(left)Assisted by Ivan and Jan Flock, market and garden manager Don Mathre of the Gallatin Gardeners Club waters newly sown cole crops. Seeded in early April, these will grow in the greenhouse until mid-May when they will be transplanted to the outdoor garden. (right) Cathy Rechlin, retired florist and past club president, shows off some of the color she has quite literally added to the club garden in the years she’s been a member. Photos by Frank Erickson.
Gallatin Gardeners Club Gives Back
For members and friends of the Gallatin Gardeners Club, February marked the beginning of gardening season— the first opportunity for both longtime residents and newcomers to the region to gather, get their hands back in the soil, start their first seeds, and launch another summer bounty of fresh local vegetables and flowers.
In late February, volunteers gathered in the MSU Plant Growth Center to seed more than 200 four-inch pots of onions, shallots, and leeks. Throughout the spring, the club’s planting parties will add hundreds more pots seeded with broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, fennel, kale, lettuce, and other greens, as well as hundreds of tomatoes, large and small.
By late April or early May—depending on Montana’s notoriously fickle weather—club members will work with staff at the MSU Horticulture Farm to prepare a half-acre field south of Garfield Street for direct seeding of beets, beans, peas, carrots, squash, corn, and annual flowers such as cosmos and zinnias; plant hundreds of gladiola and dahlia bulbs; transplant rows of seedlings from the Plant Growth Center; and ring the entire field with sunflowers that were started indoors. Club members and other volunteers will also transplant and stake up several hundred tomatoes in a hoop house near the field.
On Memorial Day weekend each year, the club launches its annual fundraising effort at Owenhouse Ace Hardware’s downtown parking lot, where plants and tools are available for sale. Any readers who have unneeded garden tools, seeds, seedlings, or other garden items are welcome to donate them to the sale.
Today’s Gallatin Gardeners Club is a far cry from its infancy, having started 40 years ago as a part of the Men’s Garden Club movement, a Depression-era effort launched to help city dwellers learn the lost skills of growing food for their own families in home gardens. The club has since evolved and now operates as a nonprofit where all are welcome.
Fresh produce and flowers grown by club members are available for purchase at the summer’s Gallatin Valley Farmers’ Market as well as local grocery stores, and the club gives proceeds earned through these sales back to the community in the form of grants. Since 2004, the club has awarded more than $225,000 in grants to support local programming such as Meals on Wheels, Fork & Spoon, Gallatin Valley Farm to School, Cancer Support Community Montana, Sage Gardeners, Montana Ag Live, Eagle Mount and elementary school gardening and nutrition projects, and horticulture scholarships at MSU.
Visit gallatingardenersclub.com to sign up for emails about volunteer opportunities, learn more about gardening in our climate, or become a member of the Gallatin Gardeners Club.
