If you’ve ever thought about trading your screen time for some green time, you might want to consider joining the Cache Garden Club. The club celebrated its second anniversary last week and — much like their members’ gardens — has been growing rapidly.
When Dave Marcyes moved to Cache Valley, all he wanted was to find his people — fellow gardeners who loved dirt under their nails. He discovered a love for gardening in his 20s, and was a member of three different clubs where he lived, in Spokane, Washington, before moving to Logan almost 30 years ago.
He remembers thinking, “There's got to be some clubs and some things that I can do that'll get me with my people, because I need to be with my gardeners. That's my passion, and my hobby, and a good part of my life.”
Logan locals pointed Marcyes in the direction of Mark Anderson, the owner of Anderson’s Seed & Garden, for some plant networking. But he didn’t have much luck.
Marcyes recalled Anderson saying, "Dave, there isn't a club. You should start one," and thinking, "Yeah, well, there's no way I was going to do that."
"So I waited and waited and waited," Marcyes said, "and nobody started a club … And so I thought, well, I guess I'm going to have to go out on a limb, and start the club myself.”
And so Marcyes, with decades of gardening experience and a national award from the Gardeners of America for his home garden, took to the Cache Valley Home and Garden Show to advertise his new venture. He set up a booth with signs and brochures bought with his own money, and invited people to the very first meeting of a club that didn’t even exist yet.
And then, Marcyes said 85 people came to that first meeting.
Now the club meets on the first Thursday of each month. Most meetings feature a speaker who teaches members about everything from beekeeping to terrarium building.
“Our topics are so vast that, over time, you're going to learn vegetables and dirt," he said, "and we had one of our meetings on worms — a guy that sells worms commercially. That was one of our best meetings attended … It was fascinating to watch how they sell worms by the pound.”
The non-profit club also organizes garden field trips and barbecues. But the main draw for Marcyes is the sense of community.
“I found that in the gardening world, it's a family unlike any other family," he said. "Maybe you're a beginning gardener, and that's good too, because we were all beginner gardeners once, and the more gardeners we get, the more we want to teach, and the more we want to help others with it.”
