2019 Plant Sale schedule, starting with Sequim Garden Show this weekend!

Dear Readers,

Well it has been a heck of a winter, as you know if you live in the Pacific Northwest.  But, for better or worse, we have survived and are still here.  We’d be singing a different tune if I’d lost some of our large aluminum frame greenhouses from heavy snow, and it was a close call!  But finally, the last patch of snow melted off our driveway yesterday, and I’m starting to once again be able to see my Utah cactus collection that was sitting outside when multiple feet of snow got piled on top of it that I pulled off the greenhouses.  More about that later.  Amazingly, they still look fine.

So we’ve hit that time of the year where we frantically scramble to get ready for the Sequim Garden Show while planning for what the year ahead looks like in terms of sales and events.  Last year it was not so frantic, since we’re getting better at planning ahead and making advance preparations over time.  But this year it’s frantic.  I basically lost the entire month of February for productivity, due to not being able to work at night and with frozen potting soil.  We have a lot of catching up to do!

All the same, our nursery stock has, by and large, hung on to survive the winter.  So we’ll still have a respectable selection of cool stuff to bring to the Sequim Garden Show this weekend, which is Saturday and Sunday (see website for details).  This will be our 11th year of participation in the show.  We expect that a lot of people are feeling the same sense of enthusiasm about getting outside and planting, after not being able to do so for weeks.  We can also at this time assure you of the hardiness of the plants we are bringing, since nearly all of them were in an unheated greenhouse where it was well below freezing many nights in a row in February.

So that’s this weekend–wish us luck getting ready.  After that, we have the following events scheduled for this year:

April 20 – 21: Hortlandia, Portland, Oregon, the Northwest’s biggest and best plant sale at this time.

June 21 – 22: Open House, here at the nursery in Sequim.

August 9 – 10: Open House, here at the nursery in Sequim.

September 20 – 21: Open House, here at the nursery in Sequim.

That’s all we have planned so far.  Why so few events?  Well, as much as we’d really like to do the Rhododendron Species Foundation Sale in April, I don’t think we will have enough nursery stock to go around for both that and Hortlandia, following this weekend’s event.  I guess that’s what happens after a good sales year such as last year.  Of course, there’s a lot of new stuff I’ll be potting up, but it won’t be ready to sell by April.  I also think two consecutive weekends away from the nursery in April puts me at a major disadvantage for keeping on top of things here.  That is the reason I dropped the Grays Harbor Sale–although it was reasonably successful, that weekend (being mid May) my time is simply more valuable here at the nursery.

As for Heronswood, they changed their fee structure for vendors this year, in a way that causes me to wonder if we’ve been selling a lot less than the other nurseries who attend.  I’m going to wait to see how that pans out, but at this time I’m not feeling inspired to participate.  The other sales we have discontinued in the past have been discussed in earlier blog posts.  If anything changes, or if I add any more sales, I’ll try to remember to post it here!

Not committing to this yet, but one thing I might do is add another Open House in late May, which we have done in the past.  But I need to wait and see what I think the nursery will look like at that time.  In addition to giving the plants some time to bounce back, I also need to consider some damage to our infrastructure caused by the snow.  In the meantime, remember that you can always come out and shop from us by appointment!

So that’s how things look right now.  Stay tuned for more updates, and perhaps we’ll see you this weekend in Sequim.