Guy’s Greetings Happy New Year!
I want to take this time to say thank you for your trust in me to be president of the Patchogue Garden Club and to welcome our new board members. They are Diane Voland, 1st Vice President; June Petruccelli, 2nd Vice President; Carol Tvelia, Treasurer; Babette Bishop, Recording Secretary; Carolyn Savastano, Corresponding Secretary; and Maryann Tchinnis, Parliamentarian.
I would be remiss not to thank Jo Miller for her continuing efforts in collecting, organizing, and maintaining the history of the Patchogue Garden Club and Carol Tvelia and her entire board for their guidance for the past two years.
As we look forward to the beginning of a new gardening season, we also look forward to the renewal of our government and the call of service. We are an organization of gardeners, but also of our community. I ask that we all become involved, no matter how small task. We can not do it alone. I look forward to serving the Patchogue Garden Club, but most of all, to bringing service to our community.
Mark the Date
Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 7 PM, general meeting at Hagerman Fire Department, on the corner of Dunton Avenue and Oakdale Avenue. Please bring your Chinese Auction baskets and other contributions to this meeting. You may also drop them at Georgia Dulmovits’ house, 168 E. Lakewood, Patchogue. Reservations will also be taken; bring check for $32 payable to Patchogue Garden Club or cash. Karen Ferb is collecting payment.
Thursday, March 12, 2009, 10:30 AM, annual “Think Spring” speaker, luncheon and raffle. Mediterranean Manor, tickets $32.00 For more information, call Georgia Dulmovits (289-0867) or Arlene Lamberti (289-3667). If you have a dietary problem, please let me know so I can talk with the Manor and get back to you. I wish to thank you all for your help in donating baskets, other prizes, and gift certificates. This year we have 24 members on our committee, and they worked really hard. Great group! To all our members, thank you for your continued support. I hope to see you at the luncheon and the meeting. Georgia
October Meeting in a Flash
At the October meeting, Dick Richardson spoke very informatively about his hobby, Purple Martins, one of America’s best known and most desired birds. They are treasured for their graceful flight, social antics, gurgling song, and insect-eating habits. Purple Martins are a unique part of our natural history, managed by humans longer than any other species of songbird. They depend on human-supplied housing for nesting. For further information, see the Web site of the Purple Martin Conservation Association, www.purplemartin.org. We have a Purple Martin house, courtesy of the Rothsteins, to put up at the Winona Cottage when the time comes.
Gardening Accomplishments of 2008The gardening season of 2008 was a busy one for our Terry Street Community Garden. Beginning with the opening of the garden on April 26 and ending with the closing on November 1, our members continued to work on completing the garden extension and on making needed repairs to our lighting, missing bench, and shed as well as on maintaining the existing garden. Work on the extension included mulching, metal edging, sod installation, and replacing the shed door with an exterior version as well as performing ongoing maintenance.
Christmas House Tour 2008 Since the last newsletter we had our second Christmas house tour, which was very successful. The Historical Society participated by opening and decorating the Swan River School House, 150 years old in 2008. We have received a lovely acknowledgement from Anita Timm: “Once again the Garden Club has hit a homerun! The Christmas House Tour was wonderful again. The hosts were all so gracious, and each house beautifully and uniquely decorated. It is very exciting hat Patchogue has so many lovely homes and such nice people willing to share with us. I’m looking forward to the spring luncheon and then the summer garden tour. Congratulations on a job well done again, and best wishes for success in all your coming events. Hope you have your yard sale again.” Thanks, Anita!
Serious Dirt from Richard Waldman
Krulwich on Science by Robert KrulwichWho knew that NASA, charged with looking deep into space, also looks backward at us? For years, NASA satellites have been snapping photos of our oceans, mountains and forests and sharing them with ecologists and biologists.As a result, says ecology professor Nalini Nadkarni of The Evergreen State College in Washington, "Some of the finest forest ecology studies being carried out today are the result of NASA-funded multidisciplinary collaborations." For example, because of NASA, we can calculate roughly how many trees we have on Earth. Trees, both leafy and otherwise, reflect sunshine in very particular patterns, making it possible for satellites to map and computers to count strips of land where trees are. Biologists can then sample those places, assume a tree density, multiply by acre or hectare, and calculate that in 2005 there were ~ 400,246,300,201 trees on our globe. It's a cool question and easy to calculate. Nadkarni looked up the world'shuman population as of Dec. 31 and found that on that day we numbered 6,456,789,877. She figured that the world supports 61 trees per person. When we talked, she was thrilled. "Hooray!" she said, "I get more than one tree!" Apparently, before she'd done the numbers, she had assumed that with people waxing and trees waning, the count would have been slimmer. "I severely hoped that there was more than one tree [per] person," she says, "but I feared and thought that there would be fewer." But when Nadkarni sat down with her husband, Jack, a microbiologist at Evergreen State, to tell him the good news, he was less impressed with the ratio of trees to people. "He looked at me in his quiet, slow sort of way and said, 'Well, you know, I don't know. We use that much in a couple of seasons in our wood stove and the amount of paper that comes off the printer and the lumber that made our home — so maybe it's not so many." This got Nadkarniwondering: How much of our 61-tree allotment does an American use in a lifetime? All of it? Some of it? More than 61? She didn't know. So she asked her graduate students to make a list of tree-based products — and they came up with a list so long, it almost never stops. Here's some of what they found: baseball bats, barrels, books, blocks, benches, crutches, coffee filters, guitars, grocery bags, pencils, pine oil, beds, billboards, buttons, candy wrappers, buttons, chewing gum, cork, crayons, egg cartons, fruit pie filling, kites, linoleum, luggage, paper, pingpong balls, chopsticks, rubber, tambourines, telephone books, tires, toilet paper, turpentine, xylophones and yo-yos. For the moment it is impossible to figure out how much woody stuff is found in our products. It is obvious that Americans gobble up more wood than Indians or Africans, but how much more is hard to say. Still, Nadkarni cautions that thinking about wood consumption is not like thinking about oil consumption. This is not necessarily a sad story. "I don't want people to feel guilty about their relationships with trees. After all, trees are not like oil. They are renewable. If you think we are using up more than our 61-each allotment (and that is her guess, based on the gradual reduction of forest acreage), you can always plant a few more. We may be falling behind in our tree count, but it's not only possible, it's deeply appealing, to go out with seed and shovel and repair the damage.
Road Trip: NYBG The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern February 28 – April 12, 2009Thousands of brilliantly colored orchids and the lush tropical setting of a contemporary Brazilian garden await visitors to this year’s Orchid Show in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. This year’s exhibition, the 7th annual, is designed by noted Miami-based landscape architect Raymond Jungles. In creating the display he has drawn on his years of work with renowned Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Fountains, pools, and colorful mosaics are combined with graceful palms, delicate orchids, bromeliads, and other native plants of Brazil, which are also highlighted throughout the Conservatory. Stay tuned to http://www.nybg.org/ for details. See also www.raymondjungles.com/ and www.maria-brazil.org/sitio_roberto_burle_marx.htm.
NYBG EducationSpecial Lecture Series American Gardening 2009 The New York Botanical Garden presents its tenth annual Thursday morning lecture series this winter. A wellrounded garden includes diverse plants: native and exotic, woody and herbaceous, temperate and tropical. In this series, accomplished plant breeders, explorers, and horticulturists introduce you to their favorite plants, providing something for every niche in your garden. www.nybg.org or call 718-817-8747.
BBG Winter Classes for Adults Browse the many classes offered for winter and spring by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at http://www.bbg.org/edu/adult/. You will be amazed at the breadth of the offerings, from urban garden design to painting and pastels to bird watching, bonsai, and botany.Road Trip: Plan Ahead The 2009 Philadelphia Flower Show, “Bella Italia”, is scheduled for March 1 through March 8 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. See http://www.theflowershow.com/showinfo/index.html for details, tickets, and reservations.
Nature has undoubtedly mastered the art of winter gardening and even the most experienced gardeners can learn from the unrestrained beauty around them." - Vincent A. Simeone
Timely Tips for January
- Rework your garden design and order from catalogs
- Clean and sharpen your tools
- Review last year's journal and start a new one for this year by recording your seed/plant orders- Check your stored bulbs and veggies and start cool season crops
- Check plants for heaving
- Recycle your Christmas tree as garden mulch or a bird feeder
- Feed the birds and provide them with some unfrozen water
