September 2025 Jada's Greenhouse and picnic

  

Members toured Jada's greenhouse and had the opportunity to create a fall plant arrangement.  Some are  shown below.  Then we met at Blue Mounds State Park for a potluck picnic.

   

                                                                                                       

      

August 2025 Jane Stenson Garden Tour

 

 

Jane Stenson opened her garden for a visit from our members plus the public.  A number of beautifully landscaped beds featuring native prairie plants as well as favorites like dahlias, daylilies and lilies.  A "cage" neatly holds stray branches and a nearby structure holds tubes and other crevices for native bees.

 

July 2025 Mineral Point School Garden

What a turnout of kids and their families at the July Mineral Point Elementary School garden and savanna tour! Teacher Jessica Soots is doing a great job with the gardens at the school. Summer school kids helped with weeding and harvesting and chives was the winning produce. The Uplands Garden Club gave a grant to the school to help with accessibility to the gardens. 

 Teacher Jessica Soots talking to garden club

June 2025 Janet Miller Garden

Janet Miller in her garden, viewed from Fountain St in Mineral Point. This is a garden designed to be viewed from above, but there are also pathways for walking through the Garden. Special features of the Garden to entertain children include: frogs, birds, hedge hogs and rabbit statues. There are also plants to touch such as Lamb’s Ear and Turtle Head.

May 2025 Seedling plant sale

Thank you Connie Tibbits for the tips and tricks of starting plants from seeds and allowing us to see your completed shed. Seeing your setup and hearing about your successes, will help members in starting their own plants from seeds. Your plants looked great. Also, thank you for your donation of the sales to go to the club.

April 2025 Maple Syrup production

April's program was all about backyard maple syruping. Roger and Gayl Stewart gave a great presentation starting with how to identify a maple tree to the last step of putting it in a jar. We learned trees should be at least 10 inch diameter at breast height. Sap flows when night temps are in the 20's and day temps in the 40's. 

Forty of sap boils down to 1 gal of syrup. Those were just a few of tips they taught us from their years of making syrup. Making maple syrup is a lot of work, but their product was great tasting. They gave us a taste of their maple syrup on some delicious treats! Thanks for the wonderful presentation!

March 2025: Program Olive Farm

Becky Nelson visited her cousin Pamela who is co-owner of Grumpy Goats Farm in California where they produce organic olive oil. They have 8000 olive trees on 17 acres northwest of Sacramento. Pamela was connected by phone during the meeting so she could answer our questions while Becky showed and narrated photos she took.

This farm in the Capay Valley gets around 12 inches of rain annually so irrigation hoses deliver water to each row of trees. They produce 1000 gallons of olive oil in a good year. There are several large growers in California in addition to small growers like Pamela and only about 1% of the olive oil used in the US is home grown.

They contract with a “manager” who provides the workers to hand pick the olives. Strict guidelines cover worker rights which include number of hours worked each day, breaktimes, drinking water available and port a potties. The manager was responsible for all of these and workers were paid $20 per hour.

Like many fruits, the olives on one tree will be in various stages of ripening. They want a blend of 60% green olives and 40% ripe olives which will be black or purple.

The olives are picked and then driven to a mill for processing the same day to ensure optimum freshness. They produce extra virgin olive oil so the olives are sorted, washed and crushed without using any extra heat. Centrifuges separate the oil from the rest of the olive which is discarded.

Becky brought a bottle of each of four olive oils that this farm produces so we could taste them.  How interesting since most of us just look for words like light, virgin and extra virgin!

         60/40 blend of picked olives ready for washing

The bottle lists the specific variety in it and the Grumpy Goats Farm website says the oil can be purchased at the Driftless Market in Platteville.