Adventures in Gardening 2016

Adventures in Gardening 2016: The Nursery Awakens!

It’s March again! The ground didn’t really freeze much this year so we broke ground on our first landscape project Monday. Everyone on the crew agreed it was great to be outside again doing something with ourselves. We were at an interesting house with a southern exposure and a bit of morning sun, depending on the gables of the house and what part of the ground you are looking at. We planted some really nice 2 gallon Penstemon ‘Dark Towers‘. We carefully placed the Hydrangea mac. ‘Bloomstruck’ in a precise location with a balance of shade and sun, hopefully a perfect spot for the bush to produce a ton of huge mac. flowers. My mother has a mac. that cranks out a large number of flowers without wilting and looking pathetic. It’s not always easy to do. We are installing drip irrigation to ensure our success.

We opened up the greenhouses yesterday to get everything in synch with the weather. It’s been hard to do the past couple of years because copious amounts of snow on the sides of the greenhouses prevented us from rolling them up. This year I rolled up 13 out of 14 sides, the north side of greenhouse 7 is always the last to melt down all the way.

The nursery is absolutely packed with all kinds of cool plants right now! A new favorite is Picea glauca ‘The Limey’. I love white spruce to begin with, but this one has some awesome blue green and yellow contrasts that I never get tired of looking at. We’ve grown it for about 9 months and it’s still working for me. You can’t beat the hardiness of white spruce, Zone 2, temps of 40-50 degrees below zero. Now that’s cold! Another spruce cultivar you should know about is Picea engelmanii ‘Bush’s Lace’. It’s an irregular weeping form of Engelman Spruce. And as long as we are talking about weird plants, come look at our Pinus banksiana ‘Uncle Fogy‘. I saw a particular one the other day that caught my eye. We used one of these on a job last year where we put it behind a huge 4,000 pound rock. Over time that plant will meander over and around that rock in a very slow dance. It’ll be fantastic!

Check out our Facebook page for photos of some of the plants listed above.

I can’t wait to get back out there tomorrow! Pop in to the nursery and say hi… gas is cheap, the air is fresh!