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Our Community Permaculture Garden Development now has its own
page, seperate from this Garden Club page. Please click here to check out our Community Garden!
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LINKS TO THE WRITE-UPS OF PAST GARDEN CLUB PRESENTATIONS.
Just click on them to learn and enjoy all these fabulous contributions!
Alcalde Sustainable Agriculture Center
Drip Irrigation by Kartar Singh
Faboulous Compost by Kartar Singh & Simple Compost by SFG
Fertilizer
Firescaping
"Forcing" Bulbs to Bloom Indoors in the Winter
Gardeners Share Tips & Opportunities
Gardening for the Month
Grass! Marshall's Great, Green Efforts to Create Siri Gian's Lawn!
Grasshopper Discussion
Growing Vegetables--Joe's Method, from the farm stand across from Walmart!
Hari Prem Singh on Gardening
How to Grow Vegetables, by Hari Prem Singh
Intuitive Garden Design with Rand Lee
Intuitive Gardening, Part 2: Making Your Dream Garden a Reality! with Rand Lee
Jerry Baker Garden Video
Lunar Planting and Transplanting
Nam Nidhan Kaur's Fool Proof Gardening in NM
Oriental Food Therapy with Dr. Seva Simran Siri Singh!
Permaculture with Scott Pittman
Raised Garden Beds
Sacred Gardens at Ram Das Puri
Satya Kaur's Surprising Ground Covers
Siri Hari's Garden!
Tarn Taran Kaur's All Around Gardening!
Tony Vadlez on Fruit Trees, Siri Gian's Yard, & Christie's Round Up Toxicity
Tree Seedlings from New Mexico Forestry
XeriscapeConference 2006
Xeriscape Conference 2007
From earlier Garden
Club Gatherings:
LADIES’ CAMP GARDEN PROJECT 2006
On April 22, 2006, after our tour
of Satya’s garden, we trooped over to Ladies’ Camp where Deva Kaur from Florida was heading up a project to create a beautifully
inviting area for ladies to “peanut” together between the Gold House and the other trailers. Megaeth and Guru Nam Kaur had already begun plotting it, and then when the “garden army” arrived,
we continued raking leaves and helping with the planning.
At this point, its design is an oval
of gravel with bench and chair seating. It may be surrounded by a short wall
to provide a perimeter with even more seating. And the area may be canopied with
a bright Indian tent top during Ladies Camp! Then outside the walls, we are figuring
a colorful perennial border with a row of big rocks along the edge to protect the flowers from the threat of car wheels.
And Deva Kaur has bought four gorgeous,
huge blue water-like glazed containers to stuff with bright annuals this summer. We
suggested that installing drip irrigation would be a worthwhile investment from the beginning.
And while we were there, Tarn Taran Kaur sent down some lovely plants from her own garden to give it a good start!
And so, our garden club has associated
ourselves with this most worthwhile seva project! If you have any ideas or want
to help, please contact the project’s most capable leader, Deva Kaur from Fort
Lauderdale, FL. Her home
contact is deva@khalsa.com, and 954-261-4192. She will be here for
the week at Khalsa Council, so through Tues. her phone is 753-9683, and after that at 747-6311.
WORK TOGETHER—EXCHANGE HOURS!!
We all agreed that it was so much
more fun and energizing to work together on that Ladies' Camp project than it would have been to do the same work by ourselves
in our own gardens. To that end, Guru Meher Kaur (newsletter) is devising a practical
method of bookkeeping to post on the web so that we can create a pool to trade or barter hours with each other! Any ideas on that, please contact her. Khalsa44@hotmail.com, 747-1476.
PLANT SHARING
This is the
method we came up with at the meeting. If you would like to kindly share your
great abundance of plants, please let me know sirigian@valornet.com, 753-8194, along with the kind of plants that you are offering, plus your phone number and e-mail address. Then I will advertise this great opportunity to everyone. So,
whoever wants the plants will contact the plant sharer to make arrangements to go to their house to pick up their plant boon!
Our very
first offering is from TarnTaran Kaur, famed for her gorgeous garden! Her number
is 747-7411.
The Sunset Western Garden Book--
The "Gardener's Bible"
I found
this book used and in good condition at Amazon.com for $.85, plus $3.50 postage!
Look for Guru Meher Kaur's New GARDENING FOR THE MONTH Page!!
Starting with the upcoming month of May, Guru Meher Kaur (newsletter) we will be sending
out a page of gardening tasks and other news that offers a heads up for the upcoming month! Please see the first
May issue that she kindly handed out at our April 22 gathering on www.sirigian.com/garden_month.html.
Gathering April 1, 2006
Well,
what a lovely gathering we had at Guru Terath Kaur’s home Saturday morning, April 1!
We doubled our numbers to 8 participants!
Marshal,
our very well known, respected and experienced gardener gave us a wonderful presentation on Xeriscape! He also generously made available lots of great printed information from all our local nurseries. Some highlights of his informative and poetic talk were:
- Group plants by their cultural needs, e.g. water, sun, soil quality.
- Our native soil is rich in minerals and naturally alkaline with no organic material. The categories are clay, sandy, and caliche (stony), or a mixture of any of these.
- Don’t fertilize or over water native plants. But
the first year, do water them until they are established; carefully monitor them.
- Xeric plants do well in heat, cold, wind and drought—just what we have!
- You can amend your soil for non-native plants.
You only have to amend the dirt in the hole you put the plant in; just make the hole a little larger than you would
otherwise.
- The “Sunset Western Garden Book” is the Bible of local gardeners.
- Almost
any vegetables do well in containers.
- Raised beds and containers with good soil are great to reduce weeds, hold water and
give nutrients to the plants.
- Deva Kaur has a rototiller for rent.
- Guru Terath Kaur has big bags of mulch made from apple trees available for a most reasonable
$3 per bag.
- Every plant needs mulch in NM—bark, wood chips, rocks, etc.
- Good topsoil is 1/3 clay, 1/3 sand, and 1/3 organic material, and it can be spread 2-3
inches thick. Truckloads of topsoil and other garden material are available from
Garcia’s Landscaping near Alcalde.
- May 15 is our last safe freeze date.
Grasshopper
Control Discussion:
- Gurbani Kaur is looking into getting a group, bulk, pre-paid order of Nolo Bait. It is a powder that you sprinkle around your property.
Baby grasshoppers eat this and it destroys their insides. Then when mature
grasshoppers eat the dead ones, the same thing occurs to them. It’s best
if your neighbors do this treatment as well.
- Mrs. Satya Kaur is looking into the use of tobacco juice, made by soaking chewing tobacco
in water.
- Marshal collects his grasshoppers by hand and destroys them every morning—very
organic, but not easy.
- Guru Prem Kaur has Guinea hens that eat all the bugs in her yard. Starting May 31, the feed store on this end of Riverside Drive will have baby Guinea chicks for sale for about $5 each. But be careful that dogs and cats don’t eat the chicks! Also
be sure that your neighbors don’t mind them wandering into their yards.
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In March 2006, these are the main areas of interest that we came up with:
- Information, ideas and education on Xeriscape—low
water gardening. Perhaps have a workshop.
- How to best prepare our soil.
- Indoor plants—care and maintenance.
- Like to talk about plants and gardening
with others.
- Share our own overgrown plant materials
(e.g. dividing bulbs, lamb’s ears, iris, etc.).
- Bulk order together (e.g. bulbs, plants,
seeds, mulch, grasshopper control, topsoil).
- Figure out how to help each other.
- Visit some special gardens together, e.g.
Nam Nidhan K., Tarn Taran K., Siri Hari K., Nirbhe K., Dr. Grist in Santa Fe,
some notable local Xeriscape gardens.
- Plant some lovely places on the ashram
grounds.
- Learn how best to choose and grow vegetables.
- Explore how to design a garden from scratch.
- How
to best do container gardens.
Does
this list cover all your interests?
Guru
Terath Kaur called Santa Fe Greenhouses to find out if someone on their staff could come to talk to us. She reported,
“They are done with workshops until June, but they are willing to have a speaker come out, free of charge. We
would need to have 20-30 participants to make it worth their while. They can speak on anything we want. So, that
is something I think we can grow into, once we get more people, and maybe people would want to come even if they are not in
the club.” We would probably make this opportunity available to the whole community, and find out if the Espanola
Garden Club (if they still are around) would like to participate as well.
We all felt that the www.SantaFeGreenhouses.com two e-newsletters, their High Country Gardens
catalog of Xeriscape plants and their Saturday afternoon seminars (given during the winter) would be great helps for us, along
with various books that we found there and at Lowe’s.
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