No one is quite sure how long the Odell Garden Club has been putting on their annual Blossom Fest plant sale — it’s estimated at around 20 or 30 years — but whatever the tally, it’s the club’s largest fundraiser.
Jackie Shaw, the club’s vice president, has been in charge of the event for the past 10 years, taking it over from former president Jenny Vann. She “doesn’t do much” to get ready for the sale; she simply tends, digs, cuts, grows, waters, fertilizes and eventually sets up and labels the plants for the one-day event, held in the Community Building at the fairgrounds — this year, on April 18.
“I just do a lot of digging of my plants; I do a lot of dividing,” she said of the undertaking. “It’s fun and I love doing it. I like starting stuff.”
She took over the sale “to be nice. I’m vice president, and I took over because they wanted me to because I was the one who brought the most plants,” she said. “I can’t remember how I got voted into that job, but I could get voted out pretty fast.”
April 18-19 marks the annual Blossom Craft Show at the Hood River County Fairgrounds. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, vendors from around the Northwest will offer arts and crafts, plants, garden art, handcrafted home furnishings and decorations, photos, paintings, and gourmet food products. Parking and admission are free.
The Odell Garden Club will hold their plant sale on April 18 in the Community Building; Gorge Strings will perform Sunday afternoon. Hood River Valley High FFA, Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers and Special Olympics will also have booths.
The Blossom Quilt Show is held in the floral building during the Blossom Craft Show. Quilts will be for sale and show. Admission is free, with donations for Hood River Adopt A Dog accepted at the door. Those attending can vote for their favorite blocks to include the annual Harvest Quilt fundraiser. The blocks are created using one main and a variety of coordinating fabrics from ETC in Hood River. This year’s sale proceeds will benefit Hood River Adopt A Dog; watch for the finished quilt to make its rounds to various business window displays in the coming months.
While the sale is one day only, Shaw and the garden club ladies work year round: the plants, shrubs and berries sold come solely from members’ yards.
This year, the club will offer Shaw’s raspberry, marionberry and strawberry starts in addition to the usual perennials and shrubs. She likes the plants to be potted to sell at least a week in advance because “if I did it today and sell it on Saturday, I wouldn’t be sure if it was going to live, even though it probably would,” she said. “I like everything to stand up and look pretty.”
One thing she’s known for is her ability to start plants from cuttings, such as roses, dahlias, hydrangeas and forsythias. She can’t recall exactly how she learned to start plants from cuttings, “but it works,” she said. “Some things don’t work — I go by trial and error. Lilacs, they don’t start from clippings. You have to dig down — they send out runners and you pull them up and cut them off and hope you get a couple of roots. But roses are really easy for me.
“They root and then the next year I put them in pots and we sell them for $3,” she said. “That’s mainly what I do.”
Well, maybe not. Because she has a large property — the area where her daughter used to ride horses now holds plants — many members bring their seedlings for her to take care of in addition to her own.
“I keep (the plants) watered all year — all summer — and fertilized because no one else seems to have the property that I do,” she said.
And for those who lost rose bushes in the November freeze, she’ll have her starts available, which surprisingly survived.
“I had started four big planters full of rose starts, from climbers to just normal roses, and the weather didn’t get them at all,” she said. “I transplanted them and they’re beautiful. But the big roses I cut them off of are dead. But those little bitty starts were happy. It’s a miracle. It’s nothing that I did.”
Friday morning, Shaw joined other Odell Garden Club members in the Community Building to set up for the sale, which takes about five hours. It’s her job to make sure everything brought in is labeled — and if she’s not sure what a plant is, she finds someone who does.
“Some of the older ladies who have been in the Garden Club longer than me, they’ll tell me what it is,” she said.
At the sale, customers will find “anything from flowers to shrubs to berries at a good price,” Shaw said. “The highest thing we have is $3, that’s shrubs, down to $1.”
Money earned goes to the many organizations and charities the club supports, including Hospice, the Hood River County Fairgrounds, St. Francis House, the Hood River Valley High drug-free graduation party, and 4H scholarships.
“We try to keep (the money) mostly in Odell,” Shaw said.
Anything that doesn’t sell at the April sale is held over for the club’s second sale in June, located at Shaw’s house “to babysit … We sell lots of stuff that way, too.”
Shaw joined Odell Garden Club 12 years ago, after retiring from Diamond Fruit, where she worked as a bookkeeper for 44 years. She’s always been interested in gardening, and “always had flowers and flowers and flowers,” she said. “I think that’s how they got me joining — somebody said, ‘I’m having a plant sale,’ and I said, ‘I have lots of this and lots of this, do you want me to bring it?’ and they said, ‘yeah.’ I did that for a year and got hooked and joined. It’s really lots of fun.
“I like doing the plant sale and making more plants and making more plants. And I love the people. Everybody in Garden Club is very nice.”
The plant sale isn’t the club’s only activity; they also create bouquets for Hospice patients every Friday, make Mother’s Day bouquets for Hood River Care Center residents, and create all 28 of the Christmas wreaths and swags that decorate every business in downtown Odell.
“It’s a great club to belong to,” Shaw said. “If somebody else is bored and needs something to do, we do a lot of work, but have a lot of fun, too.”
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