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s e r v i n g m i d va l l e y & u p pe r l ac k awa n n a va l l e y thevalleyadvantage.com | october 13, 2017
Olyphant Borough officials recognized a patriotic couple |PAGe 3
A local businessman donated to the Ladies in Pink benefit |PAGe 7
Lakeland’s Scott Campus chose the students of the month |PAGe 10
GrowinG interest Gardeners will gather next week in Clifford
By Christopher Cornell
ADVAntAGe eDitor
Gardeners: they’re a special kind of people. They’re up early and they’re out late, and there’s always another project to tackle. But if gardening is your passion, you might want to put down the trowel on Tuesday, Oct. 17 for a meeting of the Mountain View Garden Club, which will be held at the Clifford Fire Hall on Route 106 beginning at 7 p.m. The public is invited. According to JoAnn Hall, the president of the club, which was founded in 2005, it meets on the third Tuesday of the month March to May and September to November. “Summer meetings usually are at Garden Club members’ homes or other outdoor venues,” she said. “Generally, there’s a short business meeting, followed by a program (such as a guest speaker) and
refreshments. At our September meeting we had a presentation by Cheryl Nolan, a watershed specialist, from the Lackawanna County Conservation District. We had a field trip to Lambertson’s Lily Farm in Thompson in July and to Grey Towers in Milford in September. We’ve had presentations on perennials, tree pruning, monarch butterflies, hydroponic gardening to name a few topics.” The speaker at this month’s meeting will be Dave Waselewski, aka “Mr. Mushroom of Northeastern Pennsylvania.” Officially he’s a mycologist, and a faculty member of Luzerne County Community College. He will speak on wild mushrooms. Waselewski recalled that it was his father and brothers, the sons of Polish immigrants, who sparked his love of fungi. “They hunted a few edible types of wild mushrooms,” he said. “One type they called ‘popinkies,’ and many locals still use this term, or something that sounds very close. The seeming diversity of wild
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Mushroom expert Dave Waselewski will speak at the upcoming meeting of the Mountain View Garden Club.
mushrooms captured my attention.” But mushroom hunting has changed in the last decade, Waselewski explained. “There are two things that were gamechangers for my hobby of mushroom hunting: digital cameras and the internet. Lots of nice close-up photos could be snapped without need to have them developed, and these photos may be posted online for discussion.” His own interests have changed as well. Since then, “I met mycologists online, and have become involved in research projects aimed at classifying fungal species of North America. Mainly, I preserve collections of interest, document their traits/habitat, perform some microscopy and submit to various researchers.” He said he may have helped find a few proposed new species, one of which is currently called amanita luzernensis, after Luzerne County. “Mushrooms often pop up in gardens,”
he said. “They are not likely to harm anything, and may be removed. (Poisonous mushrooms may be handled without consequence.) Or, they may be photographed, harvested, preserved, studied, and discussed. One never knows when or where a really interesting type of mushroom may pop up.” If, after hearing Waselewski speak, you want to investigate mushrooms further, he runs the Wyoming Valley Mushroom Club. “We meet at Luzerne County Community College at 7 p.m. on the second Thursday of the month, excluding January, February and March. Our club also has a Facebook page where anyone may participate,” Waselewski said. Back at the Garden Club, Hall noted that every year in June “we have a plant exchange where people can purchase perennials grown in garden club members’ gardens or exchange perennials from their own gardens. We are in the process of determining the location of the 2018 event.” For more information about the garden club, call 570-222-2233 or email lmguszick@aol.com.