To Buy or Not To Buy - That Is The Question

With all this talk of buying plants, you may wonder what I am buying.  Aren't true Gardeners supposed to grow everything themselves?  Well, yes and no.  There are only so many hours in the day, so spend accordingly.  There are also only so many dollars in the budget.

1.  Perennials:  We always seem to be adding landscape space.  While I am generally happy to admire a well mulched, freshly edged, EMPTY landscape space, Tim is automatically compelled to fill it with something.  Well, for ME to fill it with something.   Some of my existing plantings may become unbalance because of plants dying out and not growing well.  

Once Upon a Time I bought some Black Eyed Susans....
And maybe a Hosta... or two

You can easily propagate your own perennials by Dividing or re-Seeding.  About 12 years ago I bought some Black Eyed Susans.  I now have BES in several places, have given some away, and on occasion will wheel a barrow out to the compost pile and murder them.  

And now they are every where

Same with Hosta and Phlox.  One well established and thriving planting can supply a neighborhood for generations to come.   But sometimes you just need something new.  Or something Right Now. So you pay for something that, with a little diligence, you probably could have gotten for free.

The simplest way to make sure you are matching your existing plantings
without remembering what variety they were is to divide or seed from what you already have.

2.  Vegetables:  Yes I do buy some vegetable starts.  A gal can't do everything.  There is an excellent blog here on Northwest Edible Life that perfectly explains what seedlings to buy or not to buy and why.  I plan my spring cold frame real estate carefully for early Lettuce, hardening off indoor starts, successive plantings of Summer Squash, Cucumbers, and Cantaloupes etc.  I have room for 8 flats at any given time plus a little edge space for keeping warm watering cans and a tub of potting mix.  Sometimes I feel I have room to plant Herbs or a certain variety of annual flower.  But they have to fit into the timing and space provided by the frame. 

I try to stick with a "hot" color pallet in the vegetable garden.  I only use red, orange and yellow.
Some years I buy Profusion Zinnia seeds by color so I know I will have only those colors.

I have two grow lights and heat mats (and space to put them in) to start seedlings indoors.  These are devoted to my Tomatoes, Eggplants and Peppers.  Sometimes I like to try new things like Jalapenos and I don’t have a preference for the variety so I will pick up a likely candidate at the nursery just to get me started.  The biggest problem with buying vegetables commercially is the limited selection and generic labeling (or miss-labeling).  Tag says Red Bell Pepper.  Yes but what KIND of Red Bell Pepper?  If I really like it will I ever be able to find the same variety again?  Or next year will you sell me another Red Bell Pepper variety with the same generic tag?  I am a self-professed Tomato Snob.  I want what I want when I want it.  I am also a well-rooted Eggplant Snob.  I don’t want to grow Black Beauty Eggplant every year.    And I am fast becoming a Pepper Snob.

Not everyone grows Purple Beauty bell peppers, and certainly not
people who buy their transplants around here.

There are some other vegetables that just don’t transplant well, but that doesn’t stop greenhouses from selling them to the unsuspecting public.  My neighbors routinely plant a couple of packs of Bush Bean transplants.  Hmmm… interesting.  Four plants for the price of 30 seeds.  To each his own.  The Beans transplant and produce well and they routinely have beans weeks before I do. But when they brought out the four packs of Carrots!  Now this was an experiment worth watching.  Carrots!  I kept mum but my eyes peeled.  I happened to be present the day the Carrot crop was harvested.  Neighbor Mike began pulling first one, and then a half dozen of the most fascinating Carrot Knots I’ve ever seen.  He was perplexed.  “What is WRONG with my carrots?!?”   Pest damage?  Some strange disease?  I couldn’t help but chuckle as I walked over to inspect.  “Didn’t get your roots plumbed when you transplanted them huh?”  After all, a Carrot is merely a root.  Even he managed to find the humor in it.

3.  Herbs: This seems like one of the most obvious grow your own projects in the garden.  Every housewife in America can grow that stuff on her kitchen windowsill.  With the cost and variety of seeds available only a dummy would buy a Basil plant.  Well count me in.  I don’t have the inclination to fiddle with Basil anymore.  Or Cilantro.  Just give me a couple of pots and I’ll be on my way, thankyouverymuch.  

One Red Rubin Basil seedling will soon become a shrub

I do have well established crops of the hardy, woody stemmed Herbs planted in permanent locations.  The Catnip shows up here and there in the garden each spring and I rip the little buggers out by the roots and put them in a large planter where they belong.  But they will wander off… they always do.  I doubt I will ever have to buy Catnip ever again.  I am helplessly drawn to the Herb selection at every greenhouse.  An unusual variegated variety will get me all excited.  I just can’t resist them.  I really don’t use them, not as much as they deserve to be.  So they grow happily and un-harvested to shrub size, attracting pollinators with their blossoms and self-seeding themselves all over the place willy nilly.

Large rocks shelter and warm these herbs and keep them alive through harsh winters

4.  Annuals: There are plenty of annual plants that can be started from seed, cuttings, or even wintered over.  My grandfather and mother-in-law had Geraniums as old as I am.  They would just bring the pots in every winter, put them in the barn or the basement, and haul them back out in the spring.  My mother had Petunia plant (maybe still does. ) that we picked up at my PaPaw’s greenhouse back in the early years when the Wave Petunias first came out. That was back around 1998 or 99 and I know I saw it in the dining room last year, rambling up towards the drapery rod.  I could keep a “seed” Geranium over each year and start my own cuttings in January and save myself $60 every year.  If I were so inclined.  But I’m not.  I’ve considered pulling the Marigold volunteers each spring and potting them up alongside the Catnip.  That project interests me a bit more.

A tub of Calibrocha "Million Bells" Petunias can add color to any corner

So each year I adjust my shopping list keeping old favorites and adding new novelties.  I lurk about the local nurseries and scatter color all over our acreage.  Shades of pink and white around the house, hot red orange and yellow for the garden, and on to the side yard whose remoteness enables me to play with the color pallet each year.  I don't have a "flower garden" and yet I still manage to plant almost 100 Marigolds, 20 Geraniums, a few dozen Petunias, Portulaca, Alysum and various and sundry Spike and Vinca and other fillers.  I find volunteer Petunias and Portulaca in the midst of Sweet Potatoes and Cucumbers.  I don't pull them.  They're not really weeds.  They're just trying to give me my money's worth.

What's that peaking thru the carrot tops?  A Petunia!

To Plant a Garden is to Believe in Tomorrow

I read this sweet little inspiration phrase in a gardening book, and my first reaction was “yet so many garden with total disregard for tomorrow”  For example, people who plant in the ground before the last frost date or buy over-grown root-bound potted plants and hanging baskets they will never water. 

I guess I am the tomorrow kind of gardener.  I am always the one buying the short, stocky plants that haven’t bloomed yet.  When I see a particularly nice combination potted up, I march right past those and head out to buy the individual components to plant up myself.  That way I get younger and healthier plants that are not already root bound and hard to maintain.

A basket full of Calibrocha may look beautiful today, but buying the individual plants
and planting fewer per pot will make them easier to maintain.  These baskets usually burn out
for me within 6 weeks while my own plantings peak a little later.

Today I passed up the rack of hopelessly wind burned pepper plants and went through the show room with it’s tempting selection of a little of this and a little of that and back to greenhouse # 8 (out of 21 in the large glamorous garden center with the concrete walkways and shopping carts) and found the protected and fresh stock of pepper plants, pulling flats out so I could step back to the wall with the shortest, deepest green and most enticing plants.

Newly germinated seeds shelter in the warmth of the cold frame
along with annuals fresh out of the commercial greenhouse.

Gardening is about patience.  Sometimes you get instant gratification by going out and buying a beautiful selection of plants or shrubs and transforming a dull or unkempt portion of your garden into a virtual Eden.  But usually gardening is a long process.  In the last post I wondered how many greenhouses I would manage to visit this year.  So far six at least once, and I am on the third round for several suppliers.  I have also visited two Big Box garden departments for various supplies, and have two more greenhouses on my wish list mainly for tourism purposes. 

A trunk full of Geraniums will take over
an hour to transplant properly

Why so many trips?  Because it won’t all fit in my car all at once.  And if it did, the sheer enormity of the task would be overwhelming.  I walk into a well stocked greenhouse and I am immediately overwhelmed and underwhelmed at once.  There are so many beautiful choices, but the I can’t always find the exact variety or color I have in mind.  If I did manage to find everything I wanted all at once, I would not have room to stage everything and keep it protected until it is safe to plant and I certainly wouldn't have the energy to plant it all at once.  This must be done in stages. 

On one side the hoop house with a frost cover shelters tender seedlings
from direct sun and wind.  On the other side, sturdier, hardened off
plants await transplanting after threat of frost.

Last Friday I planted 16 gallon size perennials in the new rock arrangements between the trees.  This is in an area that was previously lawn and requires digging through sod and amending the soil.  Rain storms were rolling through and I had to do it in stages.  Plant six plants, get rained out, pack up, flee to the house, check the laundry, check the weather radar, start all over again.  Then on Sunday I planted a whole flat of marigolds.  With list in hand I made my rounds depositing the planned number of packs in each area, then I went back through with a trowel digging them in.  Saturday I filled large pots and added soil to the stationary planters, shoveling compost and wrestling with heavy pots.  Today I was back to the nurseries for another car full of plants.

Half of a rainy day's work

Another reason to do this gradually is that greenhouses stage their plants in cycles.  They can’t do it all at once either.  First come the perennials and hardier plants, then the bedding plants and vegetables, and finally the hanging baskets and combination pots for the finishing touches and color refreshers.  I have hanging baskets on my list and I know the best place to get what I want, but they are still in their beginning stages and not yet beautiful and tempting.

The bad news is that half of our clump Birch tree died.
The good news is the smooth red bark of the branches make
an attractive support for the pot of 3 foot high Sweet Peas.

Back at home I have a large population of plants to harden off and coddle and protect until after threat of frost and high winds.  The most finicky live in the cold frame and must be moved in and out and placed in sheltered spots until they become hardened to the sun and the winds.  There are adolescent plants who have graduated to the garden paths and which can be covered with my miniature hoop house if frost threatens.  Then there are plants ready to go in the ground, staged beside their intended beds, waiting for a free moment between weeding and watering and mulching and carrying to get settled into their permanent homes.  Today’s work was to pot up some decorative pots of Portulaca and Nasturtium.  I still have 15 (a trunk full of) Geraniums to fetch, carry home, and plant.  But there’s always tomorrow.

The garden peas are doing well, and the oldest planting of leaf
lettuce is supplying us with salad greens.

March Madness

So there I was... bent over the soil tub in the cold frame in 28 degree weather with snowflakes landing in my ear... wishing I had a potting bench... especially if it were in a warm greenhouse.  Gardening just isn't fun when the weather is unseasonably cold.  Plans are easy to put off just one more week.  I think the planting season is going to be a little late this year anyway.  But I have two flats of pots filled and ready.  The dirt in the tub somehow managed to be warm and welcoming despite the brutal winter.

Eggplant seeds start first, followed by peppers then tomatoes two weeks after the eggplants.  Even though I've sworn I'm going to start tomato seeds in the cold frame, I think I am going to do one flat in the house anyway since the grow op is going to be set up.   My eggplant seeds are old and I've put them on damp paper towels in the warm spot on top of the freezer.  Whatever germinates this week will be planted in pots under lights.  The Purple Beauty pepper seeds are new so they go directly into pots next week.  The week after that tomatoes get started in egg carton trays then transplanted deeper into pots.  And then... weather willing, it will be time for lettuce and nasturtiums in the cold frame and peas in the raised beds.

This is how dirt days should be enjoyed....

Me (2 yrs old) sitting on the steam pipes under a bench in the geranium house with English ivy above.

I was always playing in the dirt.  There were dirt bins in every green house and they were always full of my toys.  Usually tractors and shovels, but I had a large Marx farm set handed down from my mother and if there was so much as a wheelbarrow full of dirt to be had, I began farming.  Maybe this would be more fun if I got some farm animals out and scattered them in my dirt tub?

Potting Soil

My Dad and little sister transplant Coleus

 This time of year is dirt making time.  We need potting soil for starting seedlings, planning decorative combination pots and hanging baskets and I always need some on hand for dividing perennials and rounding up volunteer seedlings.  I remember at my family’s greenhouse, in late winter, coming home to the smell of Dad “cooking dirt”.  He had a steam bed system set up in an old manure spreader.  He would mix up large batches in the spreader, cover it with plastic and sterilize it.  From there he shoveled endless yards into flats and stacked them for the transplanting crew who moved from house to house transplanting seedlings from the seed trays into the flats, comfy women in calico aprons with dirty fingernails and names like Beverly and Betty Lou.  They toted their radio from place to place, perched on old stools and marked their progress in a ledger whose pages were yellowed and crinkled from the moisture.  The warm earthy smell filled the greenhouses and our attached home and brought visions of spring to the bitter lingering winter.

Some people, I’m sure, have decent luck just shoveling regular old dirt from their garden into a pot but around here, with our clay based soil, if you do that, by the end of the summer, what you end up with is a pot shaped clay brick.  You need to amend the soil to lighten it to retain moisture and add nutrients to meet the demands of the plants with their root base limited.  You also need to solarize or sterilize the soil to reduce soil born disease which is the same reason why you should wash and bleach your pots every year.

I’m reducing my large decorative combination pots by about half this year because after last year’s extraordinarily long hot summer I’m really tired of watering pots.  Plus, the raccoons can’t seem to resist playing in them. There are several “self-watering” systems available that really do cut down on watering and I’ll show you my results further down this blog.  But these require “soilless” potting mixes which is basically peat moss or similar substance (that will wick water from a reservoir) amended with nutrient additives.  There are several recipes available on the web.

Of course you can purchase the ready mixed potting soil or soil less mix.  My favorite was Miracle Grow’s Moisture Control mix and I used to make several stops at the Home Depot each season loading my trunk with 3 or 4 of the large bags until I had carted home close to a dozen.  However, for the sustainable heirloom gardening crowd, Monsanto Corporation is the devil incarnate, and Scotts, the owners of Miracle Grow brand, are in cahoots with Monsanto so buying a dozen large bags of Miracle Grow potting soil holds as much gardener guilt as going to the bad part of town and buying the same quantity of crack.  It’s an ethical no no.  Another sustainable ethics no no, is basing your potting medium on Peat Moss, which is not a renewable resource and probably comes from far far away.  You can substitute your own compost for Peat Moss.  I mixed mine about half peat and half compost.

Once you have established your wicking base, you need to add nutrients to the soil.  The recipe I use contains Peat Moss, Perlite (used to improve drainage), Vermiculite (holds moisture), Gypsum (adjusts the pH), Blood Meal (nitrogen), Bone Meal (phosphorous) and Greensand (potassium). 

I love shopping for these ingredients and having them on my shelves in case I need them for a spot in the raised beds later on in the season.  For instance, bone meal, scattered at the roots of tomato plants and watered in with Epson Salts seems to halt blossom end rot in its tracks.  This satisfies the Mad Scientist in me.  It will also earn you the respect of your local garden center workers.  I choose organic brands and Non-Miracle brands whenever possible.  It always takes me a while to collect everything.  For instance, the only place I’ve found locally, which carries greensand, is Tractor Supply.  So I buy a year ahead when I spot the hard to find items.

I mix my soil in the loader of the tractor.  I use cup measures and cut up gallon milk jugs to measure and scoop my ingredients.  I keep the garden hose handy to dampen the ingredients to keep the dust down, use gloves, and avoid breathing the dust.

 

Then I fill all my planting containers, first making sure I have drilled holes in the bottoms of those which did not come predrilled.  If you think that there is no possible way that a 20 gallon pot could ever fill up with rain and flood, you are sorely mistaken.

 Now, about those self-watering systems.   I bought the ones from Gardeners.com   They consist of a reservoir with a fill spout and the reservoir has a grid lid which allows the water to overfill and wick from the bottom of the pot midway up your potting mix coaxing the roots downward and eventually straight into the reservoir itself.

The spout has a cap, but I ended up removing the cap by the end of the season.  It’s hard enough to find the spout in a bushy pot of sweet potato vine.  You don’t need to fiddle with the cap too.  Make sure you leave the top of the tube far enough above the soil surface to make it easier to find. This looks awkward in the spring when the plants are small, but in a month, the pot will have filled in well enough to disguise the spout.  Disguise it very well.   The spout comes with a tube attached to a foam float which is supposed to tell you when you have filled the reservoir.  Just get rid of that.  You will know the reservoir is full when the water comes back out the top of the spout.  Obviously…

 My pots ended up being a bit too deep so to keep the spout high enough, I had to raise the reservoir up by placing used pots under it.  You could also use packing peanuts (not the eco-friendly kind which dissolve in water) or other plastic scrap that won’t compress too easily. Don’t use gravel.  Pots are heavy enough without it. 

You also want to avoid filling the reservoir with soil.  I used scraps of burlap to cover the grill.  The soil did bypass the side flanges and fill around the edges of the reservoir and pots below.

Last year was a very dry summer.  Through July I watered almost every morning.  The pots with the reservoir were much less maintenance. 

  I would fill the reservoir once or twice a week depending on how the plants looked.  And I did not just fill the reservoir up and walk away.  I found if I waited 30 seconds or so, the dry soil would immediately wick the reservoir almost dry.  I kept filling until the soil stopped wicking and the reservoir would take no more.  On very dry days, especially early in the season when the roots weren’t very deep, I also topped off the pot with some water to restore anything that may have wilted in the afternoon sun.  But overall I was very satisfied with the difference the reservoirs made.

I was also curious as to what was going on in there.  When I emptied the pots in the autumn, I found the roots had grown right into the reservoir and formed a thirsty mass.  They also grew down around the pots underneath, carrying soil with them and utilizing the entire depth of the pot.At the end of the season, you may be left with a root bound mass which appears to have devoured all available soil.  Some pots will have virtually untouched soil in the bottom.  I may reuse this in my pots the next season, or amend my beds with it. 

 The roots masses I generally throw into the compost pile.  The soil which appears used up, I dump into my raised beds.  The high percentage of peat and compost serve to lighten the dirt that I filled the beds with to begin with.  There will always be a “dead” spot somewhere in your beds you think could use a little help.  I dump the used soil there and cover with a thick layer of compost so it will be ready to go in the spring.

The List

This time of year, it is easy to suffer from gardening burnout. There are a million things to do, and they all seem to either all need to be done at once, or done yesterday. As I spend time gardening, making my rounds of the greenhouses and garden stores and talk to fellow garden enthusiasts, a dozen good blog ideas come. And, somewhere, under the sun and dirt…they go. There just isn’t enough time! And with the beautiful summer weather we’ve had all through May, there is no excuse to put it off, and a LOT of watering to do.

My life is dominated by The List. This past weekend, it grew faster than I could cross things off as I walked around the property and noticed more things that needed to be done. Why is it that a half dozen 15 minute projects take 3 hours to complete? A) travel time. B) collateral projects. Tim had his own projects, finishing up the side yard where the trees were cut, and staging supplies for the next project… a compost “bin”. We were both soon over heated, over sunned and filthy. But, we did manage several hours of relaxing on the porch. So, in this blog, I’m just going to share my List with you.

First, there is the Shopping List. This contains all the supplies I will need, as well as all the Annuals and occasionally Perennials for replacement. I frequent 4 greenhouses, and if time allows, manage two more. Each one has its own speciality, and I make sub lists of The List to try to keep return trips to a minimum. Even so, I will stop at least twice at each one. For one thing, this stuff won’t all fit in the trunk of my car. Heck, it won’t all fit in the bed of the truck!

Annuals

28 Geraniums
16 Marigolds
2 Packs Wave Petunias
3 Packs Petunias
12 Sweet Alysum
8 Sweet Potato Vines
4 Calibrocha/Petunia baskets
10 of something (?) to go under split rail fence

Vegetables (Because I didn’t start any in the house this year)

3 Tomatoes
8 Sweet Peppers
4 Eggplants

Supplies

1 Peat Moss (Large)
1 Vermiculite/Perlite
1 Greensand
1 Iron Phosphate (Sluggo)
1 Diatomaceous Earth (In case they don’t eat the Sluggo)
1 Neptune Fertilizer
2 Epsom Salts



And then the To Do List. Each morning this starts with

1. Water

2. Thin Lettuce. The lettuce is growing exceptionally well, and this year I am going to thin it. I pick 1 or 2 big bouquets of lettuce babies, and cut the roots off. Then I rinse them, shake them off, and put them in a Ziploc bag for latter on.

Plant Geraniums
Plant Marigolds
Plant both whiskey barrels
Grow Through supports on Black Eyed Susans (other perennials have already been done)
Stem Supports on Irises
Trim back Tulips
Cut flowers off Rhubarb (AGAIN!)
Re-hill potatoes (Growing fast)
Take bricks back to pile
Weed strawberries
Add compost to north end of bed #1
Plant Cukes and Zukes
Pot up azalea bush (the myrtle is drowning it)
Mix Soil (involves laborious sifting of compost)
Plant combination pots
Hang shades in garden shed
Cut shade cloth for cold frame
Wash the garden shed doors
Find a home for unwanted perennials (sitting in pots against the house)
Scotchguard Porch Cushions


I only got four and a half of these things done, between all the watering and thinning! And weeding! If I had a nickel for every ash seedling I’ve pulled in the past month, I could take you all out for dinner.

One trunk load of Geraniums

Tonight's harvest meal: Fresh salad with baby radishes

It's hard to chose a photo of the garden because by the time I get around to blogging, it has changed so much that the photo looks pitiful!

Tim's tree project.  Nine blue spruce.  Our excavator is pleased and says he knows in 20 years Tim will cut them down and he will get to haul off the stumps and bring top dirt.  He says it's Job Security.

It just seems at this time of year, before it all gets established, it is a big burden to keep it all alive.  There are seedlings to harden off, things to fertilise, and water water everywhere.  Water the trees, water the tiger lillies we moved, water the pots, water the newly planted geraniums.  When you've spent all this money, effort and TIME, you worry about water all the time!  I just need a few raining days, or at least some seasonable weather instead of record breaking temperatures to catch my breath.

Growing up in a Greenhouse

In May my favorite activity is visiting every greenhouse for a 20 mile radius. And my favorite color is green. Why? Well because I grew up in a greenhouse! Literally.

My parents met at the University of Kentucky. They both emerged with degrees in Horticulture (you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think) , and within a couple of years, had returned to my mother's home town to buy the Busti Greenhouses. For about 5 years we actually lived IN the greenhouse. Our little 2 bedroom house was attached to the end of the two original greenhouses.

When we arrived, the greenhouses still had their original glass panes. The roofs were soon replaced with plastic because having loose glass panes falling on your plants and customers is rather inconvenient. But the greenhouses retained their vintage charm. I remember a concrete slab near the end of one house had a date in the 1920s scratched into it.

The center of our home was the Sales Room. Mom cozied up the sales bench by stapling bright plastic picnic table clothes over it. I would sit on the counter for hours blowing bubbles, sniffing flowers, and examining the bright pictures on the seed packs and boxes.

As I grew up I advanced to stapling boxes and punching the sales numbers into the old cash register. My family sold out when I was a teenager, but I returned during college to work in the summers. Memorial Day Weekend was our big sales time, but the two or three weeks leading up to it were utter mayhem as well. My mother planted hundreds of combination pots that were set out in the cemeteries on "Decoration Day". And, if the normal mayhem was insufficient, Mom would invite the radio station in for a remote broadcast, put on a pot of Marigold Chowder and dye her thumb green.

The existing, more contemporary, outlying greenhouses were inefficient, so one of the first things Dad did was tear them down and replace them with modern hoop houses or "Quansuts". We referred to them as "The Tomato House", "The Petunia House", "The Marigold House" and "The Pansy House" based on what dominated their contents.

I remember watching them scrape the ground level with the plow on our Allis Chalmers Model B, and I spent a lot of time with my own tiny tools digging in the mud.

I was three years old.

I spent my formative years playing in dirt. My inherited Marx farmsets were set up on the dirt and the animals grazed on freshly plowed fields full of perlite and peat moss. Each spring my Dad would "make dirt" which involved mixing the various contents and cooking the resulting potting mix to sterilize it. I still love the smell of warm dirt. Any dirt bin or wheelbarrow full of the stuff was my playpen.

This was the view out of the picture window in our dining room, hundreds of geraniums grown from cuttings. We grew almost everything we sold. We didn't ship it in from large wholesale growers. Everything was started in the warm and steamy seed room. My mother still has the weathered doors from the seed room hanging on her wall as rustic art. All the planting dates and amounts were entered in a grimy ledger.

My little sister got a chance to grow up in the greenhouse too. Mom put her out of harms way in her own "hanging basket".

My Dad shows Holly how to transplant Wizard Mix Coleus.

Greenhousing runs in my family. My father's father took a summer hobby (he was a shop and math teacher) and turned it into a full time job during his retirement. Above are PaPaw's Barlow Greenhouses in Shelbyville, KY. They are now gone, and Fletcher Lane runs to their west in honor of my MaMaw Mary Fletcher Hodges Barlow.

The inside of Barlow Greenhouses. In my eye, these modern houses were never as charming or esthetically pleasing as Busti's vintage houses.

THE actual honest to goodness original Rototiller™.

Much like all facial tissues are not Kleenex, and not all adhesive bandages are Band-Aids... Not all rotary tillers are Rototillers. PaPaw is tilling the soil inside the newly constructed tomato house. The dirt in Kentucky smells completely different from the dirt in New York.

Each spring I anxiously await the opening of the greenhouses. I walk methodically through each one looking for old friends and new varieties. Both the Busti Greenhouses and the Barlow Greenhouses have been flattened to the ground and erased, but their legacy lives on.

PaPaw and I in the geranium house. Dad is back in the upper left corner. Look at those clay pots and peat pots! How Retro!

Hey Mom, how come you're not in any of these pictures? Probably the same reason I'm not in any of my gardening pictures!