighbors of anderson Mill Enrichment Society), in which his wife helped sew on a bunch of little ceramic gnomes on his hat to ensure they didn't fall off.

Following the hats competition, we moved into making seed balls (We will have a table at our Nature Festival on Oct 24 10-2pm - come visit us!)

I used the Lady Bird Wildflower Recipe as the base:

3T clay

1T compost

1T sand

1/2 t seeds

enough water to form a dough

The amount above should make roughly 10 balls - you're aiming for small M&M-sized balls that will easily break apart when it rains, not 1 golf ball which will take many rainstorms to break apart.  On the plus side, balls will fly further when you throw them (so they're great for "guerilla gardening"), you're able to place them more precisely if that's your thing, and they also prevent birds and bugs from eating all the seeds before they germinate.  That being said, if you are prepping an area for wildflowers (as in you're already scraping the dirt, spreading & tamping the seed, plus watering), there isn't any proof that balls are better over doing your best Maria from Sound of Music impression.

Finally, thanks to Daria, we were able to do some door prize give aways of potting soil, garden soil, and seed starter medium.

Thanks for joining us this month!

Katina & Cathy