Wednesday, July 05, 2006

The Old Man is Snoring...

...as in, "It's raining, it's pouring" etc.

Actually, it's rained on and off for the past two days. July Fourth BBQs be damned. I (and that black snakeroot I just planted) couldn't be happier.



Hubby and I had pizza last night and watched Mother Nature's fireworks: a full-fledged supercell thunderstorm to our north around 9:45, while somebody's lame holiday display fizzled out to the south.

Speaking of the snakeroot, my order from Garden Crossings arrived in absolutely outstanding shape. Huge, huge plants. And who knew Ligularia was so cool? I sure didn't. Mine came out of the box a full 1-1/2 ft. tall. It too is loving all this rain.

Also included in my order was Echinacea 'Hope', a new pale pink coneflower cultivar developed to honor breast cancer survivors. What's nice is that a portion of all proceeds from Garden Crossings' suppliers has been donated to the Susan G. Komen Foundation for each plant sold.

I left a review on Garden Watchdog if anyone's interested. Somebody just left a bad review for GC, though, which is a shame. My experience with them has been exceptional.

2 comments:

Jenn said...

Looks like Garden Crossings is at Michigan Bulbs old mailing address... and Michigan Bulb has moved to Indiana.

You can get good product and service from this mass mailers, but you have to order early, and then be home when your plants get there (or have them delivered to your work so you can open the packaging right away.)

I ordered from Kelly Nurseries this year (another company that can be terrible to deal with) and all the plants I ordered are doing fine. But.

If I had not been home at delivery, I would have come home to mush instead of fushcias - they were shipped in a plastic baggie, in a plastic shipping envelope - no boxes or much in the way of protection at all - just a single piece of cardboard wrapped around the plastic baggie like a belt. All of this was shoved into my curbside mailbox - not even delivered to my door, although the delivery was by DHL. I was annoyed, but saved the plants by getting them (bare root) into soil right away.

So mileage varies greatly.

I'm glad you had a successful transaction, too. One can only hope that they are trying harder to bring the standard up!

lisa said...

Thanks for the link to the coneflower and the nursery where you got it, as well as the garden watchdog site! I am always willing to try new nurseries, so I think I'll check them out next spring!