Plant Sales

I really hope you’re not getting tired of all of the plant related posts and pictures.  I’m justifying them by telling myself that most of you who read, or at least comment, regularly live in different regions, countries, or even continents, so hopefully I’m not showing you pictures of what you’re currently seeing in your own backyards.  It’s also my favorite time of year, and I get so excited over the plants and flowers.  This winter seems to have been particularly harsh and long, so I’m even more enthusiastic about plants and flowers than usual.

The local community college has a plant sale every year.  The horticulture program does it.  The plants are things the students have grown, and the money goes back into the horticulture program.  It’s one of the first places GrandMommy took me when she was cultivating my love of gardening.  I’ve gone every year since then (even though the first year going without her was really hard), and it’s something I look forward to every year.  They seem to have mostly vegetables, and the prices are better than the stores here, so it’s a great way to get the vegetable garden started every year.  The sale runs Thursday - Saturday, so I arranged to take a half day off of work yesterday so I could go plant shopping.

We’re changing things up a little bit with our garden this year; we’re scaling way back on the number of tomatoes we plant (we just don’t eat enough of them to justify the number I usually plant), we’re going to try growing corn this year (though it’s still early to plant it), we’re adding a few cucumber plants, and we’re trying a few eggplant plants.  We tried planting eggplant seeds last year, and absolutely nothing sprouted.  We think that’s probably because a certain three legged dog has a habit of rolling and digging in the raised beds, not because our yard isn’t eggplant friendly.  So we’re trying plants rather than seeds, in hopes that Duke won’t destroy those like we think he did the seeds.  We’re also sticking with planting kale, squash, and zucchini, from seeds.  We’ve had good results from that, and aren’t about to mess with a good thing.  The kale seeds are planted.  The squash and zucchini seeds with be planted either this weekend or next weekend.

So I had a pretty specific list when I went to the plant sale yesterday, which was good because I have a tendency to buy anything that looks interesting when it comes to plants.  Here’s what I bought: seedless cucumbers, a type of heirloom slicing tomatoes, eggplant, purple peppers (not on the list, but we like peppers, so I’ll find a spot for them), and two kinds of flowers (pink vincas and a lavender petunia).  I’m hoping the cucumbers do well because I really like the seedless ones, so it would be nice to grow our own.  Of course I’m interested to see how the eggplant does so we’ll know if we were right to blame Duke for last year’s eggplant failure.  I’m really excited about the purple peppers, just to have something a little different.  I’ve finally determined that when it comes to eating raw tomatoes I definitely prefer the heirloom/slicing variety.  I’m actually not a huge fan of Roma or cherry varieties.  Nick doesn’t have a preference other than not grape/cherry, so heirloom it is.

We also needed more garden soil, so we went to Lowe’s last night and bought several bags while we were there.  I had to look at the flowers, which leads to me buying flowers about 99.99 percent of the time.  We bought marigolds, yellow snapdragons, pink petunias, and these purple and yellow violas.  The violas were on the sale rack, even though they looked great to me.  I always check the sale rack. Sometimes the things on it clearly need a lot of attention, and I don’t buy those because I don’t have the skill set to nurse them back to health.  Sometimes, though, they seem to be on the sale rack just because the store may have a lot of them, and I’m delighted to buy those.  I’ve planted violas before, and they came back a second year, so I’m hoping these will too.  Even if they don’t I’m pretty to happy to have only spent $3.00 on flowers that were originally around $10.00.

Needless to say, we’ll be spending a large part of the weekend outside plating things, so I’ll probably have more flower pictures over the next few days.

How will you be spending your weekend?  Are you planting anything?  Have you been to any good plant sales lately?