North Eighth Street home is Cheney's September Yard of the Month
Bart Olmsted and Mary Ann Powers pose with Cheney Garden Club representative Karen Smith (second from right) and Cheney Kiwanis member Pat Isbell (right).
Powers points to a dahlia plant she took seedlings from that won ribbons at the Spokane Interstate Fair.
Cheney's Mary Ann Powers first began growing dahlias over 20 years ago. She has met with so much success that not only did her friends and neighbors enjoy the color adorning the outside of her home along North Eighth Street, but they encouraged her to show those flowers off to others.
"Everybody kept nagging me, 'Do you show at the Fair, do you show at the Fair?' so I joined the society," Powers said.
The fair of course is the recently completed Spokane Interstate Fair, where although officials results are not complete yet, Powers said she brought home 28 different kinds of ribbons, nine the opening weekend and 19 more the closing weekend.
The society Powers refers to is the Inland Empire Dahlia Society, which according to its website is affiliated with the American Dahlia Society and the Pacific Northwest Dahlia Conference.
To those previous awards Powers and her husband Bart Olmsted can add another more local honor - the Cheney Kiwanis and Cheney Garden Club's September Yard of the Month. The couple lives at 522 North Eighth St. across from Cheney High School's Tom Oswald Field - a house you can't miss not only because of the Garden Club/Kiwanis Yard of the Month sign but because of the amount of color on display in the front yard.
According to information from the "2014 Classification and Handbook of Dahlias" on the American Dahlia Society's website, the flower is classified through a combination of classes, color, form and size. A glance at Power's front yard and you will understand what she means when she says she is currently growing 147 different types of dahlias.
Powers is also trying her hand at developing a couple of hybrids, and won some of her Fair ribbons in the seedlings categories. She is also growing vegetables such as pumpkins along with watermelons and strawberries, which the consensus among those who tasted them during the Yard of the Month photo shoot was "de-lish."
Powers' secret ingredient in her yard ventures is something that isn't really so secret. It's a special brand of compost that is made completely local.
"I use Cheney compost to fertilize," Powers said, referring to the popular Eco-Green compost that is a byproduct of the city's wastewater treatment plant's disposal of biosolids.
Powers receives a $25 Jarms Ace Hardware gift certificate for being selected as Yard of the Month.
John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.
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