4H Garden Projects

One of my non-gardening activities is leading a book group for the senior high girls at my church. We met last Wednesday and ended up talking about “the Fair.” (Today is the last day of the Fair, and life will go back to normal, but it really does dominate conversations, media, and lives for 12 days.) I asked if they stopped by the 4H building. Some had, but some of the girls had never heard about 4H.

I’ll have to admit that until I started going to the Fair with my friend, Annie, most of my 4H experiences were in the animal barns. But, Annie is a costume designer and knew about a myriad of other 4H projects and activities, which she happily introduced me to. This year, in addition to looking at the clothing booklets and watching the variety show (they pull together a 30 minute program with only one week of rehearsals), I checked out some of the garden projects.


These two projects are about sunlight and plant parts. Budding botanist?







These two are about soil and compost. (Hooray for compost!)






And, this one is about garden design! The 4H’er who did this project took before and after snapshots of her site, selected plants (and included colored photos), and drew a map of the site, which she documented on her board.






Regardless of whether she grows up to have a career in landscape design, the skills she learned/used to create this project (and the garden) will remain with her for a lifetime.


Note: I’m not related to or affiliated with any of the projects I took snaps of. I was looking for projects that were related to gardening in one way or another.

Garden Stamps

After my shift at the Hort Society Plant Show yesterday, a friend and I toured some of the Fair. It had been almost 20 years since she’d been there and she was eager to see a couple of buildings – Ag/Hort, which she toured while I was working and Creative Activities (formerly called the Women’s Building). It’s the building where people (not just women anymore) display their creations. We saw garments, quilts, knitted creations, woven creations, mosaic creations, and wood-carved creations. We ogled the baked creations (cookies, cakes, pies, breads, muffins, you name it) and the “canned” goodies (jams, jellies, pickles, peaches, and salsa).

I had forgotten that people entered stamp collections and post-card collections until we rounded a corner and saw several of them on various themes. So, when I got home, I went through my own stamp collection and pulled out a few of my favorite gardening stamps!

These four represent the Minnesota State Fair – two stamps about Minnesota itself (statehood and territory centennial) and two on the kids who exhibit at the Fair – 4H-ers and the FFA kids.




Here’s a set of stamps about conservation – soil, water, forest, energy, wildlife and wetlands.






These include botany and forestry.








These are just flowers. I don’t know that I’d ever enter them at the Fair, but it was fun to look through them and see how many stamps are about gardening, botany, horticulture, and flowers. (I didn’t even touch the international stamps for today’s post, but there are some beautiful floral stamps in those collections, too.)

I hope you enjoy seeing them, too.