It was a full house for our April meeting in the Abbot Library Community Room. Members of the Driftwood Garden Club, veterans and newbies, gathered to participate in an information and question session about our upcoming Dig & Divide, the Plant Sale Set-up, the actual Plant Sale, and our Plant Sale celebration luncheon.
Thank you to our hosts for providing delicious snacks and beverages, and a perfect table setting for our topic tonight! Our social time is just as important to our members as the topic of the meeting, especially after a long winter. It’s a nice way to reconnect.
We were welcomed to the program by our Plant Sale Chairs, Susan and Adrienne, who, along with the members of their Plant Sale Committee, have been working for many months to set up donor gardens, gather supplies needed for our Dig & Divide days, assign Captains for each Dig & Divide garden, prepare flyers and signage for the event, and myriad other details to make our Plant Sale 2026 a great success.
They started off by reminding members to watch their emails for the Dig & Divide Sign-up. There will be choices of gardens and dates, so members will be able to choose the time and place convenient for them. This signup will be followed by an email from your captain reminding you to bring CLEAN tools, potting soil (large bag, please), and newspapers to your particular location for Dig & Divide. Your Captain will provide a table, tarp, and chair, as well as your individual bag of supplies to bring home for the 10 plants you will be digging in your own gardens. If you are new to this event, your Captain and teammates will help you. Dig & Divides are really fun, and you always learn something new. At the end of the Dig & Divide session, usually about three hours, members of your team will each take home 15 or so plants to care for until the plant sale. At home, you will dig and divide 10 plants from your own garden to care for until the Plant Sale Set-Up.
You will receive another Sign-Up for the Plant Sale Set-Up day, which is the day before the plant sale. This will take place at the Masonic Hall on Pleasant Street from 10:30-12 noon on Friday, May 8. Please clean (wipe down) each of your plant pots before bringing them into the building. The tables will already be set up in categories: perennial sun, perennial shade, etc., and in alphabetical order in each section. Take your time finding the right place for each of your plants. There is always someone to answer a question if needed.
There will also be tables for “special” plants. This year, two of our members will be hosting a table of indoor plants which can be for Mother’s Day gifts, or for plant-lovers who like indoor gardening. There will also be our “Grab & Go” table with beautiful annuals or perennials wrapped and ready to be given as a gift on Mother’s Day. There will be baskets of dahlia tubers, donated by a friend of the Driftwood Garden Club, a station to help create a beautiful window box, and, and of course, Marblehead Gardens, our partner for many years, will add a burst of color with an incredible collection of annuals for purchase.
SATURDAY, MAY 9, THE DAY OF THE PLANT SALE! Members will arrive by 8 a.m. on the day of the plant sale. We’ll have our blue Driftwood Garden Club aprons on and be ready to greet our customers. Once the door opens, our job is to help each customer in any way we can. If we do not know the answer to something, there will be somebody who does. We want happy customers because they will come back year after year and also tell their friends. From 8:30 – 11:30, things can get hectic, but we have some extra help this year from high school volunteers who will carry a customer’s plants to the car. At 11:30, the plant sale ends, and the clean-up begins. All members help put the room back together just as if we had never been there!
Before the close of the meeting, Susan and Adrienne chose a name from the hat for the drawing for a Spearhead Shovel, and Ellen, a longtime member was the happy recipient! We left our April Meeting with smiles on our faces, carrying yard signs, flyers and bookmarks, all to be used in spreading the word to people that the Driftwood Garden Club Plant Sale 2026 is NOT to be missed!
Driftwood Garden Club 