Headlight on a Northbound Train

Next week we will be marching into July. We are in the middle of summer and approaching a fall season. July is an important month for us at home and at Garden Works. John and Luke have grown heat tolerant crops for our July and August sales in our bedding plant area. July 1 is when our loyal shoppers can come by to spend their bonus bucks that they have collected over the year prior. When you shop at Garden Works we give you one bonus buck back for every $10 that you spend during the regular season. In July and August, you can come in and spend the bucks that you collected for up to half price for anything that you want. It is a lot of fun to watch people come in with their monopoly money and figure out what they can get at half price.

Our bonus bucks program has grown into a really big deal for us and for our customers. For us we get to keep busy during the two months that are normally not very busy in the nursery business. We get to flush out some of the spring season stuff in order to prepare and make room for the fall season. For our customers, their incentive to shop up here comes into fruition by being able to buy some things at some extra good prices. We have noticed that the week before bonus bucks redemption time, July 1, people spend time up here at the nursery, picking out what they’re going to treat themselves with. It’s a lot of fun to watch people walk around with their monopoly money trying to figure out what it will be. We have even caught customers hiding things so no one else could get to it before they can. It’s all been good fun just as we were hoping it would be. Some people come in to buy their mulch, some people come in and get Christmas shopping done at half price in July. Some people come in and add to their arsenal of gardening needs with fertilizers and such.

As most people that shop up here know, we have an employee named Isaac Tillman who has started a cut your own flower area down in the bedding plant section. Isaac has been growing cutting flowers for our customers for the last three years. He will join the customer while they go to the cut flower section and cut a nice handful and either put it in a vase that they brought with them or find a vase in the store that is appropriate for the cuttings. Isaac had a very successful seminar along those lines a few weeks back. People were really excited and filled the room while he demonstrated how to arrange the freshly cut flowers in vases. I walked through a few times while this was going on and there was a lot of laughing and fun going on while the sky was the limit for people’s imagination. We have a room that is designated just for fun events like this. We have had some people that wanted to have a gathering who weren’t sure what to do with their time. They have asked Isaac to allow them to go to the cutting garden and then have a little fun at the workbenches up in our meeting room. It’s a great way to get to know people or to have fun at a party or celebration. We’re proud of Isaac and we’re proud to have our own cutting garden for people to utilize in our community.

Another reason that July is important to us is that once bonus bucks season has gotten off the ground and we’re settled in into being busy during the hot months towards the end of July when Mimi and I will usually takeoff on a vacation. We have finalized our plans to go to an area north of Seattle and also in Canada to cool down for a while. We will stay north of Seattle for a few nights while we visit one of Mimi’s gardening heroes personal garden. Dan Hinckley works for Monrovia nurseries. He has mine and Mimi‘s dream job. He travels the world looking for plants that would be suitable to grow in nursery pots to be sold at garden centers all over the world. Dan experiments with these plans before introducing them to the nursery world. His personal garden is full of some of the most unusual plants ever found in the world. We were lucky enough to be approved for a personal tour by Dan while we’re up there. When we are finished in that area, we will cross the border and take some ferries up to Victoria, so we will have time to do a little bike riding, hiking, and take our time at Butchart Gardens. We’ve not been there before and have heard numerous times that that is somewhere we need to see. I imagine we’ll be looking at some beautiful older plantings with colorful additions coming from fuchsia and begonias and some other plants that might not appreciate our heat so much.

I know there are some Japanese gardens up that way that have us pretty excited. Between finding good restaurants and cafés and watching whales on the Puget Sound, we will be searching for more gardens. West Coast beaches are so different than our wonderful beaches down here in the south. They are usually rocky and cool and windy, just perfect for some long walks and some exploring. As you move inland, the trees are covered in moss and the ground and rocks are covered in moss, a look that we love to see. Moss gardening is a big thing up that way since they have the weather for it. We are going to try not to spend much time in our rental car once we get where we’re going. We hope we can bike to most of the places that we want to be, as long as they have a good cup of cappuccino nearby.

We planned our trip so we will be home inside the dates that madeline and Max will be having their first baby and our first grandchild. I think both of our babies were a couple of weeks early so we timed it as if that might be the case this time. We don’t want to bein Canada and get that call that we need to boogie on home real quick. We could not be more excited about the thought of having a granddaughter nearby. Max and madeline have moved to Crystal Springs in a nice cou

ntry setting in order to raise their child. We are so excited for them and the life that they are creating for themselves. We are hoping that we will get home in time to slip in a side trip to South Carolina where Mia and Cody are living a similar type of life. They have recently purchased some acreage outside of Greenville, South Carolina where they plan to do some homesteading. They are doing it right by taking their time. They want to spend time improving the soil and getting the land draining in the right direction, probably towards a pond or lake that they will build on their property. They are so calm about all that is happening in their lives with this property and this plan that they have, it’s been very inspiring to watch as they seem to have every step along the way planned out perfectly. I have not seen their land yet so I’m excited about sneaking up there soon so we can see the property in its early stages.

July is usually the month when I set my irrigation system to run fairly regularly depending on the amount of rainfall. I usually hit the zones in my front yard on one day and the zones in my backyard the next. That allows me to keep an eye on things to make sure they’re not getting overwatered. Sometimes when it gets really hot plants will stop taking up water as a defense mechanism. I don’t want to overwater and cause bigger problems. We have to keep our pots around the yard hand watered on a regular basis anyway so we are able to keep an eye on those types of things. We will do a little pruning and snipping to try to keep as much stress off the plants this time of year as we can. I will start irrigating with the water from our pond, which is very nutritious for the plants.

If we wind up in a drought situation I will be forced to use city water to irrigate my yard since the level of the pond will be dreadfully low if I use too much of it with my irrigation system. I run 22 zones so you can imagine how much water that would use out of our small pond if it’s not being replenished on a regular basis. I can tell when we irrigate from the pond. The plants are so healthy with the slow release fertilizer that comes from the water in our pond. The bottom of our pond is built out of at least 40 years of decomposition. It’s hard to find a fertilizer of that quality. I am hoping that we will see you shopping up here with your bonus bucks this month. If you are not a regular shopper here, we hope you will give it a try and enjoy collecting those bonus bucks so you can come up and snag some good deals for July and August.