Minutes 3-10-05 Meeting

The Manchester Garden Club had its first meeting of 2005 on March 10, 2005 at 7 p.m. at the Manchester Center for History, 124 E Main St.  President Angie Kline started the meeting. In attendance were 14 members and 5 new members.

Dues were reduced to $10.00 for the year and those who paid, received their Manchester Garden Club book.  Rick Bauer designed the very nice book of our meetings, list of members and other pertinent information.  We all thank him and appreciated the time he took so we could pass them out at our first meeting.  We also talked about placing them around town so we could possibly interest others in joining.

Karen Melton and Joyce Joy presented old scrapbooks and pamphlets from Garden Clubs in the past.  We all enjoyed looking through their books and we were surprised at the formality of their group.  The original Garden club was established in 1928 and met on the first Wednesday of the month.  They had 12 members whom had to be voted in and they had a limit of 40 members.  We found that the garden club dues where only 48 cents that first year.  The Garden Club disbanded in 1987 and re-established in 1997 to its current membership.

We discussed the purchase of bricks for the Eel River Garden pathway, which can be attained for $50 from Garden Club members.  It would be more cost effective to order 10 bricks at a time, but it was decided we would not hold purchasers funds for long periods of time in order to send the order in.   We also talked about the "Honey Hoes" the Garden Club sells for $15, which Linda Richards has stored.  The Garden Club has $2,018.27 in our checking account before we collected dues on March 10, 2005.  Last year we earned $540 and expenditures were $476.55, which left a gain of $63.45 for 2004, from dues, brick sales and sale of "honey hoes".

Our next meeting will be at Linda Richards home, 101 E Ninth St, North Manchester, IN.  Leesa Metzger will be discussing landscape design.  The meeting will begin at 7:00 pm on April 14, 2005.

Terri Jones would like the Garden Club to do a Designer's Challenge for her home, which we will discuss more in future meetings.

The Town of North Manchester had a surplus of funds and donated $2,000 to the Garden Club.  They asked that trees purchased with these funds be from the Walrod Foundation.  The cost of these trees is $75.  We talked about replacing some of the trees in Eel River Garden, but the Walrod trees are varieties, which would grow too large for that area.  We also need to lift the boulders in the garden due to settling.

Our homework for our next meeting was to tell of your favorite tree.

The meeting adjourned at approximately 8:45.