A LITTLE ABOUT GARDEN PERENNIALS

We prefer to garden without chemicals, and we make every effort to find alternative ways to do so. We accept a few aphids and katydids rather than spray to eliminate them. We think we would also killing off the good bugs. Still, occasionally it is necessary to get tough when we can’t find another way to maintain a balance.

We have had no rust since 2001

We don’t have to look at the calendar to know when August 1 has arrived. That’s when we start thinking about how we are going to make the next year better. We hear such comments from some of you too, so we know we are not alone in this thinking. We’ve made plans on some transplanting to create better pictures and we hope to find some new plants to excite us. We hope you do too.

Garden visitors sometimes ask, “Where’s the greenhouse?” Our answer is that we don’t grow plants to live indoors. We grow them to live outside in gardens. We strongly suspect that the fact that our plants spend their lives subject to Nebraska winters and summers makes them transplant more successfully than plants that live their entire lives in a greenhouse until they arrive at your door.

We sell field grown plants. This means that our plants are acclimated to growing conditions in northeast Nebraska, where we get nearly every kind of weather imaginable—sometimes all in the same day. We chose to deal in field grown clumps through the recognition that gardeners, especially new ones, like bloom results the first year rather than coddling babies and waiting a year or more to see blooms. We do not send any plant that we would not be pleased to receive ourselves, and we don’t like them to be too small. Our plants are inspected annually by the State of Nebraska. A certificate of inspection is attached to each shipment.

RECYCLE!

We have been recyclers for a long time. All packaging materials and boxes are pre-used. We would like to use biodegradable packing material, but the fact remains that at the present time, we don’t know of a material that does a better job of cushioning plants than styrofoam peanuts. We firmly believe that no new styrofoam peanuts need to be manufactured. We get ours pre-used from a local gift shop. Rather than putting them out in the garbage, we can all just keep sending them around the country. There is nothing wrong with them if they are not sent to a landfill. If you think about it, you probably know some person or business who can use them.