"NOW is the winter of our discontent..." *sigh*

The rain was slamming down this morning as I began typing this, but hey!…at least today it’s just rain, right? No, this week can’t end quickly enough, but there are indications next week may not be much better. After such a mild winter (no temps lower than 28° at the nursery, YAY!) we’ve been lulled into believing This Is The Year. Poor, optimistic little fools that we are, we still do.

Eggplant 'Fairytale' - great in containers and they even ripen here!

Early seed sales have been amazing, and we’ve already re-stocked the Irish Eyes organic veggie seeds. More Renee’s coming soon. Maybe even more Baker Creek, though we went light on those to begin with as this is the first year we’ve carried them. In the warmth of your home greenhouse or under lights in your basement, even just a sunny windowsill, some of you are already seeing spring’s promise: the peas or sweet peas you decided to germinate indoors this year after LAST year’s wretched spring just rotted them in the ground or fed the slugs, or well-sprouted tomato, pepper, even eggplant seeds (’cause you’re really optimistic and this is just about as late as you want to try those heat-lovers from seed in these parts if you hope to get any fruit before, you know, November). Like I said, we’re there with you on the optimism bit.  One of our windowsill pots is thick with ‘Emerald Evergreen’ tomato seedlings, an heirloom variety from 1950 – green tomato geeks, we’d love to get your feedback on them!  Tapas lovers: Padrón peppers are sprouting nicely, too, and I’ve had very good luck with them here, especially in black plastic containers that keep them warmer and help the sweet or hot fruit set and ripen.  Ditto for ‘Fairytale’, a new small-fruited eggplant that has to be one of the prettiest vegetables on the planet (see photo – agree?).  One of our seed offerings this year, not planted yet because they don’t transplant well and probably shouldn’t go in the ground until mid-May is the little Armenian heirloom melon ‘Tigger’ (I know, a MELON?!  Harrrrumpphhh!).  Colored a bit like the planet Jupiter they’re supposedly quite tasty, and small enough they might even ripen here.  Hmmm, the nursery’s flat, summer-hot roof and a five-gallon container…hmmm….

*shrug* If we fail, we’re out the price of a pack of seeds that retails for less than $3.  Worth a shot, no?

Impossible melon dreams aside, the reality is that we live in a cool, damp climate and “One woe doth tread upon another’s heels, so fast they follow”…the revised long-range spring forecasts are “meh” at this point.  Summer patterns look much more promising but that’s then – this is now.  Trees, shrubs and most perennials love to be planted in this weather, though, and so do a lot more vegetables than you might think.  Concluding today’s Shakespeare theme-within-a-theme, these are “My salad days, when I was green in judgment ” – lettuce and almost every sort of salad greens love our spring weather, too; we even recommend shade-planting ‘em in the summer because they’ll bolt and turn bitter in the heat. If you check out our Facebook page (have you “Liked” us there yet??) you’ll see a picture of our shiny new cool-season veggie starts, looking no worse for wear despite full exposure to the elements this week.

Come in and let us show you what else will survive or even thrive in these conditions. We survived the Great Depression er, Recession and have no particular belief in the Mayan Apocalypse (though the latter would certainly solve the problem of surviving next winter, wouldn’t it?), so suck it up, get in here and help us launch our spring season! Or, you know, you could get a cup of coffee next door and browse the house plants…we just got some new stuff in. ~

Statistics show that shopping small and local keeps more money in our communities but there are other reasons to get behind this. We keep our neighborhoods diverse, make them more desirable places to live (= ups the value of your real estate, okay?) if we have an eclectic brew of small shops, restaurants and services close to home; the national chains homogenize the American landscape in a way that’s falsely comforting and, to me and many others, also creepy/depressing. Coming from my small business perspective, though, doesn’t trashing the chain stores just sound like sour grapes? Shopping at a box store may siphon more bucks out of the local economy but, well, aren’t their employees local, and don’t they deserve to make a living, too? Bottom line, if they sell what we do, but for less, how much more are you willing to pay for the privilege of keeping us in your neighborhood?

Short answer: if they have the same thing for less and if the quality’s about the same, you should probably buy from them. If you’re on a tight budget, as we are, you should totally buy from them! If we’re smart, we won’t try to sell you the same things they have in the first place. You can see where that gets difficult, though: naturally we do sell some of the same items as (for example) the Fred Meyer up the street because our customers tend to see us as a full-service garden center, even if we’re small and a little eccentric and prefer to think of ourselves as a specialty nursery. We need the traffic “the basics” bring in, but the balance can be tricky. We’ll always be under some pressure to carry a whole lot of things we don’t have room for, don’t desire to or can’t make a profit from, and knowing what not to sell is almost as important as knowing what to sell.

Not available at Fred Meyer - nor anywhere else on the planet,for that matter!

Sometimes, we try to be ordinary but circumstances conspire and we just can’t get stuff. You won’t find a poinsettia in the store this year; no Christmas cacti, either…we didn’t pre-order and, go figure, our wholesale source sold out! (a good sign for the economy, maybe?…) Our wreath table broke but we sold so few wreaths last year we actually lost money on cut greens for the first time, though we think the weather was mostly to blame. Still, we decided to use the money we would have spent to repair or replace the table and load up on house plants instead – you know, those things we can still sell in January, after poinsettias and wreaths have lost all their value and we’ve thrown them away. A few people have let us know they’re disappointed and I have a (perhaps) irrational fear we won’t be seen as worthy of your holiday business this year because we don’t have these things you can buy elsewhere, but we’re hoping for the best. Even in a good economy, the nursery you manage to support even a little in the dark of winter is the one that will still be there to meet your needs in the spring.

Poinsettia alternative: a firey red bromeliad, easy care and long-lasting

So, no poinsettias? No, but some beautiful alternative flowering plants that are more durable and a lot more fun (we do have paperwhite narcissus and fancy amaryllis). No Christmas cactus? True, but our succulent collection is really stunning right now, including mixed planters from mid-sized to miniature, perfect hostess gifts or little jewels for your own sunny windowsill. Andy’s scented geranium collection, probably the best in town, is still available in our front courtyard (we keep them outside when it’s not freezing). For us, being a little different also = job satisfaction. We’re at our best when we delight you, when we show you something you’ve never seen before, or we’re able to present familiar things in a new light. When we engage you and take the time to listen to you, helping you plan for spring or as one industry peer said, “Becoming masters of charades” or working through your bad descriptions as we help identify plants, or pests, or diseases. Our advice is always free, and almost always worth more than you pay for it. You’re welcome.

It’s not that you’ll never find good plants or great service at a big chain store, but why risk it? You’d miss us if we were gone, so let’s not let that happen! Thanks for reading and whatever you’re celebrating this season, please to enjoy. Thank you for supporting Small Business Saturday as well – you can come in Sunday, too, if you want. ~

The good news is that, as every gardener knows: where there is life, there is hope.  Part of the online empire is, in fact, thriving - our Facebook page is up to 180 fans and we love that we can do SHORT, timely updates there, usually with pictures, and easily interact with our fans with answers to your gardening questions and timely updates on what’s new in the store.  It’s very convenient for us to update and we’re proud of how it’s developing, and grateful for the time it spares for other things.  That said, though an estimated 51% of the world is on Facebook now, not everyone is or will be.  It doesn’t matter your reasons (privacy concerns, disinterest, Mark Zuckerberg is the devil, what-have-you) we’re getting more and more complaints that our online presence is otherwise…well, useless.  That’s even more of an “Ouch!” ’cause I completely agree.

My primary excuse for the sporadic and infrequent emails is that it’s become too big a burden as far as being a manageable time investment.  Some of you miss the long, rambling prose of old.  More of you, it seems, want short and sweet, “Just the facts, Ma’an.”  Some of you have sent unsubscribe requests and I can’t do it immediately because the mail is sent from the company computer, which I only use perhaps 5% of the time and I’m not good about forwarding mail between machines.  I think we’re very adequate nurserymen – our reviews and your support seem to support that theory – but yeah, we wish there was time to do all the things the social media experts tell us we need to do!  All else being equal, though, we’d prefer to concentrate on growing and selling awesome plants.

So, what to do?  We can’t afford to farm out these tasks and we’re control-freaky enough that’s probably not an option, anyway.  The main site and the blog?…all I can do is try harder.  The emails, however, should soon be flowing again…

If you’re on our e-list or would like to be (send an email to info@emeraldcitygardens.com if so!) you will hear from us within the next week requesting that you merely hit “REPLY” if you would like to stay on the list or put “UNSUBSCRIBE” either in the subject line or the body of the mail if that’s your choice.  If we don’t hear from you either way, then a few days later we’ll send the same mail.  If we don’t hear from you then we will presume it’s an unsubscribe request and you’ll be taken off the list.

If you stay, here’s what to expect.  We’re going to try a free trial of Constant Contact® professional email services and, well, the hope is to be able to provide HTML mail that will have more of the look and feel of our Facebook entries – in other words, PICTURES!  After our free trial we’ll have to pay monthly for the privilege so – that means monthly emails, which is far more frequent than the maybe-not-even-quarterly “schedule” we’re on now.  Does this sound more interesting/useful to you?  Comments welcome!

Oh – and happy spring!  Er, by the calendar, anyway…

UPDATE, 5/6-11: so much for good intentions!   Maybe later then.

In news of the edible bulb-y kind, we are sold out of garlic for the year – but happy to send you up the street to our friends at Walt’s Organic Fertilizer, who just got in a new shipment this week. At this writing we do still have a half-dozen packs of organic shallot sets available, both red and yellow. No rain expected ’til next Thursday the 21st, so take advantage!

ALLIUM ALBOPILOSUM - 10
ALLIUM GLADIATOR – 10
ALLIUM STIPITATUM ‘WHITE GIANT’ - 10
ANEMONE BLANDA , BLUE SHADES - 100
BRODIAEA COCCINEA - 10
CALOCHORTUS SUPERBUS - 25
CAMASSIA CUSICKII – 10
CAMASSIA QUAMASH ‘BLUE MELODY’ - 20
CROCUS TOMMASINIANUS ‘BARR’S PURPLE’ - 100
CROCUS VERNUS ‘TWILIGHT’ - 100
FRITILLARIA MICHAILOVSKYI - 50
FRITILLARIA PALLIDIFLORA – 10
FRITILLARIA PERSICA - 5
IPHEION UNIFLORUM ‘ROLF FIEDLER’ – 50
NARCISSUS ‘BELL SONG’ - 100
NARCISSUS CANTABRICUS – 10
NARCISSUS JONQUILLA SIMPLEX - 100
OXALIS ADENOPHYLLA - 50
TULIP ‘BASTOGNE’ - 100
TULIP ‘QUEEN OF NIGHT’ - 100
TULIPA HUMILIS VIOLACEA - 50
TULIPA HUMILIS ALBA COERULEA OCULATA  – 20
TULIPA V. ’TANGERINE BEAUTY’ – 50

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Dramatically smaller selection this year, as reported in an earlier blog post, but we hope there are a few things here you’ve never heard of and are curious enough to google or ask us about!  We threatened no tulips or daffodils but relented a bit on that; everybody loves ‘Queen of Night’ tulips and that ‘Bastogne’ thingy is the nicest classic red tulip we’ve ever grown.

You’ve still got plenty of time to get these in the ground but come in soon for best selection!

It seems a strange day to be closed, but we do it because it is pretty consistently our slowest day of the week.  Mondays are usually busy here, and yesterday was no exception: it’s a day that many restaurant workers have off, as well as other people who work retail (=weekends).  Last year we did this far too early, starting in July, but October through February makes a lot more sense.  Just because business is dramatically slower this time of year doesn’t mean we don’t need time to catch our breath, and with all the projects we’ve got going on we need at least one full day a week to concentrate on them.

That said, you are welcome to stop by and knock on the window if you see one of our cars in the lot.  Turn away business?  Not likely! 

We ordered a new door panel for our little greenhouse so we can start heating it and continue with our ambitious propagation program.  I stuffed my car full of new houseplants this morning, and I’m here pricing ‘em now – okay, I’m taking a break to post this, but whatever.  Tomorrow or Thursday, a huge shipment of evergreen and other winter-interest plants arrive from Oregon (camellias, witch hazels and daphnes, oh my!).  Tomorrow or Thursday, a photographer is showing up from Google Places to snap purty pictures to enhance our listing – exciting stuff as it’s FREE and this has been almost as good an online referral source as yelp.com, which has been very good to us.

Business is slowing for the season, but we’re not stopping.  We’re doing our best to stay interesting and stay on your radar through the winter months – thanks for giving us the chance to do that.  Just not on Tuesdays.  :b

'Langley's Silver Tiger' tomatoes in happier days (last year)

For most of us gardening in these parts, it hasn’t been an easy year. The cool spring should at least have given us great lettuces and other salad greens, but somehow a lot of them bolted before we could even get ‘em sold. June-uary didn’t do our tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and other heat-lovers any favors, but we made good use of our tiny greenhouse to help the poor things along. End result of that, tomato-wise, was that we got a nice first crop of ‘maters in early July(!) but more than a month passed before the second flush came on…meanwhile, the plants grew about 8′ tall with very little fruit set. Uff da!

Now our friends at the National Weather Service are threatening us with a La Niña winter. Oh joy. That most often means colder than normal temps, and definitely wetter than usual. So, should you even bother with a winter vegetable garden this year? It’s a fair question but my reply is naturally going to be biased, as our business lives or dies by our ability to get you in here. The most honest answer is, it depends on what you want to grow and how you intend to grow it.

Plant your lettuces NOW; it’s not too late to start them from seed but your window for that is closing fast, and failing that we currently have about a dozen beautiful varieties already growing in 3.5″ pots and 4 or 6 paks. Garlic and shallot sets are appropriate for fall planting, too, and we expect to have them in the store the week after Labor Day. Any of the cole crops – cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, arugula etc. – also beets, chard, carrots and onions – can be sown now; they’ll be hardier to cold than the lettuces but they may rot if your garden beds or containers have heavy soil and poor drainage. In the ground, raised beds are always a good idea and fresh compost can help lighten compacted soils. If you grow in containers, as we have to, your potting soil can be re-used for years if you rotate crops and replenish the nutrients (fertilize, please!); when it becomes heavy, almost like actual soil, it’s time to replace it.

Another option – not for the crops mentioned above – is to grow some things indoors. I can scarcely believe I’m recommending this, after years of ranting against people growing flavorless basil on their kitchen windowsills (and I’m still kind of a snob about that), but there are more promising subjects for your experiments. Like, peppers! Not the big bell types so much; those aren’t very productive indoors or out in western Washington (though try the variety ‘Lilac’ next year – it’s actually producing for us outdoors!). Inside, grow the smaller-fruited varieties, sweet or hot. Peppers are not annuals, they’re tender perennials that can live for years if you keep them warm (above 50° F is essential; above 60 is better) and they’ll usually explode with a new flush of blooms when you bring them indoors, followed by pretty good fruit set if kept in a sunny window or under gro-lights.  Fruit ripening will be eeeeevvvennnnn sloooooooooower than in summer outdoors, but they’re handsome little plants that are easy to care for and don’t have many pest problems. If you see any bugs, break out the neem spray right away. A balanced monthly dose of organic fertilizer is all they ask for otherwise, cutting down on the nitrogen when they set fruit.

Some people report success growing tomatoes indoors. I am skeptical, but my mind is wide open (is that a breeze blowing through?…). I have a friend who lives in an apartment with sunny windows but no balcony, who not only grows bumper crops of peppers but just shared pics online of his eggplant harvest. My outdoor-grown eggplants refused to set even one fruit this year, so I’ll pull ‘em indoors next month and see what happens. Tony, I’m impressed and very jealous!

You have options. We have plants, seeds, fertilizer, soil, compost and more. You need your vegetables. We need some green, too. :b Let’s make this happen! ~

In August of ’08, just before our economy made its most earnest suicide attempt since 1929, we visited Norway as guests of Andy’s half-sister and her family.  He hadn’t been back to see them since 1980, air fares weren’t horrendous, we’d come off our first and most successful spring and we needed a vacation!  Looking back on it, our timing was perfect.

Flor og Fjære – tropical Norway! (click for larger)

His family is from Rogaland, the county in SW Norway that birthed the unified Norwegian Kingdom in the 800s – specifically the island of Karmøy, just off of Stavanger.  It’s a beautiful region with a relatively mild climate owing to the Norwegian Current, a sort-of offshoot of the Gulf Stream; the water is warm-ish (compared to the north Pacific, at least!) and some of the microclimates are sweet enough to allow the growing of things one would never associate with Scandinavia.  Most amazing of these is no doubt Flor og Fjære (pronounced “floor oh fyair-?”, approximately – swallow the r, kinda like you would in French), a scenic 20 minute boat ride from Stavanger on the island of Sør-Hidle. 

Warm ocean currents + a windbreak of closely-spaced Sitka spruce has created a shelter-belt for four acres of lush plantings, mostly hot-colored annuals in the shade of hardy palms, tree ferns, even bananas. Espaliered and cordoned fruit trees thrive here, too, even some producing fig trees! More plantings were being added when we visited, including what looked to be an expansion of their Mediterranean garden. You won’t find anything very unusual here, other than the unusuality of its locality – I mean, who visits Norway for the banana groves, right?  It’s shiny and touristy in the same vein as Butchart Gardens, but at FoF you’re also captive for a meal (price included in the boat package): the food ain’t all that but if you take the lunch cruise instead of dinner, you’ll save money and get the same tour.  

Flor og Fjære is definitely worth a visit, a strange, beautiful intermezzo between the region’s quaint fishing villages and the melodramatic scenery of the nearby Lysefjord, which is probably the area’s most popular daytrip. If you’re feeling athletic and not afraid of heights, climb the towering Preikestolen for one of the best, most photographed views in the country – a sheer drop of nearly 2,000 feet into the Lysefjord! Being neither athletic nor unafraid of heights (and pressed for time – oh, darn! *g*) we passed on that one, but you can google lots of pretty pictures. ~

We like our flower bulb wholesaler; they carry almost all our common favorites and some fun, freaky stuff besides.  They’re late to deliver their product, though, so we never get a shipment from them before the fall equinox.  They claim it’s because they leave their bulbs in the ground longer than other growers to size them up better, and we have to admit, the quality is everything they claim.

Bulb sales have been declining every year for us, though.  We do well with some of the more unusual sorts – fancy fritillarias and the larger alliums have been hot sellers - but tulips, daffodils, hyacinths and all that are increasingly ignored.  We don’t blame you!  The big box stores and the larger nurseries get their stock in as much as a month earlier than we do, and the chains offer them at prices we can’t touch.

One of the secrets of staying in business is recognizing what you do well and what you need to stay away from, then putting that information to good use.  With two fall seasons under our belts, we figure the third time’s the charm: it’s not that you won’t find any tulips or daffodils here this year (we still have a few favorites and we can sell them all day long, or at least we don’t mind leftovers!), but we’re cutting way back on them in favor of the more obscure things that actually sell for us. 

We’re sorry for the inconvenience to those of you that prefer to buy from us even if we cost a little more than that big box up the street – please don’t think we don’t appreciate you!  We’ll still have holiday bulbs, too, starting in November: a few amaryllis and eleventy million paperwhite narcissus.  Common or not, we manage to sell tons of the smelly li’l things!  Until the economy recovers more convincingly, though, we have to be a lot more careful with how we allocate limited resources – and most of the run-of-the-mill fall bulbs didn’t make the cut this year.  Yeah, we’re sorry, too.  A public outcry is welcome. ~  

Our Facebook page is alive and well and is still our most-frequently updated online thingy.  This new incarnation of the blog should give it a good run for its money but for now, FB still rules; “like” us there for timeliest information.  So far we’re still resisting Twitter.

August was, as always, our slowest month of the warm part of the year, but it was a productive time and we’re pleased with what we got done.  The Arboretum Foundation’s publication, “Cuttings Through the Year” indicates that July, August and September is prime-time for softwood cuttings in our region, and our greenhouse is filling up with planty bits: ‘Golden Charmer’ pyracanthas, ‘Silver Mile’ barberries, ‘Pink Elephant’ hebes, ‘Fiona Sunrise’ jasmines and more, including as many fun varieties of pelargoniums (geraniums) and coleus as we can get our paws on.  Andy’s been dividing perennials, digging giant voodoo lily corms and I’m afraid to ask what else.  One of the positives about the bad economy is that it’s forced us to grow more of our own plants rather than just resell the (admittedly awesome) stuff we get from our wholesale growers.  It also makes the job more fun!  We’ll never be 100% self-sustaining, but it does make a difference.  Creating new life isn’t generally something that humans get paid for.   

Though times have been hard, we want to assure you that we have no plans to throw in the trowel…more than that, we still love what we do.  Of course we can’t do it without you, and we have high hopes for a great fall season, but please don’t take the burden for our continued existence entirely on yourselves – TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT US, fercryin’outloud!  “We’re all in this together” – it’s not just a slogan from my favorite dystopian movie anymore.  We would love your feedback on this new blogging effort, the new web pages on the main site, any issues with loading or anything that just looks “off” – I am not a professional web designer but we want this to work for you and maybe even lure you back for repeat visits.  Thanks for your support, and we’ll see you soon!