Last Wednesday we had our first meeting and here is a picture of the door prizes:

9/14/11 door prizes: plants, seeds, pots, labels, garden art, ...

We grew the bamboo from roots donated to the Community Center when we planned on renting a property on Pierce Ferry for a community garden last June.   We ended up planting them into pots and now have about 10 of them.  It sure grows fast!

I had set a BEAUTIFUL lemon basil on the patio table to bring, but then a dust devil came through.  That poor plant has now been in the greenhouse for two days and it still looks pathetic.  I hope it’ll recover.

The replacement I brought isn’t nearly as nice, but we have several basils in the gardens to transplant into pots as it gets colder.  They’re one of the first plants to freeze, but do fantastic in pots at a sunny window.  We STILL have basils we dug up last fall in our little adobe greenhouse addition.

If you’re wondering why there’s an onion …   We got 50 lbs for about $11 at Smart & Final in Bullhead recently and that’s more than we can eat before they go bad.   Maybe we’ll have some of our zucchini and cucumbers to bring to the next meeting, now that it cooled off we have lots of female flowers.

We drew numbers and the 2 lowest numbers got to pick from the bamboo, basil or 5 of the other items.  Bob was a winner, but didn’t have use for the plants, so he got 5 onions.   And everybody got to pick a seedling — basil, rosemary or aloe.

 We also brought samples and most of our seeds:

9/14/11: catalogs, seeds, mulch, fertilizer, DE, rice hulls, gardening books and lots of SEEDS!

The cigar boxes in the back had seeds for root crops, salad, herbs and veggies and we’ll continue to bring the seeds to share with other gardeners.   Many salad, herb and veggie seed packs contain hundreds of seeds, much more than we can use.

It was almost 6 pm when we finally left as we had LOTS to talk about.  Since it’s starting to get dark earlier, we decided to start the next meeting earlier, at 1 pm on MONDAY, October 3.

I just saw that the cilantro seeds sprouted and maybe those seedlings will be ready to bring to the next meeting.

If we can play DVDs recorded on the computer on Bob’s TV, we’ll watch the documentary “Greening the Desert” next time.   It’s always so inspiring to see plants thriving in the desert and eventually turning the desert into an oasis.

Many thanks to Bob and Ollie for letting us use their place for the meetings!