"Where have all the PNWers gone"

Hi everyone! It's been a few days and I'm feeling much better-thanks for the well wishes! :)

Otherwise, I'm hopelessly behind on everything, although I've been lurking. The disapproving rabbits were great, though! :)

Rachel, your bunnies are adorable-give them a pet for me. Maybe someday I'll get a bunny. I'm not prepared for one right now. Everyone's dogs look like good furry friends. I guess I'm in the minority here, in a cat-only home.

Somewhere I saw Pixy mention that her Territorial seed catalog had arrived, and that finally got me out of my nasty sweats and dressed so I could go check the mail! I got a surprise catalog from select seeds-anyone ordered from them?

Carla, yep, that's a very cute haircut! :) I envy your knowing how to change your hair so it looks great.


This message was edited Jan 4, 2008 6:20 PM

I have ordered from them before. I think they were fine. If anyone likes wildflowers prariemoon nursery has huge huge packets of seeds that were great. I also like JL Hudson. It all depends on what your looking for. Heidi and Dragonfly

Susy - I order from select Seeds - no problems. Territorial is one of my faves for vegies, and then there is Annies &...off I go to check the mail!

, I like Territorial as well - glad to hear everyone is collecting their catalogs.... this time of year sends me into serious plant lust!

My dh had his second interview today down in Santa Clara.. they told him they'd be giving him an offer as well - I guess I will be a California girl (sigh) ..... guess I better break out those Garden Design magazines I've been getting for the last year or so.

We'll be here thru spring at least (I;m going to rip out some of those darn bulbs I planted!!!!! jeez!)

Hi Susybell,

Hi from another cats only home!

Just in the process of getting a stray neutered and taken to the no-kill shelter right now. The inn is full.

RTP - if you move to the Bay area, where do you plan on living?
A curiousity, as I lived there a very long time ago (Cupertino, Los Gatos, SF).

well, we are heavily weighing the options.... thankfully DH is ok with a longer commute so we are looking at Dublin or Livermore (hello vineyards!) so the kids will be in good schools and we can have a decent house... the cost in Santa Clara is really nutso-crazy for icky house + no land. He knows I will go into a serious depression if I can't dig in the dirt, I'm ok with no landscaping, bring it on!

But, we wont move until summer, have to sell our house and all - but I'll always be an Oregon girl at heart.

Essential - are you going to the shelter in Sherwood?

Heidi- Your tempting us with those seedlings aren't you! It's working! When would be a good time for us to have a fieldtrip to see you? March, April, or May? I'm thinking it should be on a Saturday so that more of us can come. Thoughts?

RTP- We will miss you! You will always be PNW gardener to us!

OOH, Santa Clara! The weather will be perfect! You'll be able to grow such wonderful things! And all that sunshine!

I've ordered from Select Seeds and found them to be good. Wish they had a little more specific germination info, though. JLHudson is great, but sometimes things don't look like they are supposed to. However, he has really interesting and different stuff, which I am into.

Rachel got me turned on to vegetable gardening and now I'm perusing the veggie seeds. Geez! They all look so good! And there are so many different varieties now that were unavailable the last time I grew vegetables, which was way too long ago. I fear an entire new episode is about to begin. I already have plans for a long, rectangular raised planter to be placed by the back door so I can take advantage of the banked heat in the concrete and the wall of the house, as well as full sun. That's for the tomatoes.

Look at this . . .

http://www.gardeners.com/Living-Wall-Outdoor/default/37-001RS.prd

http://www.gardeners.com/Living-Wall-Indoor/default/StandardCatalog.DecorativePlanters_Cat.37-085RS.cpd

http://photos.gardeners.com/thumbnails.php?album=179

They look "buildable". I'd like to do several varieties of lettuce . . .

Pixy- You will love growing veggies again! There is nothing better than stepping out the back door and "shopping" for dinner! I am adding to my raised veggie beds this year, need more room! I currently have six 4x4 beds that my dad and I made last year from some 1 x 12 douglas fir fence boards that I got for free.

When I was at Watson's the other day I got six boxwood in gallon pots for 1.50 each. Going to go more for the potager look this year!

Those are cool Katie! I bet you could build them yourself!

Hey gang,
I was reading one of today's DG articles about snowberries (I love them!) Here is an interesting little tidbit: The western snowberry does have a bit of interesting history. Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, catalogued it in 1804 and even recognized it as a honeysuckle relative. Seeds were saved and sent to Philadelphia to a horticulturist named Bernard McMahon. In 1812, McMahon sent cuttings to Thomas Jefferson, who planted them in his garden. The cuttings thrived at Monticello and Jefferson wrote back to McMahon in October that they had "some of the most beautiful berries I have ever seen." The following year, Jefferson forwarded cuttings to a friend in Paris. So snowberry bushes travelled half-way 'round the world on the basis of the pretty berries. Never knew our berries where so famous did ya, I sure didn't!

I don't know snowberries! Latin name?

Katie, the idea of the wall sculptures is wonderful - lettuce does need quite a bit of moisture, will these hold that - and remember, a lettuce is for eating - you're going to have bald, but yummy memory, places.

Good to hear Select Seeds is a "good'un". I hope I get Annie's this year-maybe I'd better make sure I'm on the list. ;) I haven't gotten my Territorial seed one yet.

Hi EP, how're you doing? Nice to know I've got good company in the kitty department. :) Wish I could take another kitty right now, but I've got three that aren't getting along as well as they should and one of them isn't in the best of health. I'm thinking about trying Feliway and some of the homepathic things mentioned on another thread.

RTP, you can be an honorary PNW-er, especially if you let us all visit you in January or November when it's dark and icky here, lol! Seriously, what a wonderful adventure, and great place to get to live in and explore! Go north, and you're in Napa, St Helen's, and Sonoma (Sonoma is my favorite), out to Pt Reyes on the ocean, south along the coast down to Santa Cruz, Monterey, Big Sur, Carmel. Long half-day to LA, east to Yosemite, southeast to Death Valley (imagine getting to see it bloom!) , north to the Redwoods-what great trips you can take with your kids to some of the most interesting places in the country! You definitely need to get down there to see for yourself where you want to live. Make sure his offer covers at least one trip for YOU to go down and go house-hunting. It's so important to see it in person-the internet is just not the same-there's no context to the houses and neighborhoods that way.

Kathy, those boxes look neat. Following on Laurie's thoughts...Wonder if you could make them modular if you made them yourself, so you could replace an empty one with either an arty design or a new plant ready for round #2, or #3.

Laurie- Symphoricarpos
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/164348/

I purchased a Symphoricarpos that has pink berries - they look like large pastel pink pearls. The Bees adore this shrub - they were all over it daily, and it flowered prolifically over a long period of time. There is a white snowberry growing wild out front - I did not plant it - i think the birds helped me with that one!

Katie - I saw the gardener's catalog & figured if i bought one, I could duplicate it pretty easily. I was thinking of a combination of annual vines with some long-flowering perennials. It would be fun to try...I have a Mark 5 woodworking machine that needs to be tested... =:0)

Do you know if the wild snowberry adapts well to being "captured"? There's a field not too far from me that I think has lots of baby ones (need to get a closer look to see what exactly it is, though). The lot is slated to be developed, so I was thinking that maybe I could try bringing one or two home.

Sounds like fun Katye. Post pics of your progress with the project!

Good idea Susy! I brought some with me from the "farm" when we moved a few years ago and they are doing great. They really are pretty tough. You could bring some to the Green Elephant too :0)

I was thinking along the same lines about the hanging boxes - fun to see what scraps you could pull together to create one yourself. There's a reservoir for watering at the top and a reservoir to capture water on the bottom. I haven't yet figured out how the water gets to each of the individual plants . . . Kate, might be a fun project for us - a glass of wine, a little woodworking - oops, not a good way to keep all your fingers. LOL.

So much potential - and a good way to keep the plants safe from critters . . . imagine a shade box with moss and ferns, little cyclamen and miniature lady's mantle poked in here and there . . .

Love the history about the snowberry, Rach. Thanks.

RTP, don't be a stranger when you go - keep us updated on the goings on there. Suzy's right - so much to see.

Susy - dig them up - they're tough puppies! they'll do fine & there will most likely be folks who want some natives.

yowza - everyone's up! how'e the wind there? Sounds like my windows are gonna give way every other gust!

Katie - wine & wood. Sounds like a great way to invest time. I will check on ordering one.

Susy - if yer diggin', I would LOVE a native snowberry . . .

Kate - I can just see us getting into trouble. Wheeeeee

It's been windy here all day. Got really bad around 5 p.m. then calmed for a little while and now it's ripping again. Have the generator gased up and ready to go! And it's raining sideways. I can hear it pounding on my garden window.

Now Kat's you have to cut before the wine is poured. Not the other way around!

Cut? Why cut when you can lift a glass in appreciation of it growing. Oh, that's right. the point was to make something. besides trouble!

Nooo you two make trouble, I can't beleive that, hah!

Maybe we can work (and drink) in shifts.

It's windy here, too. One minutes I can hear the rain going and the trees moving and the next there's nothing.

We haven't lost power since the December storm last year. Puget Power made some great changes to whatever was ailing us in Duvall. I'm grateful . . . but I still have candles and flashlights at the ready. No generator for me, yet. Boohoo.

Ok, I'll check out the snowberry situation tomorrow.

Kewl . . . I really love the idea of true native "survivors".

wow ! you ladies were chatting late last night! Love the "living wall" - I'm going to have to give that a try, the pictures in your third link are amazing.

thanks for not kicking me out ! We are getting excited about moving. I will definitely go down myself to check things out.

The rain woke me up @ 5 this morning , it is really pouring. I'm going to be yawning all day.....

Thanks Rach, that's a lovely looking shrub - I'm going to have to locate that for the wild garden. On my list. Are the berries edible?

Hi Rachel and all. I would say the best time for you to come would be towards the end of April. Most of my plants sit out all winter so they come out of dormancy with the rest of the plants. Then I ordered some really cool plants from California sothose won't be here till April. I will post my cool new plants on the website when I get to it. My friend Ian who owns desertsnorthwest nursery is a young computer whiz and is going to help me label plants. Wow won't that be nice. I will let you know when my plants are on the web and if you want me to save anything till you come that would be great. Some I only have a few of. What a rainy cruddy day. Heidi and Dragonfly

Hi Tootsiepop,

Yes, we are taking him to C.A.T.

We have an appointment for him to be neutered and they will take him in the same day.

Heidi- Looking forward to it! Can hardly it to see the new stuff too!

Just checking in and saw the 'living walls'. I love them! They are perfect for growing lettuce and many other things. I could see a patchwork of heucheras. what a cool idea. I have the gardener's supply catalog, but don't remember seeing those. I'll have to look again.

In case this wasn't posted, snowberry reproduces by runners, which makes it very easy to move.

EP - how's your feral doing? Is C.A.T. a spay/neuter clinic for ferals? We have one up here and I don't know what I would have done without it. They have spayed and neutered 37,500 cats since 1997.

I checked out the snowberry, and there are loads of them in a field which is right next to a park where they've planted-and are cultivating-snowberry (and salal, and kinnikinnick, etc). So, not being a pro at harvesting from the wild, I'm trying to decide how to do this so I don't look like I'm stealing plants from the park. If they propagate by runners, does that mean their roots are shallow? That would be so much easier!

Hi Katie,

C.A.T. (Cat Adoption Team) is a great no-kill shelter. They often take on cats that other shelters would have euthanized because they are hard to adopt, and they never euthanize unless it is medically necessary. So after the neuter, Charlie will enter the shelter for adoption.

This boy is a sweetie, not a feral at all, but a roaming intact male that showed up on our doorstep one day clearly needing care and attention. If we did not already have a full house of 9, we would adopt him in a heartbeat, but we are at (actually beyond) our limit at this point. If only people would spay and neuter... such untold misery could be prevented.