DELTA INFORMAL GARDENERS We're Banding Together to Promote Gardening
	MAY 2005

by Carole Hendrickson, with Pat Moore, Jon Bergstrom, and George Donux
Photos by Russell Byrne

Most of us love gardens, I think. And we typically love all kinds of gardens — from formal places where pathways and borders organize plants and flowers into a patterned feast for both eye and mind, to cultivated but unkempt mini-wilderness-like areas strewn with flowers, plants, and vines in a disarray that echoes unrestrained nature herself.

Any garden that actually has healthy plants and flowers growing in it is a happy place. Gardens are good for people. Time spent in a garden can soothe the soul. Someone once observed that we’re nearer to God in our gardens than anyplace else on earth, and he might have got that right.

Growing an Idea into an Organization
DIG (Delta Informal Gardeners) is a garden club that was started by Pat Moore, who moved here in the 1970s, when orchards and farmlands still ruled East County. Pat says that in those days tomato fields dominated the entire end of her Oak Street neighborhood.

Pat moved here from Concord, which has an altogether different microclimate from ours. She had to learn how to grow things in this new climate and there wasn’t much assistance, except for Brentwood Nursery on Highway 4. She felt a yearning to learn how to grow plants that were indigenousness to our local conditions. In 1988 Pat was having a conversation with Gene Scudero, who was running Brentwood Nursery in those days. She said to Jean, “If anyone ever starts a garden club around here, let me know.”

“You start one!” Gene said.

“I don’t know anything about that!”

“Make some flyers,” Gene said, “and I’ll help distribute them.”

Just then a couple people entered the nursery. “Here come your first members!”

We kicked the club off on June 25, 1988. Fourteen people attended that first meeting. The first order of business was to select a name. After rejecting 14 other suggestions, George Dwelley proposed “Delta Informal Gardeners” and gave us the compelling argument for the name, “We’ll use DIG for our acronym.”

The fact is that we really are informal. Everyone agreed from the beginning that whatever we did would never be regimented. We would exclude no one from anything. Everyone’s opinion would count. We also decided that we would always accept everyone into the club, even if they didn’t know a weed from a flower. Our club has included ranchers, retired ranchers, city slickers, and residents from Brentwood, Antioch, Oakley, Bethel Island, and Knightsen.

Steve Hendrickson and Pat have been guiding the garden club for the past 16 years. Steve is the plant manager. We currently have 156 members. One couple who joined with a family membership brought in their two kids, aged six and eight. The children are now grown and still showing up for our meetings.

Joining Together to Laugh, Learn, Grow, and Serve
Our club meetings are times of fellowship, fun, and learning. Many of us DIG club members are on a life-long quest to improve our gardening knowledge and skills. The meetings always include an interesting lesson from some knowledgeable person. For example, Sylvia Musso instructed us concerning geraniums and re-blooming irises at our April meeting. Patty Caramagno-Robinson and Maxine VrMeer will discuss the topic of Herbal Medicines at the May meeting.

Besides meeting together, we also undertake community service projects. For example, we used to do the plantings and flowers around the gazebo in the Brentwood town park. We planted daffodils at all the entrances to town, roses at the cemetery, and 1,500 seedling trees to be used for public parks and boarders in partnership with the National Tree Trust.

We have donated books and tapes to the public library, and have contributed to scholarship programs in local schools. We provide plants and funds for the schools’ programs for special needs students at Liberty and Freedom. The teachers incorporate our plants and seeds into their curriculum.

We like to have fun! We take bus trips to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show and sponsor monthly garden tours. Last month, for example, we went to Filoli Gardens on the Peninsula south of the City. We also have an annual Christmas Potluck, complete with live entertainment, good food, and a lot of holiday joy.

One of the year’s most fun activities at DIG is the Curious Containers Competition potluck we hold each June in honor of the club’s anniversary. The event is a lot of fun. Members can let their creative juices flow freely as everybody tries to create a container to hold plants and flowers that nobody ever thought of before. The champion last year was a kitchen colander planted with herbs and lettuce, to make up a salad. Other witty entries included a sunflower in a yellow flashlight, a potato planted with herbs, a scrub brush filled with veggies. A birdhouse with echeverias, and Rapunzel’s Castle filled with maiden’s hair fern.

The contestants come up with some wonderfully artistic creations. A prize for the most abstruse creation might have gone to the member who spent six months converting a six-pack of beer into a flowerpot filled with alyssum. Most people would miss the pun, since they wouldn’t know that the name of the flower comes from the Greek word meaning “to cure madness.” A somewhat more accessible joke was submitted by another member — a clock planted with thyme.

The most obvious pun last year was an entry entitled “A Margarita for Two,” which consisted of two glasses planted with margaritas. That margarita entry might actually have run a close second for the most outrageous right-in-your-eye play on words that was simply an olive tree planted in a can of olives.

The Mother of all Plant Sales
DIG’s year revolves around our May Annual-Perennial Plant Sale, which we conduct every year on the Saturday before Mother’s Day — May 7 this year. We propagate (start) about 10,000 plants for the occasion. We concentrate on plants that are indigenous to the area, so that the plants can be placed outside and perhaps play a role in beautifying our community.

We began our DIG tradition of selling plants at the Harvest Festival (which turned into the Corn Fest) our first year as an organization. We sold these from a table we had rented for a $25 fee and in that first year the club made $177.50 in profits. The next year we moved the sale to the Hendirkson’s house on Third Street, in front of the library. We did the sale at the Art and Wine Festival for a couple years, beginning in 1991, and then for nine years held the sale beneath the water tower on Walnut. We moved to the East County Historical Society for one year, and three years ago we moved to our current location — Hoffman Lane, off of Marsh Creek Road. Last year we sold 9,500 plants earning about $10,000 for our organization and for the charitable projects we support.

Some of us look forward to this all year long, and begin our preparations six months before we sell the first plant. We conduct the propagation activities at a ranch on Marsh Creek Road. Without being involved in this themselves, nobody could imagine how great the experience is when we get together to plan the event and begin the work.

The plant sale involves so much joyful participation by all kinds of people that it takes on the aspects of a holiday event. In fact, a woman once told me that she could never sleep the night before the sale. “It’s better than Christmas,” she said. Every year people help us who have no prior experience whatsoever. They learn a lot, however. Participants include all ages. The children fill cans with dirt. People who aren’t able or don’t want to dig or lift can help with the labels.

More than half of our members help work at the sale. We don’t want to go home afterwards; we don’t want it to be over. The sale becomes a learning experience for everybody. Boy Scouts help us sometimes to earn points toward badges, as well as students working for community service credit.

Propagating 10,000 plants requires a lot of planning and coordination. We get about 3,000 of these started before Christmas. We go far and wide in search of fragrant fertilizers, including pigeon poop, llama doo-doo, and horse manure.

Boisterous Market Day for Plants
Of course, the best part of the process is the Saturday sale itself. You might imagine that it would be impossible to actually sell almost 10,000 plants at a single day’s sale, but people start to camp out by the front gate at 4 o’clock in the morning in order to be the first through the door for the 8:30 a.m. opening.

You would have to see the event to comprehend how spectacular it is. More than 200 people might be waiting impatiently by the time the sale starts. We open the gate and have to make a jump to get out of the way. People pour through the gate like a herd of cattle. The stampede reminds me of drawings in history books of the Oklahoma Land Rush. Those people are on a mission.

Everything about our sale is conducted with great good humor. When you buy plants as inexpensively as we sell them, you can buy a lot of them and really enjoy the experience. People sometimes bring wagons and wheelbarrows to haul the plants to their cars. Some of them will take home 100 plants, stick them into the ground, and come right back for another load.

This May we will mark the 17th year of our sale and some of our regulars have come 16 times so far. Plan to drop by our sale on May 7 and see for yourself how great it is. Plan to get there early.

DIG has been mentioned in Sunset Magazine and is regularly featured in Pacific Horticulture. Steve Hendrickson has lectured at other clubs who are trying to duplicate our success.

We hold our meetings from 7:30-9:30 p.m. on the fourth Monday of every month, at the Methodist church at 809 Second Street, which is on the corner of Maple, directly across from Liberty High School. Drop into one of our meetings if you have a love for growing things — or even if you just want a reason to get out of the house and meet some friendly folks. We are a fun group of people. Nobody’s a stranger twice. You’ll see!