Friends of Baltimore Woods Native Plant Sale a Success – With a little Help from Our Friends

By Caroline Skinner

OK, it was a lot more than a little help from our friends that got us through another FoBW native plant sale so smoothly on March 31st. A core group of us, including co-chairs Kelly Derr and Susan Gere, plus Mark Hill and me, spent many evenings during recent months meeting around Mark’s dining room table nailing down the event details. Thanks to a nifty “how to hold a plant sale” document done by Sylvia Allen, we seemed to hit on all the key points as our sale date drew closer. Those points include reserving the St John’s Plaza, renting the tables, rounding up the canopies, ordering the plants and recruiting volunteers… lots of volunteers.

The four of us could not possibly hold a plant sale without all the fantastic volunteer help from the community. The biggest areas where major help is always needed is picking up our plant orders at two places, on two consecutive days, and then setting up at the plaza on the morning of sale day and bringing in the plants—at last. Labeling with informative signage made the shopping fun as well as easy. To all our plant sale helpers, thank you so much!

Mother Nature also gave us a helping hand, by giving us one of the warmest days so far this year. Our plant suppliers, Bosky Dell in West Linn and Scappoose Bay Watershed Council, in Scappoose, provided us with strong and healthy native plants. After a long, cold winter, the idea of putting a few new things in the garden sounded appealing to many. We had a fun and festive day of immersion in the wonderful world of native plants. Thanks to Willow Elliott from Native Plant Society of Oregon for fielding the plant questions that just kept on coming. And the plants just kept on going… we nearly had a complete sell-out. Thanks again to everyone for joining us.