October 2025 Beekeeping

 

 

Mike Smith demonstrated his beekeeping equipment, including a traveling case of working bees.  He explained how to start beekeeping and the life of bees in a hive.

                                  

         Roger spinning honey from a "box"                              working bees in a traveling hive

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!