Boston Flora

Tag: Betty Sanders

  • Thursday, April 19, 7:00 pm – Vegetable Garden Design for a Full Season of Great Food

    The secret to a great garden is in the planning.  The vegetable garden benefits greatly from good planning.  If you start early and make choices wisely, you can enjoy a summer’s worth of vegetables with plenty left over for storing or sharing.  Your vegetable garden can be a fun and healthy choice as you make the decisions about what to grow and how you want them grown.  Betty Sanders (www.BettyOnGardening.com) leads this Massachusetts Horticultural Society lecture on Thursday, April 19, beginning at 7 pm at Elm Bank.  Betty is a Lifetime Master Gardener, and co-designed the Chef’s Garden at Elm Bank in 2011.  Her horticultural hints appear monthly in Mass Hort’s Leaflet, and on her website.  To register for this free event, visit www.masshort.org.

  • Wednesday, April 11, 6:30 pm – Learn to Garden with Edibles

    Join Master Gardener Betty Sanders at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 11 at the Endicott Estate, 656 East Street, Dedham, for a talk on how to grow vegetables in that most local of all gardens, your own back yard. Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served. Sanders will discuss how to plan an edible garden, amend the soil, and choose what plants to grow. While vegetables traditionally are grown in a separate area, Sanders will also talk about how to incorporate edibles into flower borders, containers or raised beds. Betty has lectured at the New England Flower Show, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s lecture series, the Boston Public Library as well as at many garden clubs and civic organizations. Her own two-acre garden was part of the National Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program in 2008. The talk is sponsored by the Fairbanks Garden Club of Dedham and is made possible by a grant from the Dedham Institution for Savings Foundation. For further information call Fairbanks Garden Club co-president Lisa Brayton, 781-326-6081. Photo from www.housetrends.com.

  • Wednesday, May 25, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Glorious Container Gardens

    Containers are the most versatile way to show your gardening creativity. Containers can be those classic terracotta urns, but they can also be ‘found objects’ from your home. Betty Sanders will do more than just talk about container gardening at the next Wednesday Night at Elm Bank lecture on Wednesday, May 25 beginning at 7 pm: she’ll put together five distinctive container gardens, explaining both the basics and the tricks experts use. You’ll leave both with a lot of new knowledge and with the confidence to try it on your own. For more information, log on to www.masshort.org.  Reservations are not required, and refreshments are served.

  • Wednesday, July 21, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Healthy Lawns, and Alternatives

    On July 21, Betty Sanders talks on ‘Healthy Lawns – and Alternatives’, as part of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s “Wednesday Evenings at Elm Bank” series.  Betty is a well-respected gardening lecturer to groups around the region and the author of the Leaflet’s monthly ‘Horticultural Hints’ column. She believes that homeowners are caught in a web of conflicting and frequently overstated claims about the virtues of ‘four-step’ processes and ‘organic lawns’. As a chemist and Master Gardener, she’s well positioned to sort out hype from truth. She’ll describe how homeowners can have healthy lawns with a minimum of chemicals, and how a smaller lawn can be a better lawn.

    Sessions begin at 6:30 and go until 8 p.m. or until the last question has been answered. All sessions are held at Elm Bank, either in the Hunnewell carriage house or the Education Building. MassHort members pay $8 per session. The cost for non-members is $10. Refreshments will be available.  For more information, log on to www.masshort.org.

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  • Thursday, March 25, 11:30 am – 6:00 pm – Gardening Essentials at the Boston Flower & Garden Show

    The Massachusetts Horticultural Society has put together a full day of programs as part of the Paragon Group’s Boston Flower & Garden Show, opening March 24 and running through March 28 at the Seaport World Trade Center.  On Thursday, March 25, beginning at 11:30, Art Scarpa opens the morning with ‘The Care and Feeding of Houseplants’. Whether we live in a grand house or a one-bedroom apartment, houseplants are an essential part of New England because six months out of the year there’s nothing growing and green outside. This program will deal with houseplant basics: selection, care and maintenance. You will come away with your thumb considerably greener.

    At 12:30, MassHort has assembled on stage a virtual encyclopedia of gardening knowledge. Roger Swain, Paul Miskovsky and Kerry Ann Mendez invite everyone to bring their best questions on any topic related to gardening. Swain (pictured below) is the well-know host of PBS’ ‘The Victory Garden’ (he will also speak on the subject of tools on Saturday), who brings a dollop of humor to his broad knowledge of all things botanical. Miskovsky is considered one of the region’s best landscapers. He has installed two gardens on the exhibit floor; one, a 1,080 square foot garden (Falmouth-based Miskovsky Landscaping) and a second one for Heritage Museum and Gardens. Paul creates inspiring gardens for his public and private clients, but he can also tell you how to properly plant a rhododendron. Mendez is a ‘passionate perennialist’, an exceptional gardening speaker and the proprietor of ‘Perennially Yours’ in upstate New York.

    At 1:30, Rita Wollmering offers ‘Ready, Set, Grow – Preparing for a Successful Vegetable Garden’. She’ll take you through the practical steps that lead to a more successful vegetable garden. With planning, preparation and smart planting, gardeners can see an increase in both the health and yield of their plots.

    At 2:30, Betty Sanders talks on ‘The Green, Organic and Affordable Lawn’. The level of hype and dubious information about ‘organics’ has gotten to a state where someone with a wide body of knowledge, no axe to grind and nothing to sell is needed to sort it all out and answer all questions in a way that listeners understand their options.

    At 3:30 p.m., Cathy Felton will talk on ‘Editing the Mature Garden’. What do you do with a yard full of overgrown shrubs and perennials with dead centers? It may be the house you’ve lived in for 40 years or it may be the one you just purchased. Either way, bringing a landscape back to a manageable shape doesn’t always need to be a job for a contractor – or pointlessly expensive. The program will show how incremental steps can undo decades of neglect.

    At 5 p.m., Sally Muspratt offers ‘Small is Beautiful: Do-it-Yourself City Landscaping’. Not everyone has five acres, not everyone can hire a designer. The house in the city with 50 feet of street frontage can have just as much appeal as an estate. But where do you begin when you’re starting with some old boxwood and scraggly grass? This talk will take homeowners on a step-by-step process toward achieving a great landscape in a small space, and is especially appropriate for those of us located in the City of Boston.

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  • Wednesday, April 1, 7 pm – Water Smart Gardening

    A lecture by Massachusetts Horticultural Society Master Gardener Betty Sanders, sponsored by the Pinefield Garden Club, will be held Wednesday, April 1 at 7 pm at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 3 Maple Street, Framingham, MA.  Admission $5. For more information call Linda Hughes at 508-320-0041.