Come to our spring sale on Saturday, May 2.  We have all kinds of neat stuff that you can get from plants, hypertufas, stepping stones, outdoor candle holders, to yard jewelry, gourd bird houses and fairy homes!  Much more!

Location:  Under the tent beside Jubilee Grocery Store in Germantown Hills.

Time:  8:00 am til 2:00 pm.

Date:  Saturday, May 2, 2009

Get some goodies for mom for mother’s day! 

Half the proceeds will benefit charity and everything will be very reasonably priced!

Hope to see you there and tell your friends!

Bonnie Cox, who is the president of the Illinois Gourd Society, met with us in March.  She brought a huge display of gourds that she has decorated and carved over the last 2 years.  The display was fabulous!  She created a beautiful bonnet from a gourd by carving intricate flower designs in it and decorating it like a bonnet.  It was on the cover of a gourd magazine recently.

Other items she makes are birdhouses, flower pots and even musical instruments. 

She let us all do some carving on the inside of a gourd.  We found that even thought the outer shell is hard as wood, the interior is soft and easy to remove.

More information can be found on her website at ilmidwife@aolcom.  It’s well worth the visit!

We truly enjoyed the evening and all of us want to try our hand at growing gourds to see what we can create with them!

Date:                           Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Place:                          Germantown Hills Community Center

Time:                           6:30 PM

Refreshments:              Snack – Gerda Wirt

                                    Drink   -  Lisa Hill

We will have our first meeting of the year at the Community Center starting at 6:30 pm.    We’ll discuss our plans for the coming year and catch up on everything.

At 7:00, our speaker, Bonnie Cox, will arrive to speak to our group about planting gourds and giving us ideas of things to make with gourds.  Bonnie is the president of the Illinois Gourd Society.  She grows gourds and then creates art with them.  Some of her projects have included birdhouses, wood burning, decopauging and gold leafing.  There was a full page article in the Journal Star which featured Bonnie and her gourds.  I’m anxious to get some pointers from her and try some new projects!  She is also going to tell us about a Folk Art School that some people are starting at Three Sisters Park in Chillicothe.

Visitors are welcome!  There is a $5 fee for visitors who come to hear the speaker. 

We’ll have a seed swap, so if you have some extra seeds bring them to share.  Dues of $10 for the year will be collected.  Our dues money is used for gas for our road trips, speaker fees, hostess gifts, materials for projects and postage.

I would love to hear from some of the garden clubs in our surrounding area to get ideas from you for things our club might like to do.  You may also have thoughts on some of the things we have done in the past with our different projects.  Some of the clubs I am aware of are the Washington Garden Club, the Peoria Evening Garden Club, the East Peoria Illinois Garden Club and the Heart of Illinois Bonsai Club.  Please feel free to leave any comments, suggestions or ideas!  Let us know if your club would like to meet with our club!

Title: March - Native Plants for Your Garden
Link out: Click here
Description: March is a great time to keep prepping your garden, but also a good time to plan out which plants you will cultivate this season, and that can include native plants of Illinois
Date: 2009-03-01

I belong to the Germantown Hills Garden Club in Germantown Hills, Illinois.  The meetings, events and projects shown on this website are all things we do in our club.   Most of us are working women so we usually plan our meetings on the 4th Tuesday of each month, March thru September.  When we plan a road trip it is usually in lieu of having a meeting.  If you view our calendar, you will notice we like to take a lot of trips!  We are always interested in having new members join.  The dues are $10 annually, which covers the cost of postage, items to make our projects and mileage for our road trips.  If you are interested in joining, please leave a comment and I will send you a newsletter.  Please feel free to attend any of our meetings!  We’re just girls who like to get together and have fun, and love getting new ideas for our yards!

Title: February - Clean Your Garden Month
Link out: Click here
Description: February is the time (when the weather allows) to clean up your garden. Rake or burn those leaves, trim back grasses, cut back perennials and roses back and make room for the fun to come.
Start Date: 2009-02-01
End Date: 2009-02-28

Well, its a new year, and time to grow something new, so in addition to raking lots of leaves and cleaning up around the yard, we have upgraded our site!

The look and feel may change a bit as we have upgraded the platform the site runs on and and have many more options now.  You can consider the current look as a bit of a test drive.  We will have to see if this one takes root or not.

In addition to looks, we will also add a calendar function soon, which will make it easier to track new events and keep things organized for everyone.

We kicked off the 2008 season with a presentation from Mac MacMahon and his wife Arrah, who talked about their hobby of starting plants from seeds. They gave us handouts with good info for all types of seeds and when to start them. Mac showed us pictures of his plant trays that he has built with adjustable fluorescent lighting to keep the light 1″ above the starts. He also gave good tips on using planting medium instead of soil, keep the plants moist, give them 8 hours of darkness each day, and harden them when they are ready to take outside.

Everyone brought some seeds to share, so while we swapped seeds we gave out door prizes. Lynne supplied pencils that had “Germantown Hills Garden Club” imprinted on them.