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Volunteer helps community blossom

By Audin Rhodes - Staff Writer | Sep 7, 2024

From the left is Steve Dockter sitting beside his grandchildren, Paige, 4, and Beckett Johnson, 6. Dockter and Beckett are holding freshly picked flowers.

Maintaining Rugby’s flowers is a community effort involving many but one resident has gone a cut above the rest in his dedication to making Rugby bloom.

“It makes the city look so much nicer when you can have color downtown like that,” said Steve Dockter, the primary caretaker responsible for watering Rugby’s potted flowers.

“I’m strictly a volunteer. I had been asking for more flowers in this town for years prior and I retired a little over four years ago,” Dockter said.

Since retiring, Dockter has volunteered his time to both the Rugby Lions Club and the Rugby Chamber of Commerce. The Lions Club provides the potted flowers at Ellery Park and the Rugby Chamber of Commerce provides the flowers in hanging pots downtown and the flowers around the Geographical Center of North America monument.

The downtown hanging pots and the flower pots around the Geographical Center of North America monument are grown by the Rugby Greenhouse, installed by the city and then cared for by Dockter throughout the growing season from Memorial Day through the end of September. Dockter also waters the potted flowers in Ellery Park as part of his service in the Lions Club.

“I talked to Laurie Odden, who’s our Chamber director here, and I said, ‘Look, everybody is always worried about who’s going to take care of them. I will take care of them. You just get the flowers and get them potted,'” Dockter said.

Watering

The Chamber took Dockter up on his offer and purchased a trailer with a 185-gallon tank on it, a pump, a hose and a wand to help Dockter accomplish the immense watering tasks.

“I probably go through about 90 gallons a day. When the plants are full they absorb a lot more moisture. But when I’m only watering every other day it’s about 90 gallons a day I go through on 14 pots,” Dockter said.

Dockter anticipates the watering needs to remain high throughout September barring any frosts or cold spells. “The weather is still warm and the flowers themselves are very, very full. I mean they’re, three and half feet across in the baskets. They’ve blossomed and bushed out so it’s still taking a lot of moisture,” Dockter said.

Dockter spends roughly eight hours a week or about 144 hours during the season, watering the flowers of Rugby. “For me it’s a good way to wake up in the morning. I want to get downtown before there’s traffic so I like to be in and out of there by 7-7:30 a.m,” Dockter said. “It’s a good way for me to grab coffee and wake up.”

The water Dockter uses on the flowers has fertilizer in it. “I use Jack’s Petunia Feed and that stuff is amazing. It’s high nitrogen and petunias like nitrogen. It really causes them to be healthy and bloom,” he said. “With the right water and the right fertilizer you could grow anything in sand.”

Once mid-August hits, Dockter is often joined by special visitors during his morning watering routine.

“A lot of times I’m watering the flowers as hummingbirds are feeding right next to me. It’s pretty cool just to sit there and watch a hummingbird while I’m watering,” Dockter said. “I think there’s a few down there that bounce around from one pot to the next.”

The flowers in the downtown hanging pots are grown by Gary Lee and his staff at the Rugby Greenhouse.

“I have had to pull a few weeds but it’s really rare because Gary uses pretty sterile potting soil down there,” Dockter said. “He uses ColorRush petunias and they fill the pot so much the weeds don’t stand a chance. They get overgrown by petunias pretty quickly.”

Most of the flowers downtown, by the monument and in Ellery park are petunias. “Petunias are always good because they’re fragrant and they fill out so nice,” Dockter said.

Past, present, future

Some of the perennial ground flower beds at Ellery Park consist mostly of daylilies. According to Tonia Dosch, president of the park board, the ground flower beds at Ellery Park are watered by Denise Harmel, a community volunteer.

The annual flowers by the bandshell and gazebo of Ellery Park are cared for by the Lions Club and are watered by Dockter.

“I was only watering them every three days probably. We had music in the park on Wednesdays so I made sure to water them Wednesday mornings just to make sure there wasn’t anything lacking,” Dockter said.

The music in the park events are one of Dockter’s favorite community events to be a part of. Some of these events have had more than 300 people in attendance at Ellery Park and some of those people voiced their appreciation to Dockter about the flowers they saw.

“I don’t do it for the praise but I do like the fact that people notice because I like them too,” Dockter said about the Rugby community enjoying the flowers.

In addition to watering and the occasional, rare weeding, Dockter also secures some of the hanging flowers with zip ties to prevent weather damage.

“Early on this season we had some really high winds that were tough on them to start with but it’s been OK,” Dockter said. “They’re hanging from a hook but I secure them so they can’t spin or swing so much that it wrecks the pot.”

Petunias are resilient flowers with lots of buds and blooms to help them recover from all sorts of weather.

“We had a hailstorm here too that beat them up a little, but you know, when they’re watered and fertilized they bounce back quick. You could tell the next couple days after that something had happened but within three days they were looking great again,” Dockter said.

Dockter himself loves planting petunias, pansies, dahlias, zinnias and others in his personal gardens at home.

“Every year it seems like I’ve got a new favorite,” he said.

“I used to garden alongside my grandma back in the ’60s. My Grandma Dockter was a gardener. And, of course, back then she was doing it probably in the ’30s to survive so she had a big vegetable garden, but she enjoyed different flowers too,” Dockter said. “I just remember that and I started focusing on that a lot more once I retired because I’ve got time.”

Dockter would love to spruce up the city with even more flowers if possible and would also love for Rugby to start a horticulture club in the near future.

“I’ve spoken to our county agent about getting a horticulture club going. I don’t want to start it but I would love to be a part of it. That’s more of an Extension Service type thing to get a horticulture club going and I’d like to see that happen because I think we’d have more people involved that way,” Dockter said.