It happens once a year. The perennial plant sale of the Earth, Wind and Flowers Garden Club is this Saturday from 9 a.m. until noon. The sales area is in the Arts and Crafts building on the Crawford County Fairgrounds. Members have been loading and delivering over a two-day period filling those shelves.

In the beginning, we used driveways or garages like Lynn Kime's and Mary Ann Basinger's. As members increased, so did the plant offerings. Each of us thinned gobs of perennial plants. We ended up in the flower show building at the fairgrounds until overflowing led to the immense Arts and Crafts building.

Last growing season several garden club members began dividing, potting and labeling perennial plants. Named plants help buyers make selections. Pictures can help everyone understand plant behavior such as height and growth habit. We have learned that plants growing half a year in a pot home are presentable in May.  Perky and healthy, they tempt shoppers.

Our plant sale team works to clean the building, accept the plants, price them and set them into related groupings. The color-coded popsicle sticks indicate the cost. Herbs, grasses, ground covers, yarrows, daisies, alliums,  bulbs, mums, iris, columbines, succulents and many more plant families are staged together. We are handling all daylilies and hostas outside at the small building next to the sale area.  

With Mothers' Day on Sunday, an effort to have planters and interesting containers with plants has brought annual planters and interesting baskets with labeled perennial collections.

There is always a curiosity about where our funds are spent. We donate to the Crawford Park District as a club and individually. We support the effort to beautify the Crawford County fairgrounds where we initiated the "Company's Coming" project. We plant the Camp Millard Memorial honoring WW II servicemen, and their former barracks — now the flower show building. Monies are used for staging two flower shows in July.

We decorate the Scroggs House — the Bucyrus Historical Society each holiday season inside and out. Regular visits are made to residents of Pro Medica, formerly Heartland, where we bring sessions with projects using natural materials like plants and flowers. Two junior garden clubs are supported — the Peas in a Pod and Nuts About Nature. 

Plantings are made and maintained at the Harry Martin Memorial within Oakwood Cemetery. Twin urns are planted at the entrance of Schines Park. We partner with the Bucyrus Rotary Club to bring hanging baskets to the square, plant petunias in ground, and prune euonymous and rose shrubs. Watering and maintenance stretch from May until October, teams taking a week at a time. 

We will be decorating the dining room at Kingwood in Mansfield for Christmas. Funds are shared with the Ohio Association of Garden Clubs' Foundation with which we are an affiliate member. Other partnerships and alliances stretch our ability to share. The Bicentennial "Bombing of Bucyrus" with 10,000 daffodil bulbs brought support from Hords, Munz-Pirnstill, Pickwick, Diamond Wipes, Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs along with a local fund.

Cartons are piled high for shoppers and wagons will be rolling Saturday at 9 a.m. 

Mary Lee Minor is a member of the Earth, Wind and Flowers Garden Club, an accredited master gardener, a flower show judge for the Ohio Association of Garden Clubs and a former sixth grade teacher.