Compiled by The Bedford Citizen
A pair of venerable Bedford institutions will sponsor garden sales on consecutive weekends, May 10 and 17. Coming first, the Bedford Garden Club’s sale, and then the 61st annual First Parish Plant and Craft Sale.
The Bedford Garden Club – May 10
Beautiful cut flower arrangements in three sizes, hanging baskets of flowers and other plants will be available for purchase as Mother’s Day gifts this Saturday, May 10, at the Bedford Garden Club’s annual plant sale.
The sale – on the day before Mother’s Day – will run from 10 am – 3 pm in front of the Bedford DPW Building on The Great Road.
A new addition to this year’s sale will be the “Plant Expert Station” manned by a Garden Club member who can answer customers’ questions about the numerous types of perennials on sale.
Besides floral arrangements and hanging baskets; hundreds of geraniums in red, pink, hot pink, coral and white, as well as hardy perennials dug from Bedford homes, will be on sale. In addition to being perfect Mother’s Day gifts for mothers, sisters, aunts and friends, proceeds from the sale will be used to benefit the Garden Club’s scholarship and civic projects.
This is the Garden Club’s major fundraiser of the year, and more than 50 Garden Club members are working to make it a success. Co-chairs of the sale are Carol Amick and Maureen Levine.
The Bedford Garden Club, founded in 1956, prepares and maintains gardens at 19 traffic islands, corners and public buildings throughout Bedford, including the historic Job Lane Herb Garden. The gardens and plantings have been designed, tended, and beautified by Garden Club members for many years, and benefit the entire Bedford community by providing beautiful landscapes and vistas for the public to enjoy.
The 61st annual First Parish Plant & Craft Fair – May 17
The First Parish Plant & Craft fair offers great plants and a day of family fun from 10 am until 3 pm on Saturday, May 17. Begun 61 years ago, two participants, Marty Schafer and Jean Balfour, are offspring of the founders and remain the backbone of the plant area.
Marty Schafer and his wife Jan Sacks are professional plantsmen who moved to a “garden farm” in Carlisle after many years of maintaining garden plots around Bedford. They operate Joe Pye Weed Nursery https://www.jpwflowers.com/ where they breed and sell Siberian iris. Each year Marty and Jan share dozens of plant divisions from their garden at the fair, then spend time answering customer questions.
Jean Balfour scours wholesale nurseries from Sudbury to Kittery, ME, in search of wonderful plants to sell and organizes the plant area each year.
The fair also receives plant divisions that are the result of plants originally purchased at the fair, some that are divisions that Marty’s mother, Eva Schafer, gave to the fair almost 20 years ago. There will also be a “Grocery Garden” with heirloom tomato plants from Verrill Farm, herbs and veggie six-paks.
And the fair offers add-ons that make the day fun whether a visitor is a gardener or not:
- a craft fair with more than three dozen vendors, including a table selling Free Trade coffee and chocolate;
- a cookout lunch and outstanding bake sale, both prepared by First Parishioners;
- the Chip-in Farm/Bedford 4H petting zoo;
- face painting by First Parish youth and a seletion of used books gathered by Senior Minister John Gibbons;
- live music by Ellen Groves, often of Fishken and Groves, and First Parish youth;
- Jim Dichter, the Bubble Guy. Jim’s an interesting fellow from Waltham who creates massive and magical bubbles at DeCordova, Verrill Farm and the First Parish Plant & Craft Fair – https://www.yogile.com/bubblefun#41m
To learn more about the fair, visit its website: www.plantfair.wordpress.com. The Plant & Craft Fair supports the work of the church in the community.
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