Warm Springs Winery

The Merry Weather Garden Club met on Friday, May the 13^th in Warm Springs at “Dinner’s Ready” for lunch. Hostess Erma Jean Brown arranged with chef and owner Chad Garrett to serve a delightful addition to the meal with the preferred dessert being chosen: Chad’s seven layer chocolate cake.

The club had a fun social time before moving down the road to Warm Springs Winery at 7227 Roosevelt Highway and touring the facility. Winery staffer Joe Bankovitch welcomed the ladies with most remembering him from running the Grand Wisteria from 2000 to 2005. Owner Ed Rocereta, a semi retired pharmacist was filling in at the garden club meeting time and date and could not lead the tour.  Bankovitch did a super job explaining every step taken at the winery with the only disappointment being that the fourteen acres of actual vineyards being too far a walk for the club to make with the chance of showers looming.

For over eighteen years Rocereta has propagated or “grown the grape” as the Italians say and made wine for his own consumption. He has converted the garage into a winery and moved in much equipment. There were grapes on the property but Rocereta has cultivated fourteen more acres over the last four years and this fall will harvest from the new plantings.

Bankovitch explained the wine making process pointing out the 1500 gallon tanks where the juice is first placed.  It takes several weeks to settle the sediment which is washed out three different times with chemicals that break down the impurities until a pure juice form is made. The yeast begins to digest the sugars present in the grape juice and carbon dioxide and alcohol are by-products of this process. The liquid is moved into other tanks and the blending process begins.

Warm Springs Winery uses only muscadines and the Georgia grown Norton grape.  The different blends make for the different varieties.  The wine is filtered into 750 ml bottles then goes to the machine which vacuums out the air and adds the cork. The labeling machine places labels front and back and finally they wrap plastic around the cork. Ed Rocereta designed the labels himself. The bottles are then stored at 72 degrees and upside down to keep the cork moistened.

Bankovitch explained the difficult licensing process at which time Warm Springs Winery has a license to be a winery and to consume on the premises, but they are working to get a license so our Meriwether wine can be distributed and sold in stores and served at restaurants.

The garden club members sampled seven varieties from Warm Springs Winery served in their distinctive logo etched glasses which are also available for purchase. Beginning with White House White-an off dry and crisp wine- they moved through Unfinished Portrait, a dry blush, to Lotus Pond White a lightly sweet wine.  Recognizable are the clear Roosevelt references and local landmarks with the lotus pond being a familiar sight on the right as we travel into Warm Springs before going under the narrow train trestle.

Kudzu Rosé is a semi sweet rosé named for the official state invasive plant. It was followed by one of their most popular, Tribute, which has a distinctive muscadine aroma. Bankovitch kept reminding the ladies to swirl and aerate their wine and sniff the bouquet before drinking. Old Atlanta Red was a popular sweet red wine the club enjoyed. A last wine, Blueberry, was not so popular or tasty and Bankovitch pointed out that they only bottled 260 blueberry and they may not make it again which has encouraged some to buy it for the that reason alone!

Bankovitch allowed member Gail Coffee to remove the cork with an elegant de-corker attached to the wine tasting counter. Members purchased a number of bottles of wines and the winery’s glasses before departing. All agreed that by sampling the seven varieties they learned their favorite types and flavors, but overall, the lowly muscadine made a delicious wine.

Lunch and Learn in Concord

April 2011

The Merry Weather Garden Club met on Thursday, April 14^th and traveled to Concord for “Lunch and Learn” sponsored by the garden club in Pike County.  Sally Neal and Angie Williams coordinated the Meriwether club’s trip.

Held in the recently renovated Strickland Country Store, the ladies arrived to find delightful table arrangements featuring market baskets filled with colorful fresh produce from rhubarb to radishes. The Concord club introduced and thanked the many members who made the luncheon possible and also awarded their annual horticulture scholarship. Guests brought picnic lunches and the Concord club provided drinks and desserts-a simple plan that has worked brilliantly for over a decade with many clubs attending from throughout the Redbud District in Georgia.

Speaker for the Lunch and Learn was Sheri Castle from Chapel Hill, NC who is a noted food writer, cooking instructor, and delightful storyteller. Recently publishing The New Southern Garden Cookbook: or Enjoying the Best from Homegrown Gardens, Farmers’ Markets, Roadside Stands, and CSA Farm Boxes, Castle encourages cooks to use fresh produce in season and grown locally. The cookbook is organized in a unique way A to Z by the main garden ingredient: apples, asparagus, beets, blackberries to turnips, winter squash, and zucchini.

But Castle’s great sense of humor and cooking tips were the delight of the day.  She began telling about her entrance into the cooking industry by being a ghost writer and test cook for a number of famed cooking personalities who really could not cook. Then she lived in Italy to become a Mediterranean cook which she compared to being a good Southern cook. She pointed out while Southerners are known and judged for those special holiday and Sunday dinners, their faces really light up when asked about fresh vegetables and fruits from their gardens. Mama’s and Grandmama’s specially orchestrated meals are food memories that make up our most tenacious nostalgia.

Some of Castle’s basic cooking guidelines were to always use freshly ground black pepper, Kosher salt, large eggs from free roaming chickens, butter instead of margarine, milk, yogurt and dairy products that are always whole and not low fat, real buttermilk and not powdered, fresh cream not ultra pasteurized, and fresh stone ground corn meal. She recommended using light, thin aluminum metal baking pans, and insisted on preheating the oven twenty minutes before baking. Vanilla flavoring should be pure and not a flavored item and spices needed to be fresh and not from the wedding gift spice rack given to you when you married three husbands ago!

Each recipe is prefaced with a anecdote or cooking tip such as Ozark pudding cooked by Bess Truman to cheer up a homesick Harry Truman, the French Huguenots bringing the recipe over for their taverns, or thinking of the eggplant as a huge oversized berry. Merry Weather Garden Clubbers lined up to purchase her book and compliment her on her talk.

The next meeting of the Merry Weather Garden Club will be in May and the club will tour the new Warm Springs Winery.

Lee Cathey "Photography in the Garden" at Hills and Dales

The Merry Weather Garden Club met on Saturday, March 12^th at Hills and Dales in LaGrange for the Lee Cathey workshop “Photography in the Garden.” Ellen McEwen and Patti Acheson hosted the monthly meeting. Horticulturist Jo Phillips welcomed the group which included a number not in the garden club itself. Door prizes were given, fruit and breakfast pastries available, and Phillips invited those to come for the elementary and middle school program called CSI in the Garden where children learn to look for clues in nature to solve insect and plant growth problems.

   Noted local photographer Lee Cathey took up photography when he worked for the Georgia state archeologist while attending West Georgia University. He often photographs the gardens at Hills and Dales as it is such a beautiful garden with great light.  His first tip for the class is to set shooting times when the sun is at an angle that creates interesting shadows.  The noon sun coming straight down is bright and less interesting.  The human eye focuses and can see depths in the garden that the camera can not see so shadows and depths are important.

   Cathey recommended looking for repeated patterns, shadows and structural lines to photograph the beauty and sculptural elements of a place where, “God’s beauty meets man’s creativity.” In deciding how to capture the subject area with the camera he tries to capture form, shape, and design, and patterns working with the horizontal line of the picture. For example, capturing the grill work of an iron fence at an angle adds interest but still allows the major subject of a plant in bloom to shine.

   “Use the entire frame,” was Cathey’s tip.  The old Kodak adage was focus, aperture, shutter, and think, but today’s auto focused digital cameras makes anyone a photographer because you can take an unlimited numbers of photographs from which one or two shots are bound to be good. Cathey recommend good cameras brands like the Panasonic’s Lumix with its German lenses and Nikon and Canons but said it’s not so much about the cameras as when you pull the trigger or shoot.

   Cathey had a number of his photographs for the group to study.  A slow shutter speed allows him to let in more light and the blurred background can be used for creative effect. On a shot of a tree looking from the base upwards Cathey adjusted the shutter and kept the subject in focus, showed the details of the bark of the tree as well as the background of the picture and the upper most branches of the tree.  An orchid picture shot close-up without a tripod using autofocus shows the details of the plant’s delicate parts with a blurred, fuzzy background.

   Another tip he offered was to change the normal perspective of shooting a photo.  He regularly carries a ten foot step ladder to Hills and Dales to capture images from an out of the ordinary angle.

   Cathey’s creativity was shown in his display of photographs.  His printer allows him to print as big as he wants.  He may use Photoshop to make his pictures look like a painted canvas, but his display collage of photos was clearly most memorable.  A series of photos was folded accordion like so that from one angle the background was one color and another from the other angle. A trip to Washington DC included unique architectural details like the capital on a column, a door handle, a statue’s hand, and small different perspective details from the trip. He created a collage for his parent’s 50^th anniversary that included the steeple of the church where they were married, the podium from which his mother taught Sunday School, the sun setting over the lake where they live, the door to where his father always worked, and other important details of their lives together-clearly telling a bigger story than one snapshot can.

   Those attending the workshop strolled the gardens at Hills and Dales, took pictures and got constructive tips from Cathey. Camellias, yarrow, tulips, jasmine, spring vegetables, thrift, violets, budding trees and the fresh green of spring made for stunning photo opportunities.

Cathey attributes much of any photographer’s success as being at the right place at the right time. He pointed out that no photo today is un-manipulated. Attendees at the workshop asked if there were another, cheaper app than Photoshop-the industry standard.  He said GIMP has a free download but that it was harder to use and Photoshop is the best.

   After the workshop members enjoyed lunch at Lemon Tree Restaurant where Mary Ellen Hill joined the group.

Southeastern Flower Show-February 2011

The Merry Weather Garden Club met on Friday, February 25, 2011 and traveled to Cobb Galleria in Atlanta for the Southeastern Flower Show sponsored by the Southeastern Horticultural Society. It was “Garden Club Day” at the show, and the ladies were delighted to be given bags filled with coupons, subscriptions, magazines, seed packets and more.

The show’s theme was “In Tune with Blooms,” and the music theme was evident not only in the arrangements but with live performances by instrumentalists and vocalists during the show. There were five judged divisions in the show: Artistic Floral Design, Garden Design, Discovery, Horticulture and Photography. The photography, as in years past, was excellent.  The horticultural entries fewer in number than in years before but always interesting to see what is blooming in other people’s yards.

The designer showcase was new this year and was beautifully carried out with entries like “Moulin Rouge” featuring rich deep purple/violet in all its drapery, upholstery, tablecloths, and flowers. An Italian Renaissance Wedding, Sax in the City, I Love Paris, Georgia on my Mind, Rock Lobster by the B-52s, and Yesterday by the Beatles were other splendid creations by event designers. The club’s favorite was a romantic and elegant table setting featuring pristine white damask linens, sparkling crystal, gleaming silver and silver vases filled with white and blush roses.

Members always enjoy walking through the landscaped gardens that followed the music theme with “Moonlight Sonata,” ‘Round Midnight,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream” that feature forced bulbs, shrubs, and blooming trees, pebble or stone walkways, the latest outdoor furniture and fireplace and grill scenarios, and water features.

Always popular are the discovery gardens featuring perennials, inspiring designs in vegetable gardening, container gardens with themes like “Laissez Les bon Temps Rouler” and The Secret Life of Trees.

The marketplace vendors featured everything from needlepoint shoes and designer clothing with music or gardening themes to water hoses, nozzles and gardening tools to olive oils for dipping. Gutter salespeople were juxtaposed with artists, homemade soap vendors, and outdoor lighting specialists.  Club members enjoyed the shopping. The garden bookstore and raffle tables also inspired the imagination.

Undoubtedly one of the most popular aspects of the show was the speakers.  Twenty nine guest speakers were slated for the three day event and garden clubbers enjoyed three especially popular ones on Friday: Vince Dooley, Walter Reeves, and P. Allen Smith.

UGA Coach Vince Dooley, Honorary Chairman of the event, delivered a delightful talk to the standing room only crowd.  His adventure with gardening had the best of roots as he took advantage of being in a university town and sat in on many horticulture classes, took notes, and then told the students “Good luck” when it was exam time. The classes paid off as proved to be adept with botanical names and never faltered with varieties and species of plants, their planting and care. Over the last few years he has transformed his garden, hosted garden tours, traveled around the world to visit gardens, and is the author of a book about his gardening experiences. He has truly been bitten by the gardening bug.

Ever popular Walter Reeves spoke on Cool Tools and Funky Fertilizers.  The tools he displayed are ones he is given but often are not distributed nor sold through the large gardening chains.  His website, walterreeves.com, features the new tricks of the trade: better mousetraps that don’t snap the finger of the human installing them; several weeding tools, cobra heads or leveraged designed items for digging up dandelions; water weeders made for wild onions; pine cone picker uppers and devices for voles.  Moles, Reeves pointed out, do not disturb plant life and recommended simply stomping down their tunnels, but voles are critters that ruin plants and he showed how to catch them. New plant cameras made for watching the sequential growing, blooming, and blossoming life of plants in the garden were a new item for the devoted gardener.

Reeves held lengthy questions and answer moments that targeted the problems we face from fertilizers, diatomaceous earth, and pre-emergents to pruning.  Foremost was “Crape Murder” which he discusses at length on his web site.  Letting the myrtles grow into tree form was preferred but he blasted the common yardman who leaves the horrid misshapen knuckles that distort the trunk lines of the tree.

Popular nationally syndicated gardener, P. Allen Smith, was the clear entertainer and, like Martha Stewart, showed what having a crew of professional helpers and millions of dollars can create.  His farm in Arkansas was a showplace.  He planted 250,000 daffodil bulbs which sweep the pasture entrances in color in the spring and then local schoolchildren sell bouquets of 10 stems for $5 as their fundraiser.

Smith’s landscape around his home is divided into “rooms” featuring vegetable gardens, roses, trellises, herbs and more.  His container gardens were overflowing and lush but he also showed slides of the garden in winter when you could see the “bones” of the layout. His talk was interspersed with questions and prizes where Mary Anne Rasmussen and Sally Neal both won flats from Bonnie Plant Farm for naming the plants correctly.

The next meeting of the Merry Weather Garden Club will be on March 19^th at Hills and Dales in LaGrange for Lee Cathey’s work shop on Photography in the Garden. Call Ellen McEwen for more information.

January 2011

January 2011

The Merry Weather Garden Club met on Thursday, January 20^th, 2011 at the home of Linda Wilburn.  Wilburn and Babs Gordon hosted the meeting with guest James Mitcham from Details of the Garden who presented the program.

Members present signed up for a month in 2011 in which to host and do a program. Linda Wilburn asked to be excused from mailing out the meeting announcement postcards every month and Sally Neal volunteered to take on the job. Neal also told the club we had received the Redbud District’s financial statement and the 2010 President’s Report was due in February. Club dues were paid and Jean Biggers gave the club’s financial report pointing out the garden club had purchased a paver for Greenville’s streetscapes project.

Wilburn gave a summation of the streetscapes project in Greenville.  The contractor has been selected and the Georgia Department of Transportation next approves the choice.  Wilburn pointed out that she is very excited because we are actually getting close to construction. Wilburn said the application was submitted before Christmas for grants to next do the streetscapes for the west side of court square, College Street, and about half a block down LaGrange Street.

Wilburn introduced James Mitcham from Details of the Garden in Pine Mountain.  Mitcham decorates Wilburn’s house at Christmas and Wilburn complimented the care and detail that he brings to the job stating that every limb on the Christmas tree has lights wounds around it and the effect is stunning.

Mitcham grew up in a florist family as his mother was Callaway Gardens’ first floral designer and later the family owned seven florist shops. Mitcham worked with the Wall Street Journal until retirement and then worked at Callaway Gardens managing special events. He has been doing events and weddings and special occasions for fifteen years and brings a unique touch to that special day.  He noted that today’s bride is “greener” now and is using herbs and grasses instead of classical formal arrangements and often the ring bearer’s pillow is now a bird’s nest.

Mitcham’s nephew Ross Harper has returned from a year teaching and studying in France and he brought pictures of entire downtown walls that are made up of topiary plantings.  Usually creepers and ivies fill walls but the unique topiary effect is easy to reproduce. The program for the garden club was making a topiary.

Mitcham used a simple wire tomato cage that was inverted and anchored in a pot that could be fitted into a larger decorative urn or planter. He prefers to use a transportable pot so that in winter the plants can be lifted out and brought inside.

The project requires using bolt cutters, pliers, a good knife and scissors plus cling wrap or shrink wrap.  Mitcham recommends using a plastic wrap because the membrane does not dry out.  Mitcham wraps the cage in layers as he moves upwards, slicing the plastic and adding succulents layer by layer.  He chose succulents for the project because they require little moisture. 

The variety of shades of grey, green, and purple succulents that Mitcham purchased from his plant supplier, the  Blooming Idiot in Pine Mountain Valley, led club members to ask if Mitcham would demonstrate placing the plants in a pattern. To fill a standard tomato cage he uses approximately 40 plants but would use less if he wanted the plants to grow and spread. Mitcham also uses sheets of moss or burlap if he wants to use fewer plants and leave room for them to reproduce.

This topiary can be filled with a variety of plants: herbs would be pretty if exposed to a lot of sun, succulents also need a lot of sun, sultanas or impatiens would make a pretty topiary planter too especially topped with a cascading plant.

Club members asked many questions which Mitcham adeptly answered or showed an easy method to make or design.  Mitcham also filled the club in on all the happenings and events coming up in Pine Mountain and noted how several of the popular restaurants and stores had changed hands and were opening under new management.  He recommended that the club come to Pine Mountain on February 18^th for the “Taste of Pine Mountain.”

Hostesses Wilburn and Gordon served a delicious carrot cake along with Chai tea latte. The next meeting will be in late February and members will attend the Southeastern Flower Show.

Decorating the Downtown for Christmas

And the prettiest sight you'll see  . . Toots Hobson has a bird's eye view of the square as she adds Christmas greenery and a red ribbon to the historic fire bell. She noted that mischievous children in an earlier time would run a string from the bell to the top of Hill Brothers Store to ring the bell and not get caught!

The Merry Weather Garden Club and the County Commissioners purchased sixteen new wreaths for the courthouse this Christmas season. Garden Club members responsible are,from top, Sally Neal, Toots Hobson and guests Margaret Corbett from Connecticut and Muriel Quinn from Rhode Island.  Also offering vital help but not in the photo were Linda Gasses, Battle Neal, Ed Hobson, and Melvin Kelley. 

October-November 2010

The Merry Weather Garden Club met in October and was hosted by Dee Garrett and Jean Biggers.  The club went to Rocky Branch Garden Center in Pine Mountain owned by Ken and Sherrie Callaway and met gardeners Debra Daniel and Debbie Lee who presented the program.

   The club first enjoyed learning about Clay Buster, an organic and mineral soil conditioner that improves heavy soils by loosening the soil and allowing better drainage so roots can thrive.  It is a mixture of bark, limestone, sphagnum peat moss and gypsum that Rocky Branch adds to regular dirt in their potting.

  Debbie Lee showed the ladies two ways to root plants: making a lateral cut and inserting in water containing a baby aspirin.  Plants that are blooming may be rooted by cutting a sample, dusting it in Rootone, a rooting hormone and then planting it.

   The program was also about blooming plants like dahlias and chrysanthemums and the garden center had many colorful mounds of Korean and Belgium mums. There are many hybrid chrysanthemums and genus and cultivars branching off from them that allow for many types of blooms: daisy, pom pom, button, etc. and they come in every color with the two overall divisions of mums being a basic garden variety that is sturdy and planted outdoors and an exhibition variety that is for annual bloom and color.

   The mum is used in Asia to brew tea, it is a natural insecticide, and an air purifier. Japan holds the mum dear with the Chrysanthemum Throne, the position of the Japanese emperor; the Order of the Chrysanthemum, the nation’s finest honor; and the mum on crests, incorporated into architecture and stamped on their currency.

   Korean mums are the tall with daisy like flowers and are the sturdy popular garden variety. The newcomer is the Belgian mum with tight flowers sometimes numbering over 600 to a plant that mound and bloom well into cold weather. The Belgian mums come in hundreds of colors and shades and are popular plants for sale in the fall.

   The ladies at Rocky Branch pointed out flowers and shrubs that have year around interest or color and texture: viburnums for deciduous fall color, deutzia with its white and pinkish blooms that is part of the hydrangea family, Warren’s Red holly that is a shrub or small tree, and evergreen hollies that have soft leaves instead of spiky briars.

There are several new varieties of Loropetalum or Chinese fringe flower and they now come in pink, red, purple, and white and dwarf varieties like Pixie.

   The club members enjoyed discount shopping in the garden shop where there are many attractive and humorous gift items plus making purchases from the garden area.  The morning finished with lunch at Rose Cottage.

   The garden club met Thursday, November 4 at the Foxx Den Restaurant and covered three items of business: the club voted to purchase sixteen wreaths to decorate each of the bases of the columns of the courthouse and to purchase one $250 paver in honor of the garden club to support the Better Home Town Program.  Final preparations for the group to gather on November 20 to decorate the square in Greenville and the railroad bridge were made.

   Linda Wilburn led the members on a tour of the Jones Print Shop she has purchased and is renovating to make into a consignment gallery for local Meriwether artists. A massive, old, unique paper cutter was left in the building and Wilburn will leave it on display and incorporate it into the gallery’s name.