This weekend our daylily club (BADS) participated in Greenfest at the University of Tampa. It benefits friends of Historic Plant Park. A huge festival with plants of all kinds, garden art and other gardening-related stuff, Greenfest is, in my opinion, the best of all the Bay Area Gardening Festivals. The Master Gardeners are on hand to answer just about any question a gardener could have, and there are speakers of all types. The City of Tampa Wastewater Treatment plant was even handing out free bags of locally produced fertilizers. (yes, bags of people-poo) Our club gets a great location every year, under huge oak trees. It's one of two yearly events we hold to make money and educate people about our favorite flowers. Jay and I love growing daylilies because they are fuss-free and come in literally thousands of varieties. It was such a beautiful weekend (until 2 PM Sunday) that we sold out of all but 4 of our daylilies before 10 AM Saturday. We had to call members to dig plants and bring them so we'd have more to sell. Two of our members from Plant City saved the day Saturday by bringing more plants for the afternoon, and two other members dug and divided plants from Brooksville and Redington Beach Saturday night to bring this morning so we'd have enough to sell on day 2. After such a horrible winter, Tampa gardeners came out in full force to replace all the plants that didn't survive this year's crazy-cold temperatures. I hung my gorgeous daylily quilt that my mother- and father-in-law designed and made for my birthday in our booth, and it was a huge draw. A lot of people came up to the booth just to look at the quilt, giving us a chance to tell people about daylilies and sell some plants. Thank you, Arlene and Ray!
It doesn't seem that long ago that Jay and I bought 4 daylilies from the club at Greenfest. Now we're the ones working the club booth, Jay is the vice president and we grow almost 80 varieties! As a way to advertise our show and sale on May 1, I had the idea for all of the club members to save the Daylily Journals, Magazines and Catalogs that we all get during the year and put stickers with our show and sale information on them. We handed out probably a few hundred of them to people who bought plants, so I'm hoping we'll get even more visitors to our sale this year. The Tampa Rose Society is joining us at our show venue, so we should get more traffic from the 'rose people,' too. I'm glad we found one more use for all that printed material.
When I wasn't in our booth selling plants and talking to people about daylilies, I roamed around to see the other vendors. The lady we bought our worm compost system was there (I think a post about our worms is probably going to be coming soon). I spent the majority of my mad money on heirloom veggie starts and herbal teas. I got 6 heirloom tomatoes of all colors, shapes and sizes, white and yellow carrots, a 3-foot squash, a purple and a 'chocolate' sweet pepper as well as herbs to round out the last 3 sections of my square foot herb garden. One of the herbs I got was "pukeless" cat grass. Only 1 out of 4 of our cats liked it, and it is (so far) pukeless as advertised. I'm going to do a post soon about heirloom seeds, too. It's so important (to me, anyway) to preserve the rare varieties and our food heritage. After this terribly busy weekend, we're finally going to get back to building the chicken coop next weekend. We really need to get it done so we can bring order and bring home our peeps!
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