Gardening in the South Cariboo can be a challenge, but there's a group of people who are willing to help and share their knowledge and their plants.
The 100 Mile District Garden Club, with its 38 members, meets on the fourth Saturday of each month in the Multipurpose Room at the hospital at 10 a.m.
Meetings often feature guest speakers who have covered topics, such as soil preparation, composting and bee keeping, and all sorts of practical things.
The club has been around since 1960 and is part of the BC Council of Garden Clubs.
Members go beyond tending just their own gardens. They've recently teamed up with the 100 Mile Lions Club to maintain plants and shrubbery at Parkside Art Gallery on a volunteer basis.
Membership with the club costs $12 a year or $2 for drop-ins, and every year, some of the money is given away in the form of a $500 bursary to a graduating student at Peter Skene Ogden Secondary School who will be continuing his or her education in the field of natural sciences.
Jeanette Gellein of 108 Mile Ranch has been a club member for three years, since relocating from Vancouver Island. The garden club has been her guiding light in making the transition from all-season gardening to that of the Cariboo, with its tight time frame and other obstacles.
To avoid losing plants to cold weather, she's learned to buy plants suited for zone 3, and she's also figured out how to keep a garden without it being a feeding ground for the local deer population.
Gellein says she has found anything with a strong smell, such as lilacs, Shasta daisies, bee balm and leopard's bane, to be unappetizing to deer, and she says moth balls hung in small net baskets around the garden are also deterrents.
Gellein also uses a product called Plantskydd Deer Repellent with success.
"We're always discussing what works to keep deer away and there's always someone at garden club who knows the answer."
Every year, there is a garden tour scheduled in a different corner of the South Cariboo and Gellein says she looks forward to them.
"I love going. You get so many ideas and see how other people do their gardens. It's quite amazing what grows here and people make their homes beautiful."
Club members will be thinning out their gardens for a perennial plant sale June 15 at the parking lot of Cariboo Mall. The sale starts at 10 a.m. and will last until plants are gone.
For more information about the garden club, call club president Lindsay Roberts at 250-791-5756 or Debbie Porter at 250-791-6472.