Category: featured

RG&C’s second Armchair Gardening talk will take place on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 7:00 pm at Roslindale House, 120 Poplar Street near Florence Street (Roslindale House is an accessible building).

Jeffrey Chasin and Jennifer Park will talk about gardens in England and Boston as they take us around Kew Gardens near London, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent,and Boston’s Fenway Victory Gardens.

Join RG&C in enjoying the pleasures of plants and gardens as spring begins in 2018.

Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served.

The first of two Armchair Gardening talks will take place on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 7:00 pm at Roslindale House, 120 Poplar Street near Florence Street (Roslindale House is an accessible building).

Sheryl White will take attendees on a photo tour of Biltmore Gardens in Asheville, North Carolina.

Join RG&C for this opportunity, with spring around the corner, to enjoy the pleasures of plants and gardens.

Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served.

(RG&C is also sponsoring a second 2018 Armchair Gardening Event on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 7:00 pm. We’ll post more details right after this first event.)

RG&C volunteers worked Saturday, September 16, 2017 to revamp the plantings at Taft Hill Park at the corner of South Street and Taft Hill Terrace across from Wallpaper City.

Joyce Chalfin spearheaded this extensive work. Joyce worked with RG&C board member Diane Carter Duggan to develop a new planting plan for the park and drove out to nurseries in Greater Boston (Mahoney’s Garden Centers in Concord and Russell’s Garden Center in Wayland) to select and transport chosen plants and grasses. Joyce included plans to reuse as many existing plants at the park as possible.

This preliminary effort, including site preparation work done by Joyce and her husband Richard, led up to the work done on Saturday, September 16, 2017 to move existing plants, get the many new plants and grasses into the ground so they’re established before winters bears down on them, and spread a layer of fresh compost over the entire site. Joyce and Richard did yeoman’s work on Saturday, starting earlier than anyone else and finishing later in order to get as much work completed as possible.

Working with Joyce and Richard to make the park refresh possible were several RG&C volunteers including board members Diane Carter Duggan, Joan Linden, Erica Max and Cynthia Walat and volunteers Leah Bellman, Kathleen Kenney and Nancy Leask.

We’re also extremely grateful to Tobin & Tobin, the park’s next door neighbors, for their offer to provide access to water from their property (the City of Boston has no water service to Taft Hill Park nor will it include the park plantings as a location visited by its water truck).

On the subject of watering, we should note that a new planting done at the small plot of land at South Street and Washington Street next to Sergio’s Auto Body owes its survival to the efforts of Jon Goodhue, a local architect, who has been transporting water to the site and watering there regularly, making up for another spot the City will not water. We thank Jon for his willingness to take on this important task.

Join us for one of our Gardening in the Square (GitS) sessions in Roslindale Square.

This time, Saturday, September 16, 2017 9:00-10:00 AM at Taft Hill Park (across the street from Wallpaper City), we’ll be planting a swath of the park which has been cleared to make room for variety of plants and grasses intended to revitalize the park’s appearance. (The time for this work has changed from the originally scheduled evening slot.)

No past experience is necessary!

Our 2017 Plant Sale took place at the Roslindale Farmers Market in Adams Park on Saturday, June 3, 2017.

Again this year, we sold a variety of perennials, edibles, and shrubs from our own members’ and local donors’ gardens.

We’re most grateful to those plant and shrub donors and to the volunteers who set up and manned our booth at the Farmers Market.

Finally, thank you to everyone who chose to buy from our large selection of plants and shrubs. Your purchases, we trust, will enhance your enjoyment of your gardens. We know the purchases help fund Roslindale Green & Clean’s ongoing efforts to add to, support, and maintain Roslindale’s green spaces.

Please join us or say hello to us at our Gardening in the Square sessions this 2017 growing season.

October 29th at 9 a.m.
We will be planting bulbs at Adams Park – at the corner of Washington and Cummins Highway. Be part of the effort to beautify Roslindale for next spring!!!
If you want to add beauty to your own little portion of Roslindale, buy your own bulbs and plant them using our guide below!

Fall Bulb Planting for Spring Flowers
One of the easiest ways to garden for impact is planting bulbs in the fall for brilliant flowers in the spring. Fall bulbs come in a wide variety. Some of the simplest ones are the minor bulbs, daffodils, and tulips. Minor bulbs (scilla, crocus, grape hyacinth), will come back year after year, and usually multiply, daffodils often bloom in the next years and sometimes multiply, and tulips are mostly an elegant one-time show, but oh so magnificent that first spring.

It’s simple! Here’s how to bulbs to your landscape:

• Buy your bulbs
• Dig your holes
• Plant bulbs at depth 2 ½ x’s the bulb’s height
• Water

A half-year later, ENJOY!

Although you can buy bags or boxes of mixed colors, most bulbs come in a grouping of just one color and type, for example-10 grape hyacinths, 6 white darwin hybrid tulips, 15 King Alfred Daffodils. If you are just starting out with bulb planting, don’t overwhelm yourself with a hundred or five hundred bulbs.

An extremely useful tool for planting bulbs is a bulb planter. A spade or trowel will work, but the planter is really efficient. There are long handled planters, even powered ones, but get an inexpensive one at your local hardware store and you will be in good shape.

So, go buy some bulbs, a mix of bulbs that bloom at different times is good. There are early, mid, and late blooming tulips and daffs, even crocus bloom at different times (some even in the fall).
Bulbs should all be planted with the tips (growing end) facing up. The flatter, wider end of the bulb has the roots. You will probably even see dry, brown roots on the bulb. Bulbs should be planted at a depth about 2 ½ times the height of the bulb, err on the side of a little more. Most bags and instructions will tell you how deep to plant. They may also tell you how close, but within a couple inches is ok.

When you are planting, a bit of bone meal in the hole will give the bulb a nice start, and water in after the bulbs are planted. That’s it. You’ve made yourself a spring garden. If you have chipmunks or squirrels, you could get theft, try a screen over the bulbs or just as they come up in the spring, a nip of cayenne pepper over the tip. Won’t hurt the bulb, might keep the squirrels from nipping the tulip in the bud.

Happy planting.

A group of volunteers from Atlanta, arranged through Charles River Church, watered, weeded, and deadheaded a few of the RG&C sites on a recent hot July afternoon.

The group toiled, and broiled, working at Alexander the Great Park, the traffic islands at Belgrade Avenue and Robert Street, and the slope alongside the stairs going up from Robert Street to the Roslindale Village commuter rail stop.

Thanks to all involved for helping to keep Roslindale green.