The West Chicago Garden Club

By Marilyn Santos McNabb

Gardening this July is not easy, with the excessive heat and all the heavy rain, we struggle to keep up with the weeding, pruning, and deadheading! After the successful removal of a huge pile of “garden debris” The Kruse Crew did manage to install a couple of imaginative compost bins, one made of dog play fences and garden fence panels; the other a donated compost bin from Kerry! We will continue to find other means to collect and compost our garden trimmings to showcase how these methods can be applied to other people’s yards.

What do we, the Kruse Crew, do in July? We deadhead, cut back plants to encourage a second flush of blooms, check what plants need to be divided in the fall, what plants need to be moved because they’ve been crowded out, admire the color combinations of the pots, eat cake and cookies during breaks, or just enjoy how the garden is coming about!

Talk about application! We want to focus our attention this month on the educational side of volunteering. We continue to learn not just from our monthly speakers, visits to other’s gardens on our Twilight Tuesdays, field trips to different nurseries but also from *each other*! Kruse house is the application side of all this knowledge, not just to showcase the Museum but to showcase plants, techniques, color combinations, and color successions that you might be apprehensive in starting in your own home.

In volunteering, we learn firsthand what the most aggressive weeds are, what to plant in the front of the garden, the back of the garden, what colors go well, when to divide plants, winter-sowing, composting, etc! We experience firsthand successes and failures! So, if you want to get your hands dirty, join us for a couple of hours, maybe weekly, maybe once or twice a month, a couple times in the summer, we don’t ask for much! You might gain a new plant, some seeds, or a tremendous knowledge of gardening! If you have questions or are interested in volunteering, please talk to Christina, Kerry, Dee, Jean Ann, Chris, Barbara, Mary A, Judy, or Marilyn at the President’s picnic.

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