Down the Garden Path

For the locals, here are the details on this Saturday’s garden tour:

The Mountain Brook Community Center, 2353 Foothill Rd, will host a fundraising garden tour on Saturday, July 16th from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm entitled, “What’s Growing in Mountain Brook (Legally).” The tour will feature 5 working gardens in the Mountain Brook community, which has its own microclimate challenges for gardeners.

Gardeners will begin each hour of the tour by introducing their gardens and participants will be free to ask questions and meander through gardens as they wish.

Five artists have been chosen to paint in the gardens, Lavonne Burgard, Lindalee Cleveland, Therese Ely, Lael Gray, and Sunnie LeBlanc. Sunnie LeBlanc will be doing Plein Aire paintings. Garden refreshments will be served.

Six artists will be at the Mountain Brook Community Center: Gail Hanson, Sandra Marker, Chris Olson Hartley, Dixie Turner, and Pam Wheat.

Tickets are $10/person. To purchase tickets, call the library, 406-314-8232 or stop by Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 5-8 pm. Tickets are also available for purchase the day of the tour. After touring all five gardens, drop off your punched ticket for a chance of winning a gift basket.

Come and join us! I am sure all of us will be emphasizing the challenges of gardening in Montana in our talks this year.

I love my lavender. I’m going to cut some today to use in baking the treats we’ll be serving at the garden tour.

***************************

In the midst of getting ready for this garden tour, I’ve also been juggling my responsibilities as a member of our pastor transition team. We went from having one candidate a few weeks ago to now having several. We are trying to schedule Zoom interviews, but that’s made more challenging by the fact that people are traveling—candidates as well as team members—and one of our team members drives truck around the state during the week.

I’d still like to get away for a few days, but that’s going to have to wait until we get these Zoom interviews scheduled.

Today and tomorrow focus completely on garden prep. I’ve been waiting to cut the grass one last time. Most of the weeding has been done; it’s minimal thanks to the black plastic.

***************************

It turns out the duck that was in our yard did not belong to WS but to someone else in the neighborhood. Apparently, that person’s chickens got out of the coop. I think the duck may have been living with the chickens and escaped at the same time, which explains why it was hanging around our coop and looked like it wanted to be inside with the chickens. (I suspect Dave would have had something to say about that.)

Elysian sent WS over with a net and the duck has been reunited successfully with its family.