Is it Cocktail Hour Yet?

UPDATE:  WE HAVE A WINNER!  The bottles of Great Big Plants go to Rebecca and Shira, so y'all need to get in touch with me with your addresses.  You'll find contact info here.  Thanks for playing, everybody!

The nice people at Great Big Plants sent us a box of their wonder juice to try out.   I popped open a bottle earlier this year and watered all my distressed, frost-bitten plants with it, particularly an almost-given-up-for-dead tibouchina (princess flower) that had gone from a gorgeous flowering shrub to scary little nubs in no time.

I'm the worst person to ask to try out a product, because I'm such a hit-and-miss gardener.  You'll never get a truly scientific evaluation out of me. But I gotta say, I used Great Big Plants on half of the tibouchinas and the rest just got whatever dry fertilizer and compost I was using in the rest of the garden.  The shrubs that didn't get a shot of this stuff are seriously lagging behind.

Is it blind luck or are we on to something?  You be the judge.

Great Big Plants contains organic compost, water, humic acid, micronutrients, and seaweed extract.  It's registered under Washington State's organic program. A quart of the stuff sells for $18.95 online and makes 8 gallons.  And hey, the package is pretty cute.

Are you Great Big Plant-worthy?  Let us hear your tale of woe--most neglected plant, ugliest flower bed, crappiest soil--and we'll pick not one, but two winners, and ship a bottle to each of you.  The winners won't get announced until the weekend, so you've got time to really spin a yarn, or even post something on your own blog and put a link in the comments.

Comments

[BPB]

Ok, I'll take a shot. My ground is so dry & well drained that it makes a sucking noise when I water. (Sounds kind of like water going down a drain.) I have never had a puddle of standing water in my garden, even after the heaviest rains where local roads have flooded. This would not be a problem were the garden in full sun, but this is a shade garden! The shade garden is dominated by a group of boxelder trees & a cottonwood, & it is on a slight slope. I've had Actaea/Cimicifuga 'Hillside Black Beauty' for 5 years. It is still only about 10" high & has never bloomed. I have pampered it, mulching well with leaf mold & compost, giving it extra water & fertilizer. It's supposed to tower over the neighboring white wood aster Aster/whatever divaricata/divaricatus, the bugbane's black stems echoing the black flowering stalks of the aster. Instead, the aster dwarfs it. My 'Hillside Black Beauty' is a pathetic specimen that would cause the McGourtys to weep copiously at the sight. Please don't tell them about it; I'm afraid they'll come & perform a plant rescue! (Don't even get me started on the Astilbes.)

[Kevin]

I have always lived where we had soil, as in you can grow things. Where ever I have lived in this vast country I have had gardens, heck I even managed nurseries for 17 or so years trying to pass on organic wisdom. Then in the late 90's I fell in love, and relocated (because of love mind you) to central Oregon (high desert) 7 years ago we moved to our dream (fixer upper) home on an acre. We had dirt! Now here dirt is rare, we have rock, and sagebrush, and some junipers, and more rock. Our property had dirt (and lotsa deer). The fences are now done, ever see a bambi cry? And with all my vast experience in gardening (?) I am starting with dirt (not soil) no organic matter, no worms, got some ants, think thick sand, no nutrients, period. I now have a bad back (I hauled how much rotted horse manure?) and have gone thru 2 frosts in June (killing almost all veg) and the neighbors deciding their 4-H rabbits should be free range bunnies (bunnies dig). My dirt will someday be soil, my greenhouse will someday get finished, my compost is getting there (with worms!) and the veg stumps (bunnies) in my garden should produce veg by Christmas ( we get our first freeze about end of Sept.) and I will have my own garden blog. I could really use something akin to a miracle in a bottle, I think I just might deserve to win a bottle... maybe even a case!
Kevin

[shira]

Here's my story...
Girl loves to garden
Girl gives up great career to stay home with the kids.
Girl decides to go back to school and study horticulture.
Girl decides to pursue a career in the industry once the kids are in school.
Girl has lots of great clients and more work than she can handle.
Girl spends so much time looking after other people's gardens that girl's garden looks like crap. (okay maybe not like crap - but it certainly isn't getting the attention that it formerly did).

[Ellis Hollow]

I only looked at the Great Big Plants site briefly. But I couldn't find what's actually in this stuff. Anyone know the guaranteed analysis?

[MrBrownThumb]

I'm curious what the ingredients are too. A couple of months back when they e-mailed me asking me to review/blog about this product in exchange for a link I turned them down because I saw it was only beneficial to them since their PR was lower than mine.

It is nice to see that they gave you some to try and to give away, that was one of my suggestions to them to help them get in good with bloggers. Because everyone loves free stuff, especially when it is garden related.

[Natalia]

I made a silly mistake this year.

I bought a cute little townhouse last fall (that wasn't the mistake!) and it had bland industrial-ish landscaping out front, little tufts of variegated grasses, and little round shrubs that look like green footstools.

I planted a ton of lilies last fall, and those were a huge success, but this spring I fell victim to a classic blunder: I ordered a cheap assortment of daylilies on Ebay.

The auction said they were all big divisions, and I've never had anything but a container garden, so I didn't know what big divisions were supposed to look like. I got a bunch of things that looked like green onions with deformed roots. Now I have 15 teeny-tiny little tufts of green in my garden, that I a desperate to help bloom some time in the next 5 years.

[Rebecca]

Two days to post and take a stab at gettin' the goods? C'mon, it's your blog, you have to be here everyday. I barely have time to check it out once a week. Part of what keeps me so busy is stewarding my half-acre garden. I haven't had turf grass for almost 5 years. And although the majority of my plants are natives, it's been so dry for the past few years - here in water-rich Minnesota - that I'm truly frazzled. The garden needs some revision (fancy term for picky gardener not needing to move plants around to achieve the perfect look). It's gotten so I can't transplant at all from June through mid-September (that's most of the growing season here, folks) unless I spend my precious garden time watering them in for a few weeks to establish well. Would a shot of this miracle fertlizer help me water less and save me time and money? Sure, there's more than one way to find out, but I bet you can guess which pick is my favorite!

[Rebecca]

Two days to post and take a stab at gettin' the goods? C'mon, it's your blog, you have to be here everyday. I barely have time to check it out once a week. Part of what keeps me so busy is stewarding my half-acre garden. I haven't had turf grass for almost 5 years. And although the majority of my plants are natives, it's been so dry for the past few years - here in water-rich Minnesota - that I'm truly frazzled. The garden needs some revision (fancy term for picky gardener not needing to move plants around to achieve the perfect look). It's gotten so I can't transplant at all from June through mid-September (that's most of the growing season here, folks) unless I spend my precious garden time watering them in for a few weeks to establish well. Would a shot of this miracle fertlizer help me water less and save me time and money? Sure, there's more than one way to find out, but I bet you can guess which pick is my favorite!