Rosie The Riveter

Finally! I’m a little late to the dance but I finally got the front highway bed planted up with the colorful flower show that will hopefully take us all the way through summer and into fall planting. I think this one will be worth the drive by to see. I went back to my old school Pepto- Bismal pink petunias surrounded by Indian Summer Rudbekia, Electric Orange Sunpatiens and white, cascading Vinca. I planted 4 Castor Bean trees and some Amaranth. My old, giant petunia baskets are hanging and blooming their heads off, this is year 5 for them. This year I backed everything up with orange Cana Lillie’s and variegated Miscanthus grass.

I built a couple dry river beds going through it all for drainage but more importantly they are paths for me to sneak in and out of the beds with my snippers and nippers and fertilizers and hoses. I use a Dosatron to liquid feed the bedding plants. I love the Doser because I make a concentrate, stick the tube in it and fertilizer is coming out of my hose. You can use any kind of fertilizer you want from synthetic stuff like miracle grow or you can use organic teas that can be bought or made, it’s easier on the plants to use a slow release organic fertilizer. We sell an inexpensive versions of a dosatron called a Syphonex. A syphonex is screwed onto your hose bib like a hose, then you screw your hose into that. You drop the tube into your 5 gallon bucket with your concentrate and fertilizer is coming out of your hose for about 30 bucks. I just find it so much more practical than mixing Miracle Grow type stuff which means I would be more apt to fertilize more frequently.

I spent one morning this week trimming back the palm fronds on 3 of our palm trees up front on the highway 51 bed. I trimmed up the Vitex which are about to bloom and we trimmed the Junipers and Hollies so everything looks nice and neat. The next day I started freshening up the soil and mulched the whole bed. The next day I planted over 600 bedding plants to make it look its best ever. I’m excited about those Rudbekias kicking in a little later in June, that yellow is loud enough to grab the attention of the folks speeding past our place. Until now the beds were pretty neat looking with yellow violas looking great and our snap dragons were on their third round of blooms, it looked so good I couldn’t make myself do the deed before our big Mother’s Day weekend.

The reason I want the front bed to look extra razzley dazzley is because the area behind that bed is now ready to be shopped. We have moved part of our business back up front near highway 51. Mimi has transformed that area into a pottery Mecca. She has done it again, for the last 8 months she has worked tirelessly with our crew to mix Asian pottery with metal and steel warehouse style with specimen trees as a backdrop to the inspirational displays that only she can concoct from thin air. Each quadrant has a specific theme and some sections are nothing but fountains, it’s quite a walk through there, you don’t have to be in the market for pottery, the walk through the area is just lovely. The walk leads right into our indoor plant and indoor sales area where you never know what you might see.

Mimi had gigantic eastern red cedar tree trunks cut into specific heights and put flat stones on them for display tables, it looks so cool. We are proud of our new area and a little scared that the 7 containers of pottery might not have been enough. People are loving the pots and they are constantly moving out. Justin and his crew are steadily selling pots , delivering them and planting them up with the best plants for our clients homes. There will be more coming in soon I’m sure. We have finally taken the tops off of the greenhouses. That heat lets us know when it’s time to slow those bedding plants growing in there down so they don’t get overgrown. That day usually comes right around Memorial Day. Next week is Memorial Day so everything is on track. This Monday we will get a chance to celebrate Memorial Day and take a minute to think about and show respect to those that lost their lives while trying to defend our country. It’s a great day to have friends and family over to take some time out to consider those who paid the ultimate price. It’s a great time to get your yard in order so you can have people over and boor them to death about all the stuff that excites you about your yard.

Sometimes it is hard to remember that you are probably the only one truly excited about that stuff. I have walked people through my yard, yapping the whole time about what was and what is and what shall be only to realize that they haven’t seen or heard a thing I was squawking on about. Then some people can really see the layers of beautiful things and can hear the stories about how these layers came to be. We are entering a new phase with our yard as we do away with more and more turf as we add more and more layers of plants to eventually keep the earth from being exposed to the direct, piercing suns rays. It will be easier to maintain once the plants become established since weeds won’t have light or space to hang out in. There will always be taking out things that we don’t like or didn’t work and there will always be adding new things to take their places so it will stay fun and

challenging.

Speaking of challenging, Mimi and I have been asked by an old friend to be on a radio show this Tuesday the 26th. Pam Pybas is the founder and owner of a home inspection company called Inspect It Like A Girl. The show is a segment of Fix It 101, a popular home improvement and repair program broadcast on MPB Think Radio. You might have seen her company cars wrapped with a picture of Rosie The Riveter on the sides of the vehicles. Pam has inspected every home we have ever purchased because we know nothing will slip past her nose. I have seen Pam lower herself down into places in the middle of the summer that I wouldn’t want to go even if someone paid me. I have also seen her get up into our attics during the summer months when the temperatures up there were well past 110 degrees. I’ve never seen someone so passionate about their duty and I am glad to have her number in my quick dial on my phone. Pam has so many years experience in the biz and has encountered every funky thing that a house can hold there is no way I would call anyone else. Hopefully we will never have to call her again.

We see Pam socially a couple times a year and always have a blast talking about the woes of business and some of the crazy stuff she has seen and done to get the job done just as Rosie The Riveter did when the country needed someone to take their duty seriously. We will record the podcast and it will play live on Tuesday at 4:00. We are going to talk about landscaping around the house and the common issues that folks experience and should consider before moving forward with their garden plans. I hope you can give us a listen

and call in with any questions that we can try to answer.

Other than that Mimi and I have had some time to start discussing our summer get away. Right before Covid we had planned to go to British Columbia on Victoria Island to see Butchart Gardens, we canceled at the last minute when they shut the tour down. We are leaning towards renting a cool house on the coast but as a bonus this time we are hoping to have a private tour with one of Mimis garden hero’s, Dan Hinkley, an international plant collector. We have followed Dan for years through his work at Monrovia Nursery. Dan travels all over the world finding plants, propagating them and making them available to gardeners through Monrovia nursery, one of our venders. Dan has 2 places, one is named Windcliff, his personal home perched on a cliff overlooking the Puget sound. The second place is Heronswood, in Kingstone, WA. He acquired that 15 acre spot in1987. Heronswood is where Dan uses the weird and unusual plants from his world travels. We are trying to get into both of those spots and walk and talk with the man, the legend and see how it really happens.

We are excited about that and of course Butchart will be very inspirational to us. All of that plus a big cool down in July sounds just right. We have to be back by early August because our first grandbaby girl is due around mid August. That’s what we are most excited about. Max and madeline have moved out to some beautiful property in Crystal Springs so the baby can grow up in the country where things still feel somewhat normal. They have pens ready for all kinds of chickens and goats, this baby girl is going to have a blast! I think Max and Mia have been communicating as they are all traveling down that similar path. I couldn’t be more proud of all 4 of them for seeing that kind of life as a goal but that they are making it happen in spite (and maybe because of) of these difficult times we are all living through now.