Looking forward to spring

Here it is, the end of 07 and I have been busy getting the webstore ready for spring! Over a hundred new flower varieties this year from my seed supplier with 21 of them being pansies, my personal favorite!

Pansies are super easy to start and grow, especially for beginners! I usually start pansies in seed flats at the end of January and have full blooming plants by April ! Considering what the mega stores charge for pansy plants in 4 inch pots, I would rather grow my own. Plus I get to choose what varieties I want for my garden and hanging baskets. Pictured on the home page of www.virtualseeds.com is "Accord Series Violet Blotch" pansies. With three inch spread blooms on compact plants, these will definitely be a good seller for me this year! You can find them on page 2 of of our Flowers-Seeds section.

I hope you find time to add a few of these beauties to your baskets or flower garden area. Pansies are from the viola family so are considered an early spring flower, loving cool weather. Once the heat arrives in summer, they are gone till next year.

Pictured above is a sky blue variety I grew for garden show sales in 2002. Sorry, I don't remember the exact variety but it is pretty enough to share anyway.

Happy New Year and see you in 08!
Joyce

Hello Fellow Gardeners!
Welcome to my blog. I hope you enjoy it!








Well here we are, only two weeks till Christmas! Here in Astoria, we are having a fabulous sunny day! Beautiful blue sky and lots of sunshine. I love it! Soon we will back to our typical rainy weather but not today.

Today I am taking my working AeroGarden back down to the pond store for display. Quite a few folks have stopped in to see it and come back to see how it is growing! Funny how even in the "dead" of winter, we all still feel better seeing something growing even if that is only lettuce! LOL

I can't wait till spring and I can get some "real" tomato plants growing. I bought some tomatoes on the vine at the grocers and they are frankly hard and have little taste. Do you know how the growers get them a beautiful red color? They are gassed with ethylene. Ethylene is the same gas given off by fruits such as apples and bananas as they ripen which is why you never want to store apples and bananas together!

Speaking of seeds, my seed supplier has sent the updates for 08 so I will be working at getting my seed lists updated over the next three weeks in time for January's customers. Very little changes but some new flower seeds are on the list which I think you may find enticing! Be sure to check back next month to see what we have to offer!

I wish for you the most joyful of holidays!
Joyce

Hurricane force winds

Wow! Little did I know when I last posted that we would be in for the storm of the century!!
We got hit with a Pacific storm that had gusts up to 120 MPH and it lasted for two days. Luckily for us, we live inland about 21 miles so our gusts weren't that high but still more than what we have ever seen since moving here four years ago.
Gardenwise, everything came through intact. My hydroponic plants did fine even though we didn't have power for four days. The roots were in nutrient rich water so they came through without a hitch. I did go out and dip and pour water over the rock wool containers to keep them damp but looks like they wicked up water from below just fine.
My Aerogarden has battery back-up but the battery went dead after a day without power. The literature says the battery is good for 13 hours of operation and I think it exceeded that. Finally after two days of no power we bought a small generator so we could run our fridge and deep freeze and not lose all our frozen foods. So I plugged in the aerogarden into an extension cord in the living room and it was our lighting! I got to tell you, it was so uplifting to have a nice bright light to read by and nibble on fresh greens at will! Every time I would pluck a leaf, our dachshund would hop up in my lap and I would offer him part of the lettuce leaf. He loved it.
So here we are five days later and everything is back on line for us. It was quite an adventure!
Christmas will be a special holiday for us this year. We have so much to be thankful for. Each other and the wonderful lineman crews that came from all over the west to help get the lines back up and get us back "on the grid" just in time for colder winter weather.