Petal Pushers Garden Club Meeting Minutes, August 26, 2025

submitted by Pam Walker

Meeting Location: ABQ Garden Center, Grace Barnes room

Activity:

We made some cute flowerpot car fresheners to install in our car air conditioner vents. Ginny and Kathleen brought all the necessary parts, and we hot glued them together. Pam P. brought some essential oils to drop on them for a fresh scent as we drive around these hot days.

Business meeting:

We voted on accepting the new budget presented at the July meeting.

The club by-laws need to be reviewed and updated. So, please review them (in your 2024 yearbook) and send your ideas for changes to our president. We will discuss them at the September meeting.

We had an update on the 2025 Halloween Glow & Stroll activities. This year the event will have famous movies as the theme. Petal Pushers’ theme is the movie “Wicked” so we can think about having a witch and a princess and any other ideas you have. We are looking for an arch support that we can decorate in our section of the gardens, so if you know of one, please let us know. Also, we still have some pencils from last Halloween to give away to children again this year.

We will have a new format for our holiday luncheon – a cookie exchange! We’ll all bring a few dozen cookies and take home a few dozen. We’ll all bring some dishes to share for a light lunch. More on this later.

Susan officially resigned as president of Petal Pushers as she is moving out of state, and Viola resigned as treasurer due to many family matters, so we will be getting new officers soon.

Upcoming Events/Volunteer Opportunities:

• September 3, 5, 8, and 11 – flower shows at the NM State Fair flower building

• September 8 – Petal Pushers’ workday in the courtyard, 9:30. Bring your clippers!

• September 26 and 27 – Harvest Fair, volunteer for a fun and interesting event.

• October 13 – District One meeting at Garden Center. The new District 1 Director will be hosting the meeting. These are always fun and there’s an optional lunch.

• October 24 – carving jack-o-lanterns for the Halloween Glow & Stroll

Next meeting: September 23, 2025 @ 9:30 at an off-site location.

The speaker will be Bill Shen talking about dahlias, wine, and the new open space.

Petal Pushers Garden Club Meeting Minutes, July 22, 2025

Field trip:

We took a field trip to a local residential garden. The owner took us on a tour of her backyard and front yard gardens. She is an amazing gardener, as well as a master beekeeper, and she had planted lots of plants to feed those bees. She has beehives with European bees, and of course, native bees visit her native plants in the gardens. We made sure not to wear brightly colored clothing which attract bees - white was the color of the day! Her yard has been deemed an “ABQ Backyard Refuge”. That program aims to create wildlife habitats in urban areas of Albuquerque. She gave us a tour of all the plants, raised beds, and her cat’s “catio”. It was a wonderful way to spend a morning.

Business meeting:

We had an abbreviated business meeting so we could spend more time in the gardens. The Garden Council’s “Christmas in July” flower show was July 18-19 and Petal Pushers Garden Club AGAIN won first place in the club competition. We had a great team which made birdseed ornaments and “gifts” under the tree, dried orange slices, and other decorations for our Christmas tree. The tree was beautiful and there’s a photo of it in your 2025-26 Petal Pusher yearbook. The prize for our win was two gift certificates to the Garden Center gift shop.

Next meeting:

August 26, 2025, 9:30 at the Garden Center

Making car air fresheners craft

Petal Pushers Garden Club Meeting Minutes, June 24, 2025

submitted by Pam Walker

Meeting Location: The Garden Center, Grace Barnes Room

Speaker: Rose Kern, Master Gardener - “Scavenger Gardening”

https://www.solarranch.com

Rose has a great philosophy about scavenger gardening: it’s a mindset. With that mindset, she is always looking for ways to re-purpose ordinary items like wooden boxes, string, straw bales, wire racks, etc. She had dozens of stories and examples of how she transformed those items into beautiful and useful additions to her gardens. She digs holes in her garden to compost her kitchen waste along with old coffee grounds from Starbucks, and she drives around her neighborhood in the fall asking for bags of raked leaves for composting. She uses small restaurant take-out containers with clear lids as small greenhouses. She’s a fan of “snarfing” plants and cuttings from her neighbors, and usually collects the seeds from her grocery store produce.

She encouraged us to read the Foxfire books. It was an entertaining morning, and here’s her story about her visit today with Petal Pushers (PP): https://www.solarranch.com/scavenger-gardening-updates/

Business Meeting:

We had three visitors at this meeting, two of whom had heard about Petal Pushers at the Garden Center’s 50th anniversary celebration. At that event, PP was in charge of making and selling popcorn, but the popcorn machine was defective, and it kept tripping the electrical breakers wherever we plugged it in. The garden Council is getting a refund for the cost of renting the machine.

We have two members who have decided to become associate members of the PP garden club. This means that they will be welcome to attend meetings but will not be required to host a meeting or assist in Council events. One had been the PP representative to the garden Council, so she will be replaced by another of our members.

Susan summarized the lessons learned from the April plant sale. We did well selling daisies and geraniums, but petunias didn’t sell so well. Next year, we’ll buy strategically with this in mind.

We also have a better understanding of our Square credit card reader. It really improved our sales at the spring plant sale, but the fees take a chunk out of our profits. We can decrease the fees we pay to Square by paying our club dues by cash or check.

Petal Pushers’ new fiscal and program year begins every May 1, so we have been busy finding great speakers and field trips to do in 2025-26. Please sign up to host a meeting on the sign-up sheet that Susan has. All this information is being typed into the new PP yearbook which will be distributed soon.

July 18-19 is the annual Council flower show with the theme “Christmas in July”. Petal Pushers will decorate a 6-foot artificial Christmas tree with the theme of “Christmas in July is for the Birds”. We will be making the crafts to go on the tree at the Garden Center on July 9 from 9:00 – noon. Please come help for a while. We won the club competition at the flower show last summer, so let’s do it again!

Next Petal Pusher meeting: July 22, 2025, 9:30

We will visit the home of a PP friend to see her beautiful yard, veggies, and bee hives. No speaker, just a nice morning. Due to the bees, NO BRIGHT COLORS OR BLACK CLOTHING! WHITE OR CREAMS, if possible.