Growing something good in our NE Georgia neighborhood

Spring Plant Sale: It’s a Wrap, and a Record!

Thank you to our customers, plant donors, Extension partners, friends and ALL the Master Gardeners who helped to make our 2025 Plant Sale a huge success! We sold $8,000 more in plants than the previous year and involved more than 70 volunteers during the 4-day event.

Our opening day saw us busier than bees stocking up on spring nectar, and traffic remained steady all four days — even through intermittent rain showers. In fact, we exceeded our 2024 sales each day of this year’s sale! This money will be used to:

  • fund our own Headwaters Master Gardener Association community gardening projects and high school scholarships

  • support Victory Home, where our greenhouse is located and where many of the men in treatment there help us weekly in the greenhouse

  • improve and maintain our greenhouse operations so we can continue to grow you beautiful, healthy plants

This year we really expanded our inventory of Georgia native flowers, vines trees and shrubs — and our customers seemed very pleased. We also offered decorative pots, terrariums and container gardens created by our talented MGs. Overall, we offered more than 350 different varieties of plants — from tiny “Toe Tickler” groundcovers to native azaleas and rhododendrons to majestic oak and elm trees destined to be 50 feet tall or more!

We hope you enjoyed the Plant Sale as much as we did, and already have the week before Mother’s Day in your calendar for 2026. We’ll see you then!

Rabun Seed Library Stocked for Spring

Stop by the Seed Library at the Rabun County Library in Clayton for your free veggie, herb and flower seeds.

Our volunteers have been busy packing and labeling seeds, just in time for prime growing season. If you have extra seeds you’ve saved from last year, please consider donating them to the Seed Library.

Headwaters MG Association recently voted to assume maintenance of the Seed Library because of its community value, when the project’s original founders were unable to continue.

MGs also are planning a series of public programs on topics associated with the Seed Library.

The first, on starting seeds, was presented by Headwaters MG Agi Fuetterer in March. A talk on native garden design with sustainable landscape designer and herb grower Lindsay Mann was held in May and one on native seed propagation is planned for September.

MG Agi explained how to give your seeds the TLC (Time, Light and Climate Control) they require to flourish.

May Gardening Tips: Ready, Set, Plant (and Prune)!

Check for damage after early spring winds and rains.

Tackle those weeds — don’t let them get ahead of you!

Replace cool-season annuals with heat lovers such as marigold, cosmos, verbena, sunflower, zinnia.

Prune flowering trees and shrubs (such as azaleas, forsythia and viburnums) after they finish blooming, before they set next year’s buds.

Get heat-loving vegetables like tomatoes, hot peppers and sweet potatoes established.

Plant seed directly into the ground when the soil is warm enough. 65 to 75 degrees is the ideal soil temperature range for most plants. Find soil temperatures near you by putting your zip code into the UGA Weather Network website at http://weather.uga.edu/.

Available data includes soil temps at 2-, 4- and 6-inches in depth, along with other useful weather information including rainfall and soil moisture.