Cross Quarter Club: Mid-Spring Gathering 2023

In early 2022, I started a gardening and seasonal living club here in York, Pennsylvania. We come together four times per year: at midwinter, mid-spring, midsummer and mid-autumn, to work on a project that connects us to earth and season. Each gathering is an invitation to pause and deepen into the season we’re in, try our hands at something new and circle together in community. Gardening experience is not required — beginners are very welcome! If you are feeling the call to live more mindfully with the cycles of nature and enjoy plants & flowers, then this is the group for you!

Our second gathering of 2023 was held on Sunday, May 7th at our favorite park pavilion in Yoe, Pennsylvania. We had the best afternoon filled with locally grown flowers, good conversation, a full spread of seasonally-inspired snacks, hot tea and dessert, and the first ever CQC Member Demonstration by Little Farm Flowers East. Read on for the full recap!

Welcome & Introductions

Once everyone had arrived, we got started with brief introductions. As an introvert, I am not the biggest fan of ice breakers but I actually cherish this time for Cross Quarter Club! We keep it simple and just share our name, where we’re from, and what we’re excited about this season — which could be something your growing in your garden, a new recipe you’re trying, something you’re doing, or a place you like to go in this particular season. I love hearing what everyone else is passionate about and I always walk away with so many inspiring ideas! Plus, this a wonderful opportunity for us to discover the like interests we have and similar projects we might be working on which provides ample conversation starters for later on!

Floral Arranging Workshop

This is our second year creating our own arrangements with local and sustainably grown blooms from Little Farm Flowers East! We’ve had quite different spring weather than we did in 2022, which meant we had a much different and larger selection of flowers than we did last year. That’s one thing I love about gardening and living with the seasons — so much can change from week to week and year to year. It was such a happy surprise that we could include lilacs, ranunculus and a large mix of perennial flowers in addition to the last of Sharon’s double tulips and daffodils. I shared the best tips I’ve learned over the years, between writing my craft book and making my own homegrown bouquets, then we got to designing!

Read my blog post: A Simple Guide to Floral Arranging

Because we had such a wide variety of foliage and blooms to choose from, everyone’s arrangements came out so beautifully unique! We set up a little bouquet photobooth where everyone could get the perfect snap of their creation.

Seasonal snacks & drinks

A beautiful spread of seasonally-inspired snacks, dessert and drinks has become a Cross Quarter Club tradition! This time we went with fresh, spring-y crudites with different flavors of hummus, tzatziki and a foraged wild greens pesto recipe I came up with for the occasion! For dessert, we had my sweet friend Sophie Caledecott’s famous ‘Sunshine Cake’ recipe. It’s a delicious orange, carrot and ginger cake with cream cheese icing. My older sister, Stormi made it and went above and beyond with candied clementine decorations and wild violets harvested by my oldest niece, who is very into foraging and wildcrafting herself!

Demonstration by Little Farm Flowers East

This spring, we added a brand new segment to our gatherings, Member Demonstrations. After we settled in with our snacks and drinks, Sharon Debeaumont from Little Farm Flowers East showed us how to upgrade a homegrown or store-bought bouquet for gifting. The purpose of these demonstrations is to provide a low-key and fun opportunity to share your unique knowledge and skills with the group and can be a great opportunity to promote a small business, if you have one! Demonstrations are casual and approximately 5 minutes long and anyone who volunteers to give a demonstration will get a feature on my blog, social media & email newsletter. If you are interested in giving a demonstration at a future gathering, click here.

The Sharing Table

The sharing table is a part of every Cross Quarter Club gathering. I always plan a theme that fits our club’s focus on gardening & seasonal living and the time of year we’re in, so this time I invited everyone to bring any extra seedlings or perennial divisions they had to share, but other items were welcome too! Some additional items spotted on the sharing table this spring were vintage framed still life art, books, ceramic vases, cut eucalyptus, and hand-lettered art prints. It was so fun watching the table fill up as everyone arrived for the gathering! Then at the end, everyone got a chance to “shop” the table to take some goodies home with them!

Read my blog post: The Story of the Sharing Table

This was the sixth Cross Quarter Club gathering, but we’re just get started! You can look forward to more exciting things coming this summer, in addition to our quarterly events. More info coming soon!