ROOT RANT

As the time nears when we will begin our fun filled journeys to favorite nurseries and garden centers, permit me to launch into my blah-de-blah about roots and why what you can't see is more important that what you can see.

Garden centers are businesses, and they like to make a profit. Some of them are better at this than others. Some places raise their own plants, and some buy their plants from brokers of various sizes, who grow and ship plants that arrive in bloom or very close to bloom, or potted up in swanky looking labeled pots with gorgeous full color lables filled with the promise of drop dead gorgeousness that you MUST. HAVE. NOW.

Normally we enter the garden center, go into a trance and begin filling our arms/baskets/wagons/ truck beds with the beautiful blooming specimens that fill our senses with joy.

But do we really know what we are buying for the future? Will the plant return to us next year bigger, fuller and more beautiful than it is at this moment. Can the romance continue or will it only be a dim memory next year, inserted into our consciousness by the discovery of a cracked and faded plant label sticking out of the dirt.

Of course your planting practices have a lot to do with this, but the condition of the plant at the time you buy it is another factor that heavily influences the longevity of your new baby.

I'm talking about the roots.

Now it seems kind of dumb to talk about roots--of course the plants at the garden center have them. But do they have GOOD roots? Not to be a snob about it--but there are roots and then there are ROOTS. The way your baby spent its childhood before it made the journey to your basket can make a big difference in how well it survives at your house.

There is a wonderful greenhouse where I used to shop a lot. One year I was talking to a friend about this place and he told me he had quit buying plants from them. His reason was that the plants routinely failed to winter over for him, and he had realized that the root systems on the plants were consistently weak. Got me to thinkin' and whaddya know--same thing had been happening to me too! I began to examine what I had purchased over the years and what was still alive here and the answer was--not much.

Now this is a lovely place to buy plants--lots of variety, beautiful displays, gorgeous plants in full flower, carefully groomed by a conscientous staff.

But in their haste to make a profit, they "push" the plants too hard. Too much water, too much fertilizer. Life is easy, and the plants don't have to work very hard to live. So they don't. Trouble is, when they get taken off life support, they don't have any reserves to fall back on. They aren't tough, so they can't handle life on their own. Often they have been tricked into blooming long before they are old enough to even go on a date, much less reproduce, so their energy reserves are already being depleted. It all makes for a weakened new addition to the flower bed, and the future holds an empty space and a cracked label marking the demise. A tiny vinyl tombstone to join the legion of garden failures that plague us in the spring.

Plant growers know the adage that every time you handle a plant it costs you money. The sooner a grower can get a plant to fill a 6" pot (or whatever size it is) and come into glorious bloom, the faster the plant can leave the greenhouse and make some money.

Pushing plants like this is common practice. So is treating them with growth regulators that keep them a certain size but allow them to bloom. Essentially they are stunted. This happens more with annuals than perennials, but plants (esp. at big box stores) are carefully managed to fit properly on the displays--not too tall, not too short--everything must conform to a design constraint to maximize the dollar value of the square footage. So where does that leave us? All we want is pretty flowers that will keep looking as pretty as they do at the store, and in the case of perennials, look that good or better next year. We have know way of knowing how plants are grown where we buy them unless we ask someone in charge--but I am not sure how useful the answer to a question like that would be. We have to use our eyes and our own judgement. That means learning to feel what a honkin big root mass feels like in the pot. Contrary to what you might think, it won't necessarily be heavy. Wet soil is much heavier than roots--even well watered roots. And a pot that is mostly wet soil isn't a recipe for success. Oftentimes you can feel the roots when you pick up the pot, or you can tell by looking that the pot is full of them. Does this mean you can race home, dig a hole and plop the baby in, sit back and watch the show? NOOOOOO. Tightly bound roots are like tight underpants. You wouldn't want to grow and stretch if you went around with a permanent wedgie and neither do your plants. The roots need to be uncircled and loosened from their tightly bound mass. Your hands or a garden fork can do this. If you cut some roots its usually okay. Just open the rootball up and plant it in a hole that is as deep as the long roots and plenty wide to accept the now expanded root ball. Roots that have filled a pot will have a lot of air trapped around them--and they need to contact THE SOIL to survive. So keep a watchful eye out for quality roots when you spend your money on plants. Bang for the buck--its what we are all about!

Is it spring yet??????

Yes--she is waiting, and so are all the rest of us. Waiting and praying for sunshine and warm days when we can go outside with no jacket on and feel the sun on our heads. A slow steady warmup with no surprise snowstorms or ice events. Lots of gentle rains to soak the ground nicely, but not torrents. Its the prayers we send out each year in the vain hope that this time Mother Nature will listen to us. Usually she has more lessons in humility in store for us instead. No matter--the warm days will come and the green toddlers will poke their heads up and soon throw their laughing faces at the sky. And it will happen before we know it. I always try to pay such close attention at this time of year so I see the MOMENT when spring bursts forth--but I always miss it. One day all will be bare, and the next day the trees are cloaked in green and I am driving along in my car thinking "CRAP!!! Missed it again!"

So you found my nursery's blog--thanks so much for coming by. Visibility is a problem for me and this route seemed like a worthwhile experiment. In case you don't know, I run a little specialty nursery in Walkerton IN. I tend to be quirky by nature and don't often follow the crowd, and my business doesn't either. In the age of the mega store that sells sanitized, standardized plants designed to flower and grow to maximize profits, I have taken another path. I don't try to compete with those outfits--I can't. I can't sell you a gallon pot for a dollar and a half and I don't WANT to sell you yet another pot of STELLA D'ORO. Frankly, I don't like to be bored, and while plants at a lot of places certainly serve a useful purpose a lot of them are BORRRRING and you can find them anywhere. So what to do when you don't want to follow in the footsteps of a zillion other people? In my case I am trying to use certain aspects of my business to my advantage to give me an edge over the great unwashed masses of discount paradises. I live where I work, so I can be open when I feel like it, at any time of the season I want. I grow everything I sell here--plants actually live from one winter to the next planted in the ground. I propagate a lot of what I sell myself, so I know a lot about the plants I grow. I don't like to fuss and I think I know what most people who garden as a low level hobby (as opposed to something like I do which borders on obsession) want in a garden plant. I love to talk (okay--BLAB) and I am a good listener. I have learned a lot from the people who buy plants here year after year, which that leads me to where I am now. I sell a limited number of genera (types) of plants--all of which I have experience with and know to be easy to grow and rewarding in the garden. Gardens can become harsh mistresses, and most of us don't have the mental energy to deal with the devasating failures a Garden can dish out when things go bad. One way to avoid disaster is to use plants that are very forgiving and tolerant and will have to be pushed pretty far before they revolt.

Another way is proper foundation work in the beginning--that's a subject for another post.

ANYWAY--The plants you will find here meet this criterion--I call them "bulletproof". If you have some basic conditions in your gardens that we can talk about when you come here, they will establish and grow well for you and give you a lot of joy in return for a basic workload each year.

The other positive I have--living here and being able to conduct business when I choose means that a very valuable and underused niche is more available to me than many other nurseries. The late season garden can be a spectacular thing, filled with color and motion, but many places don't carry the plants that flower during this beautiful period. Either they are closed, or their traffic flow is down so its not worthwhile to bring in the inventory. Sometimes they will carry certain things--but only a smattering of genera that look really good in flower and will cajole some money out of peoples' pockets. There are a great many plants that are rarely seen in commerce that are surprisingly easy to grow and bring to bloom at this time. But to buy them you need to be able to see them and learn about what is appropriate for your yard. That's where I come in. You can come see how these plants look in a display garden, and learn their culture without the pitfalls that I go through on a regular basis. The only way to find out if you can successfully grow a plant is to try it in your own garden. Sometimes it works--lots of times it doesn't. By killing numerous experimental plants, I have a good idea of what works for me, and can help you decide if it will work for you.

So come and see me this year--we are expanding our inventory to encompass a lot of new things--including as always--a great many new daylilies--most of which flower in the late to very late season. A number of them have been bred and evaluated right here so I know them intimately, from the time they were seeds onward. You will find only a smattering of these late blooming varieties in other places, and my own babies can be purchased nowhere else. Demand for some of these late and very late babies can be high, especially during their bloom cycle, so we often sell out quickly.

But now we will have other things to complement these beauties, including Aster oblongifolia, Boltonia, Rudbeckia, Callirhoe digitata, Chrysanthemums "Clara Curtis, Mary Stoker, and Pink Bomb", Helianthus, Solidaster, and Helenium.

And if you want something nice for earlier times in the garden, we have a few bulletproof selections you can't go wrong with--About 10 varieties of Siberian Iris (okay--I didn't count them but that sounds about right) some epimediums if you have shade, and a few hardy geraniums, some for sun and some for shade. And two varieties of Coreopsis; "Full Moon "(my absolute FAVORITE new plant from last year) and "Red Shift". Also the spectactular Persicaria polymorpha, Kalimeris incisa "Blue Star", Allium angluosum "Summer Beauty", Echinaceas tennesseensis and "Ruby Star" and Monarda bradburiana "Paririe Gypsy". We also have a very few dwarf viburnums, but they may or may not be for sale--depending on whether I can bear to part with them or not (its my house--so--NYAA!) I have a few other things up my sleeve that I may propagate this spring--we'll see how the timetable sorts itself out.

Come see us, won't you? The G scale Garden train always runs on Saturday and it will also run when we have Open Garden days through the Michiana Horticultural Alliance. We give free plants with every purchase and love to have you visit and hang out in the gardens. We have a lot of new garden construction and reconstruction on our "to-do" list this year, so come on out and see what's going on! Have a great spring--we will see you in the summer!