Guest Rant by Maureen Decombe, a/k/a Plantanista, following Scotts' announcement that it's closing all 56 Smith & Hawken stores by the end of 2009.
A loving homage to the beauty of functional, well made
garden tools, the Smith & Hawken catalog came into my hands some time in
the mid 80s. Soon after that, the long-shanked English Garden Spade made its
way to my front porch. Unpacking the tool was a ritual during which I began to
feel like a real gardener, one who cared enough to invest in a great quality
tool that would last my lifetime. Over twenty years later, and I still use it
at least once a week.
Though I’ve not cared
for the extra-long wooden shaft as I should have, it feels as if a permanent
groove has formed between my fingers and the warm, solid D-handle. The
hand-forged blade has sliced soil from the east to the west coast, and in a
full-circle irony, eventually returned to Palo Alto, the town in which Smith
& Hawken grew from an order-fulfillment garage to become a garden lifestyle
empire.
Jackie wins! Thanks for playing, everybody, but most of all,
thanks for your often hilarious and provocative comments.
Just for fun, here are some of the strange or not-so-strange things
people mentioned having seen at garden centers and nurseries.
Air plants (tillandsias) glued (ouch) to plastic fairies. I
can’t even imagine what that looks like. Coincidentally, our randomly chosen
winner Jackie mentioned those.
Booze. A lot of places have little wine bars and cafés. I
can kind of get behind that. A glass of wine while shopping for plants? Sure.
Llama fibers (from Deborah). I still don’t understand that
one.
Reading Dirt mentioned
life-size elk and lion sculptures (made of iron!).
Common Weeder talks about miniature John Deere equipment for kids. That may not be
strange to many of you, but I’ve never heard of it.I looked for it on the web, though, and found a JOHN DEERE BARBIE. Check out her boots! I loved all the little mini-tractors and stuff, too.
Kat talks about perfume (they have that at my favorite
nursery actually, but it also has great plants), while LauraBee has seen 25k
oriental rugs. Marie found a rug made out of stones.
Many commenters mentioned horribly tacky holiday décor, from
fake trees with fake spiders hanging from them to Easter eggs the size of
bowling balls.
Katxena found textured wallpaper, Elizabeth could
do without the hand-painted silk scarves and PlantingOaks wonders why, why, why
the decorative table lamps.
I think the saddest things, even sadder than the dead plants
(which we’ve all seen) are the plastic ones.
Oh, and on moving merchandise. Yes, we understand seasonal
changes and moving stuff to pique the interest. What we don’t get is hiding or discontinuing basic garden
supplies—which is what started this whole rant.
Again, thanks, and may your next trip to the garden center
be enjoyable, whether you find what you are looking for or not.
Or I would visit a small, locally-owned toy boutique. Regardless, I can assure you, I would
not be looking for them at my local nursery.
Nonetheless, that’s what I found the other day, right where
they always used to have the bamboo stakes. Little furry birds that make
authentic noises. I asked a staffer where the stakes were and he looked at me
in puzzlement. I asked another, and she looked at me in puzzlement. Finally, we
unearthed an old-timer who knew where the bamboo and wire stakes were kept, way
back in the corner behind the cocoa matting, sort of near where the pond
supplies used to be.
It’s not just nurseries and garden centers. Stock is moved, sent back, and replaced on
a daily basis in almost every retail establishment I frequent. Entire departments
are torn apart and relocated regularly. They even do it at the liquor
store—what’s the point of that? The assumption is that all consumers have ADHD,
unable to bear seeing the same merchandise in the same place longer than 36
hours. I’m afraid to tell friends
about a great shopping find, because I’m almost positive it won’t be there a
day later.
So be it. But will there come a time when I have to mail
order such boring garden necessities as stakes, ties, and cheap terra cotta,
while resin fairies, wind chimes, and stones inscribed with profound messages
can still be had at my local garden center? Look, I know that stores need to
carry what sells. But when the basics are relegated to obscure corners, it’s
only a matter of time before they disappear altogether. People may need them,
but sometimes it takes good customer service to explain to customers exactly
what they need and why.Maybe a
new generation of gardeners will assume that oriental lilies were just destined
to lie on the ground.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen for sale in your
garden center? I will draw from
the responses and the winner will receive the eminently practical Eleanor
Perenyi’s Green Thoughts—a brand new edition from Modern Library. Contest ends tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern.
When I was in Minneapolis, I stopped in at Bachman's, a sort of destination garden center loved by the locals. But these Minnesota people are too modest. No one had really been able to convey to me the sheer scale of their Lyndale Avenue store. Really, I don't think there's anything like it anywhere in the country. 230,000 square feet of retail space? You tell me.
I know what you’re thinking: big, pretty garden center, maybe a little coffee shop, nice gift store—big deal. Seen it.
Oh, how wrong you would be. Bachman’s is like the Macy’s of garden centers. And not, like, the small-town Macy’s you sometimes visit when you go to see your mom. No, Bachman’s is truly the glittery, big city, luxurious and over-the-top fancy shopping extravaganza of the plant world. We’re talking the downtown Seattle Nordstrom’s. The Union Square Macy’s. The Saks that is actually on Fifth Avenue. Only they sell plants instead of shoes.
Some of you have already stopped reading and booked your tickets. I know. It’s too much to contemplate. You could actually shop all day long—all day!—and never see a single dazzling trinket that is not somehow related to gardening.
The gift department alone is worth a few hours. Jewelry. China. Fancy vases. Scarves. Fountains. Pots. I don’t even know how to convey the fabulousness of the gift department to you. Words fail me.
Then there’s a huge flower shop—Bachman’s is a full-service florist with locations all over town and cheery purple vans that deliver the flowers—and a full-sized card shop. I got to take a behind-the-scenes tour of their floral department, and seriously, it’s bigger than most wholesale markets I’ve seen. If you go, try to score a tour. It will blow your mind.
Oh, and the plants. One greenhouse after another full of cheerful blooming annuals, perennials, herbs and vegetables, houseplants, gift plants, trees, shrubs—really, every time I turned a corner, I’d see another sales floor larger than most ordinary garden centers, all devoted to yet another category of plant.
The hard goods department—that’s garden center speak for tools, seeds, fertilizers, and so forth—was as large as most grocery stores, with just as many cash registers open. They had everything. Every. Thing.
And then there’s the café. Bachman’s put in a fancy little bakery and a lovely deli that does high-end sandwiches and salads, and you take your food and sit in an extraordinarily elegant and oversized version of a greenhouse, with the glass roof high above you, and plants and deliciously tempting merchandise stretching on for acres around you, and some kind of elegant jazz floating through the air, or maybe that was just in my head. It was lovely in the spring, but can you imagine how rejuvenating it would be in the middle of a long, frozen winter? Bachman’s stays open until nine every night in summer, and until eight the rest of the year. I’d be there every night until close. If they would only put in a bar I bet they could keep the place hopping until midnight.
The only word of warning I have for you plant geeks who are planning on making the trip is that this is not the place to find obscure, hard-to-find, unusual plants. The plant selection is all cheerful and familiar and, for the most part, heavily branded--Monrovia, Endless Summer, and so on. I'm sure that if I lived in Minneapolis I'd go elsewhere for weird and surprising plants, but I'd hang out here for the sheer fun of it.
I had hoped that this little video would help convey the enormity of the place, but I really think you have to see it for yourself. Sorry I couldn't come up with anything better for you. Just know that every shot is taken from an entirely different part of their vast, sprawling, retail horticultural empire.
In response to a post asking how readers store their gloves, I got the smartest damn answer: put all the right gloves in one bin and the left in another, grab one from each bin and go!
But here's how glove-makers could do the right-left sorting for us. Why not make ALL the left gloves one color and ALL the right gloves a different color? So these Atlas gloves, for example, could all be stored in the same bin and we could simply grab a pink and a blue and no worries! Not the expensive gloves we use for dangerous jobs but the cheap, everyday gloves. I would totally buy them by the dozen.
It takes 600 exhibitors, including thirteen major outdoor show
gardens, twenty-nine smaller outdoor show gardens, and over a hundred floral
stands in the three acre Great Pavilion, to create the world famous Chelsea Flower
Show in London. As
much as £250,000/$390,000 has been spent on creating
a single show garden - for just a few days viewing before the site is restored
to the lawns of the Royal Hospital, the veterans’ hospital on the banks of the
River Thames. 157,000 people visit the show each year; it’s always a sell out.
But here’s the thing – you can’t buy plants. That’s right,
it’s a flower show but no plants are for sale. So what’s the point of all these
nurseries spending all this time and money creating such incomparable exhibits
if they can’t sell anything? Isn’t this a bit mad? Or just a bit too British?
Rob Hardy of Hardys Cottage Garden Plants says Chelsea is not about selling. “It’s about the
prestige of winning a Gold Medal,” he told me (as he admired his Gold Medal!). “A Gold Medal at the
Chelsea Flower Show is worth more than you could wish for, it’s known around
the world. It’s about credibility. Chelsea is the pinnacle, winning a Gold
Medal is far more important than sales.”
But not everyone agrees. Fifteen years ago John Metcalf of
Four Seasons Nursery, who staged some of the finest exhibits of perennial
plants seen in decades, took just eleven orders in four days and never came
back. More recently, others have said the same. So what’s the problem? I asked
Lynn Beddoe of the Royal Horticultural Society. Basically, it’s the site.
“With 600 exhibitors on an eleven-acre site there just
isn’t the space to stock plants,” Lyn told me. “And restocking every day is
impossible with the traffic issues here in central London.”
But she also puts a positive spin on it. “Don’t forget that
all the floral exhibitors take orders, more and more are selling seeds, plus
there’s a whole range of wonderful garden goodies on sale. And at the end of
the show, on Saturday, we have the sell-off when anything and everything from
the show gardens and floral exhibitors is sold off. Everything is recycled from
plants to planters.”
Three Counties Nurseries (they don’t have a website) have
created a great business selling seeds of American columbines at Chelsea after
giving up selling garden pinks because they no longer took enough orders to
make it worthwhile. But why not simply move the show to a bigger site? There’s
a huge park just across the river.
A simple answer, says Lynn: “It wouldn’t be Chelsea.
Firstly, there’s the historic link. The show has been held on the same site
since 1913 and it’s a privilege to be here. And the show has an atmosphere all
its own, it’s special. You can go to any garden centre to buy plants but only
at Chelsea can you see exhibits like this.”
And with more and more visitors from other countries,
including many from North America, perhaps it doesn’t matter if they can’t buy
plans – they can’t take plants home anyway.
Fortunately, there are other shows like the Hampton Court
Palace Flower Show, in
July, where the visitors can buy plants – and that’s where British gardeners go
if they want to take plants home. Chelsea remains the show people visit simply
to see the best of the best – without struggling around all day with bags full
of plants.
Photos: Top, the Gold Medal winning exhibit from Hardys Cottage Garden
Plants. Bottom, carrying home a bottle brush (Callistemon) from the Chelsea
Flower Show sell-off.
As a new-ish iPhone user, here's what I want to know: Where are the damn gardening apps? I've heard all about the Locavore app and that's nice. I found a Peterson field guide to birds, and that's cool.
But what about a book like this fine title from my friends Pete & Judy Haggard? If I was writing Insects of the Pacific Northwest right now, I'd be asking my publisher, "What format should this be written in so that it can be turned into an iPhone app? And how do we split those royalties?"
I'm not talking about digital books or e-books, in which whole pages are scanned so that you can basically flip through them on the computer the way you'd flip through the printed book. I'm talking about books like this one, filled with bite-sized pieces of information and useful photos that can be turned into a searchable database, and in turn made into a groovy little iPhone app that would allow me to look up a bug in the field without having to carry five different reference books with me.
What about Fine Gardening's Pronounciation Guide? I would love to have my iPhone helping me with my Latin while I'm on the road. I would totally pay for that.
Or the Sunset zone finder or plant finder. I would love to have the Sunset Western Garden Book on my phone as I walk through the garden center.
And Armitage's book. And AHS's big encyclopedia. And a durn good guide to poisonous plants.
What if the American Public Gardens Association had an iPhone app that gave me details about every botanical garden, including what gardens are near my zip code and what they've got scheduled for this weekend? What if independent garden centers did the same thing?
What botanical iPhone app do you want? And how much would you pay for it?
Or--at what point would you be convinced to buy an iPhone because it had so much indespensible gardening stuff on it?
New GardenRant policy: To reduce our carbon footprint, giveaways will be restricted only to Friends of Rant who can appear in person at the home of one or more GardenRantistas to pick up their winnings and carry them away on their bicycle and/or wagon.
Kidding. But. When Radius Garden Products sent me two rakes to try out and one to give away, I thought, "When am I ever going to mail a rake to somebody?"
And then Friend of Rant and completely adorable person and lovely human being Genevieve Schmidt stopped by one Sunday to talk about helping me get my garden ready for a yet-to-be-announced big media appearance, and I asked her to pick a rake and take it with her. She not only took it, she wrote glowing and very detailed review on her site North Coast Gardening, saving me the effort of doing it myself. Just like the rake itself, having Gen write clever blog posts is a great time-saver.
It was a Friday night and my calendar was pretty blank, so I decided on a whim to take in Ladies Night at a local garden center. And if you can't imagine a cool party atmosphere at a retail garden center, imagine this: The hottest band in town, wine tasting, spiked espresso-tasting, Allan Armitage and llamas! (There was lots more, but those were the highlights for me.) And a great turn-out.
Then I see that some Groovin' in the Garden
is going on at a gorgeous public garden in Richmond, Virginia - great musical events all summer.
The point is: Turning gardens and garden centers into night spots is very cool.
Photos: Allan Armitage and one of the 30 llamas in residence at Homestead Gardens in Davidsonville, Maryland.
Here’s a gadget I like even better than the moss carpet, or the new thingie that you stick into the soil to analyze your plant needs and it reports them to your computer (more on that later). Garden surveillance!
Well, it’s not really meant to be spywear, but I can see the possibilities of this Timelapse Garden Video Camera. It can take up to 18,000 pictures, every 5 seconds up to every 24 hours, and withstands temperatures from 14° F to 122°. Using the one photo per hour setting, it can take pictures over 4 months.
Oh, the possibilities. You can document the growth of just about any plant and make a cool time lapse video. Or you can find out exactly what goes on in the garden when you’re gone. Who’s been snapping the buds off your hellebores? Or worse, stealing your tomatoes? It needs to happen from dawn to dusk though, at which point the camera switches off automatically. I found it via Neatorama and Hammacher Schlemmer, which is still a great place to find cool stuff.
Oh, and remember the Botanicalls plant sensor that will place a phone call when your plant needs water? Amy wrote about it a couple years back. Did you know that this thing lets your plant Twitter too? And it will have more followers than you do if this tweeting Pothos is any indication.
“Current Moisture: 64%.” “Current Moisture: 59%.” “Water me.” “Water me please.” “Urgent! Water me!” “Thank you for watering me.”
My basic feeling about large, crowded public events in spaces with
no windows is that I'd rather stick pins in my eyes. However, I remind myself that war correspondents, too, have to put up with some unpleasantness in order
to covertheir beats--and so manage to drag myself to the Capital District Garden & Flower Show once a year to cover mine.
Probably because it takes place in that proto-spring moment when
it's likely to be beating rain outside, this event is wildly popular.
It fills the giant athletic complex at Hudson Valley Community College,
including the basketball arena, the hockey rink, the lobby, and spills
over into various gyms, where you can learn about assembling attractive
container groups with a row of punching bags above your head. Last Sunday, the place was jammed with thousands and thousands of retirees and
weary parents pushing strollers. None of them looked like gardeners. They
were not fit, they were not wearing waterproof boots, and they were not
dirty.
In fact, outside of the lecture halls, the show seems to
be only peripherally about gardening. I'm never sure why I'm taking in
stands selling window blinds or peach-flavored honey.
Or flowers arranged to look like sushi.
Or pizza.
Or lobster.
Is this really how flower-lovers spend their time?
Or
weird garden tableaux with ugly forced blooms, lots of fake stone, and puzzling themes,
including this eerie-looking bridal scene.
In this peculiarly awful winter, when the usual dirty snow/ frozen ground depression is melding with economic depression, a little glossy paper and some stunning photography really lift my spirits.
Of course, most of the magazines arriving at my house look as if they are on death row--skinny, no ads, many articles advertorials in disguise. House & Garden, my favorite shelter magazine, was put out of business over a year ago. Conde Nast decided to run out my subscription with the awful Domino, which has now suffered House & Garden's fate. So Conde Nast is currently running down the clock by mailing me Self, which will probably go out of business before we finish our relationship in May. Self! Boy, that's a long, strange trip from Jay McInerney's delightful wine column. At 48 with three kids, demanding clients, a book contract, a big vegetable garden, three hens and four goldfish wintering over in the basement, I am in the wrong demographic. No Time For Self, I'm the target market for that publication.
So the arrival of two ridiculously glossy and gorgeous catalogs in the last week has buoyed my spirits. First, Klehm's Song Sparrow Nursery. The high degree of specialization in this catalog is really nice--a huge selection of peonies, some of them bred by Roy G. Klehm, as well as clematis, hostas, magnolias and a few other things. As to how they can afford to mail out such a thick book to someone like me, who's never ordered from them before, let's just admit that the tree peony that appeals to me most, 'Baron Thyssen Bornemisza,' costs $225.
The greater mystery is Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, whose catalog I requested on Amy Stewart's recommendation, even though I am a loyal Fedco customer. But I have to admit, Baker Creek has won some of my business with its mind-blowing selection of seeds from all over the world. I'm a mad experimenter in the vegetable garden and sought seeds from Italian and Indian sources this winter. Now Baker Creek makes me wonder why I bothered.
And the catalog is so gorgeous, it deserves at least a week of bedtime flipping-through.
I'm assuming that all of the catalog's amazing photos are owner Jere Gettle's work, since that's certainly suggested by the photos on his website. As to how they amortize 150,000 copies of this beautiful book over $1.50 seed packages--well, I have no idea, but I do think a Rant interview with the adorable young Gettle family is in order.
This just in--the owners of the Seattle and San Francisco garden shows have announced that they are retiring, so the shows will either be sold or closed. Get the press release here. News reports say that the shows are on the market for one or two million; another article reports that the Seattle show made money and the San Francisco show lost money. Not a surprise, in my opinion: for one thing, San Francisco gardens year-round, making a garden show in March less of a big deal than a Seattle show in February, and for another, Seattle has the most awesome venue--an enormous shiny new convention center downtown--as compared to San Francisco's aged Cow Palace (where it was held until this year--now it will be at the San Mateo Events Center).
Like everything else, corporate sponsorships are down (remember the ill-advised Sally Fields/Boniva sponsorship of last year's Seattle show?) and ticket prices just don't cover the cost of the show.
According to the press release, the show's owners do hope "that 'My Garden Spaces,' an on-line
community recently launched as a year-round adjunct to the flower shows, will
continue beyond the shows." My Garden Spaces appears to be one of those "hey kids, come do your social network thingy on our website" initiatives, much like Scotts attempt to get people to blog on their site, or Lowe's weird faux-Second Life experience called Sunnyville (now ended, apparently). I understand the idea behind these sorts of initiatives--corporations hire a consultant who tells them that these crazy kids today have gone all bloggy and virtual, and they'd better get with the program, but I cringe when I think of what they must spend on this stuff compared to what they get in return. We're on Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and TypePad--come talk to us there if you want to talk.
Otherwise, just put on a fabulous show that fills me with joy in early spring. I sure hope somebody steps up and takes over these garden shows; no digital experience can replace the fun of hanging out with thousands of gardeners on a wintry day in a big city, even on the not-that-wintry West Coast.
I used to say that a gardener could never have too many gloves.
I was wrong.
Today's excavation of the scary closet in the laundry room where I store my garden supplies (which we refer to as the Situation Room) revealed no less than seventeen pairs of garden gloves.
After the cull, the following remain:
A pile of Atlas nitrile-coated gloves, none of which had a single hole in them in spite of the fact that I think of them as the cheap, throw-em-out option at less than five bucks per pair; plus a nice pair of WomansWork gloves (in green) and, of course, the Ethel gloves we all tried out last year. And a pair of unidentified leather gloves I got for Christmas.
Also surviving the cull: a five-pack of gloves a neighbor gave me for Christmas in response to my (apparently too often) repeated assertion that gardeners can always use more gloves. Clearly I need to stop saying that.
For an
interesting contrast to the top GardenRant posts of 2008, here are the
most clicked-on stories on the garden retailers' website the Weekly Dirt, as reported in their newsletter (not online).
2008’s
Dirty Dozen
12. Seasoned retailer offers advice for credit
crunch - Read the full blog post here.
9. Lowe’s is looking to gain market share by going head to head with small, independent
retailers as well as some its larger rivals.
8. S.E. drought causes green-industry
collapse, with 35,000 out of 79,000 green-industry employees in Georgia losing their jobs. Suggestions are offered about how the national green industry can help.
6. For retailers: 5 things they don't know about baby boomers.
5. Five "fatal" mistakes that small retailers often make? At the top of the list: failure to
plan effectively and objectively. Click here to read more.
4. Proven Winners recently published a new online magazine targeting Gen X and Y consumers - Proven Beauty, which can be viewed with no subscription fees. The first
edition includes articles on water conservation, butterfly gardening and a Q
& A with P. Allen Smith.
3. Garden Media Group unveils 2009
trends. Suzi McCoy says: global influences, water conservation and blended
gardens will be in vogue. Complete recap on
Open Register.
Newbie worm composter here, trying a large homemade bin (shown here) but dreaming of something MUCH better. That's because this single-compartment system is waaay too inexact, too messy, too intimate! My friend uses one and LOVES dumping the entire contents out on newspaper and carefully picking through all the uneaten food, the worm crap, worm cocoons and whole worms in order to "harvest" usable bits of worm crap for her garden.
But see, I do NOT want to do that. I want a stacked system that roughly divides the crap from the worms and the food they're still working on. I know the sorting process isn't perfect and you still have to remove some live works from the poop when harvesting a finished trayful, but that I can deal with.
So experienced worm composters, please weigh in on the indoor system you use, or others you've tried.
SMALL, HOMEMADE AND CHEAP (photo above right) Three small Rubbermaid containers can be stacked to create a compost system for just $20, plus the cost of the worms. You simply drill holes, add worms and bedding, and the whole unit fits easily under the kitchen sink. This may be just the right size for a one- or two-person household. Here are the instructions.
LARGE, READY-MADE AND NOT AS CHEAP Among the commercial offerings these all look great to me.
Can-o-Worms for $105-130 (photo right) One composter warned me that the tall legs makes this unit wobbly, but our Amy uses Can-o-Worms and wrote: "The
layered compost bins are great and well worth the money -- I have had mine for
at least 12 years. Tell people that it should take about a year to fully utilize
all the layers. Once that happens, they might find themselves rotating the
trays every three months or perhaps more than that."
Worm Chalet for $160 (photo below right) I'm told the Chalet has very deep trays that hold a lot of material, which means that harvesting can be done less frequently. The trays also have removable screens on the bottom, which makes cleaning easy.
Worm Factory for $67 or Gusanito for $65 Anybody know anything wrong with these cheaper units?
Tips for all bins:
If you don't add fruit at all, you won't have fruit flies.
They really don't like being cold, as my wigglers taught me by trying to escape.
BUT ARE THEY INVASIVE? I've been researching that very question for my next newspaper column and will post the short version of the answer right here next week.
The Bluestone catalog arrived yesterday, and for once I was able to leave it on the table without feeling in the least tempted to flip through, imagining what I might buy. In spite of—or maybe because of—the bulb frenzy that took place in the fall, I feel that the spring might be a time of minimal garden spending, especially when it comes to mail order.
In tough times, if I’m going to be spending discretionary dollars on gardening, it’s going to be spent closer to home. We have a lot of great nurseries in Western New York—I can think of 3 superb examples within a couple miles of my house—and I want to help keep them open.
I also worry about how growing financial hardship will effect our local parks and one of my favorite winter hangouts, the local Botanical Gardens. I have to admit I am more of a rare/exotic plant person than a native/wildflower person when it comes to botanical facilities. You’re more likely to find me admiring the prize-winning lady’s slippers at the orchid show (shown above) than hunting them down (probably unsuccessfully) in their native state at a wilderness. But it seem that this is the year to support all of these places, with my admission fees and possibly volunteer hours, as the government and foundations that fund them threaten to lessen or even sever already fragile bonds of sustenance.
While the standard interpretation of sustainability focuses on conservation of resources, I also think of sustainability as keeping alive a unique local culture, making sure that all the reasons I love living and gardening in Buffalo remain viable. So I might give up buying the mail order woodland orchids I heard about last spring (I think I was supposed to plant them in the fall anyway), in favor of visiting their cousins at the Gardens or even checking them out at a nearby conservancy.
This might be the season to keep expenses down, and consider myself lucky that New York State’s new governor isn’t imposing a tulip tax, as well as new ones on soda, beer, wine, fishing, furs, and jewelry.
Of course, the Plant Delights and Select Seeds catalogs have not arrived yet, but by then who knows if I'll even have a choice!
It was standing room only for the Green Festival's vermicomposting demonstration
last month and I'm sure I wasn't the only attendee to leave determined to get my very own little
crappers. But where to find them? Some quick Googling yielded mostly bad links but I finally
found a working website for a supplier in Missouri, ordered up 1,000 red wigglers, and began fretting about them freezing on my doorstep. Calls and emails about the
delivery date went unresponded to. Hmm. Finally I called
my credit card company to inquire about canceling the order and learned
that - aha! - my card was never charged. Despite the email
order confirmation I'd immediately received after placing the order.
At least after all that fuss I could stop worrying about frozen worms and buy locally from the Worm Girl, recently recommended to the DC Urban Gardener Yahoo group. And isn't she cute? This sixth grader is super-enthusiastic
about worm composting, has worms AND bins, and lives just 3 miles from me. How much cooler is buying from young Kathleen here
than from some outfit halfway across the continent, anyway?
Asked what got her started in the worm and compost-bin biz, Kathleen
credits a school science project (yay, science teachers!). And she
tells me that since her name's been circulated via Yahoo group, her
supply can't keep up with the demand. The wigglers eat and procreate
as fast as possible but still, it takes a lot to start a new bin this
size, ya know.
Seems the market's big enough for lots more young green entrepreneurs. Know a kid who'd like to "help nature", to quote the Worm Girl's compost bin label, and make money doing it?
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