With a new location and a new push for “fluffy, flowering plants,” this year’s Vashon Maury Island Garden Club sale at 9 a.m. May 7 will offer everything for a summer garden.
Island Home Center & Lumber will play host to the club’s sale under some big tents in the northwest corner of the parking lot. The store will also offer 10 percent off pots and soil, plus coupons for inside the store.
With this generous space to fill, the club started its grow efforts early.
“In September we held a propagation work party to create soft-wood cuttings and divisions,” Lynn Buscaglia, Vashon Maury Island Garden Club (VMIGC) president said. “Then members went home and dug up their ‘Dirty Dozen’ — plants that sell out, like heucheras, heathers, hellebores, ground covers like ajuga and tiarella, ferns and ornamental grasses. We want to fill that tent with big, well-rooted, fluffy, flowering plants.”
Geraniums and fuchsia baskets are being grown by Dan Connolly and Pat Nesland, and more annual flowers — pansies, bachelor buttons, clarkia, marigolds, wave petunias and impatiens — are already growing at the high school greenhouse to fill the sales tent with color.
Cherry tomatoes always sell out early, so the club has planted many more SunGolds, Fruity, Black Cherry, Chocolate Cherry and Gold Nuggets. Earlies like Manitoba, Stupice and Oregon Spring will be offered, as well as heirlooms like Brandywine, Cosmonaut Volkov and that huge, early-ripening plum tomato, Jersey Devil. Starts of greens, cole crops, peppers and even corn will also be available.
McMurray Middle School students have also been hard at work raising plants this year. Students will be selling vegetables such as cauliflower and broccoli at a designated table.
All plants are grown at the high school greenhouse without pesticides and in organic soil.
The “Shabby Chic Garden Boutique” will return, full of garden art and furnishings, tools, books, pots (perhaps to be filled with that 10 percent off soil) and other garden items.
The club’s popular plants usually are gone by mid-morning and in previous years, the sale would become all half-price in late morning. However, there will be no half-price sale this year as all excess plants will be donated to community groups, plant sale coordinator Lucy Harter said.
“We also aren’t going to close at a certain time: If people are still coming at noon, we’ll keep selling,” Harter said.
The sale’s proceeds support garden programs for the island’s schools and scholarships for seniors going on to study horticulture.
Plant sale
9 a.m. Saturday, May 7, in the parking lot of Island Home Center & Lumber.
— Karen Dale, Vashon-Maury Island Garden Club
