We’re just days from our kick-off meeting of Thursday, September 18. Get ready for a busy year! Our first meeting will be fun as we catch up with fellow members and enjoy some treats courtesy of our Hospitality committee.

After our business meeting, Ginnelle H, Awards chief, will announce the winners of the EAGC Outstanding Garden Awards. We’ll meet some of the winners, and see representative photos of the winner’s gardens as well as the gardens of the other nominees. This is a delightful tradition in the club. Making and keeping a garden is a reward in itself, but being recognized in your community is special.

I attended the ribbon cutting for the new Stratham Community Garden at 10 Bunker Hill Ave. — and what a spectacular event it was! Spearheaded by a small team of volunteers, including our own Ellen J, the project won town approval in February and broke ground for planting by June. Plants were overflowing today and I think I saw a huge heirloom tomato that could take 1st prize at the state fair!

Local residents, businesses, and organizations stepped forward with materials, funding, and talent to bring the garden to life. Now it offers a place where neighbors can grow their own food, connect with fellow gardeners, and share a portion of their harvest with local food pantries—a core mission of the garden. For more information, email Strathamcommunitygarden@gmail.com.

And this is only the beginning. Plans are already underway to expand the space and introduce teaching on native plants, conservation, water use, and much more. A hearty congratulations to Stratham on this flourishing new community resource!
Ann H.

Promise Tree, our practice having small member-sponsored events to raise money for projects, has been renamed Club Connections. Visit the Ways and Means Committee table at each meeting to see who’s having a gathering this season. And cook up an event that you’d enjoy hosting. A wine and cheese, a craft, maybe a couple rounds of hearts or bridge….

Various committees are already gearing up for the Yuletide Fair on November 22. Design, Horticulture, and Ways and Means have great ideas for things we can make with dried plants and other natural material. Workshops for these projects will be announced shortly. And they have lists of items that are needed at those workshops: ribbon, pinecones, dried flowers and so on. We’ll talk about this at our meeting.

Patti E distributed columnar basil plants to members last season. The benefit of the columnar basil is that it can be maintained indefinitely, never flowering. How did your basil plant fare? Kathryn J, our Hort chair, requested that we bring our plants to this Thursday’s meeting. Let’s compare our results – the good, bad, and the ugly! Here’s a preview:

Civic Beautification Volunteers are wrapping up their maintenance duties at our various gardens. The American Independence Museum volunteers have finished up their summer duties, while there are a few weeks of work left at the Stratham Veterans Garden. We want those gardens in perfect shape for the Veterans Day celebration. Meanwhile, Ellen J continues her clever, seasonal decoration of the Municipal Center entrance.

In case you didn’t know…
Before and after every meeting, we EAGCers need to help set up for the meeting and “break it down” too. Members of the Hospitality Committee will direct us!

Other Events and Activities

October 4, 2025 | 9:30 – 11:00am
Beginning Gardener Series: Gardens in the Fall: Season Extension and Fall Planting. Learn tips, tricks, and elements of fall gardening. We will discuss methods for extending the growing season to get the most out of your garden.
NH Audubon’s Massabesic Center, 26 Audubon Way, Auburn, NH. Register by Oct. 1 here.

October 7, 2025 6pm
Gardening Webinar Series: Growing native plants from seed.
Pamela Hargest, Master Volunteer volunteer coordinator for Cumberland County, Maine, will lead this webinar devoted to natives. The series will cover the steps of sowing, transplanting, fending off critters and dividing plants suitable for our climate.
To register: U of Maine Cooperative Extension.

October 15, 2025
Portsmouth Garden Club meeting at 10am, talk at 11am.
A talk on New England’s seacoast habitats with Christian Tobias at the Portsmouth Garden Club meeting at the Urban Forestry Center, 45 Elwyn Rd, Portsmouth.
Nonmembers are requested to send an email to: portsmouthnhgardenclub@gmail.com

From the Portsmouth Garden Club’s website:
“The New England seacoast has an incredible diversity of flora
and fauna. The importance of these ecosystems cannot be
understated as both these landscapes and the creatures that live
there serve important roles. Christian Tobias will highlight a few of
the different species that call these places home and what we
can do as property owners, gardeners, and humans to support
and protect these animals. An Educator at the Center for Wildlife,
Christian will be joined by a few of their ambassador animals.”

Thanks to photographers Ann H., Linda S and Carmen G
Connie A and LuAnn F – Editors