Order plants/bulbs mail order
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Does anyone have any experience with ordering plants or bulbs on line or through mail order? I have received a few catalogs and they have some complete flower gardens sets with planting diagagrams for very resonable prices but I am wondering if what you actually receive is of very good quality??
I know Jackson and Perkins is good. I just got the white flower farm catalog and found it quite expensive. Check what kind of guarantees they offer on their plants. Is there one offer in particular you are looking at?
I have ordered from Dutch Gardens for at least 10 years and have never been disappointed. Their bulbs are always in good condition and very large - the daffodils, for example, always have two or three "horns". And their prices are very good, even compared with the local Home Depot or KMart. They are on line and if you ask for a catalog they will send one. I get two main catalogs a year from them - spring planting and fall planting - and maybe another two or three special catalogs featuring one or two specific kinds of plants. And they tell you very clearly whether the plant wants full or partial sun or shade and what climate it wants, when it blooms, height, etc.
http://www.dutchgardens.com/
I agree with Collette - which companies? I have been very disappointed with what I received from some "bargain" offers, particularly from a firm which does lots of advertising. I can't remember the name but would probably know it when I see it. And it is one of the firms that offers those "complete" gardens.
I think you are better off deciding just what you want to plant and getting the plants and/or bulbs separately for each tpe of plant. From what I've seen, those "complete garden" deals are not such a great deal. And, though I do only a minimum of gardening these days, when I was an active gardener those complete garden packages weren't what I wanted in my flower beds.
I think you are better off going to home depot for best prices and pretty good quality.
We got some and the quality wasn't good. Forget the company though. Dutch something I believe.
You can also look at those diagrams in the catalogs and make a list and go to your local nursery and buy from them.
Michigan Bulb Company is the company I had a really bad experience with (I saw one of their ads today and it brought it back to mind). The plants they sent me were very small, about half were moldy, and only about 1/4 of those that were more or less healthy actually grew. I wrote to them in complaint and was offered a gift certificate, although I had requested a refund. Why on earth would I want a gift certificate to a company which had sent me unsatisfactory merchandise in the first place?
I've heard several friends say the same thing about this company, Ginny. Their ads look so inviting, but I've steered clear.
Look around your neighborhood this Spring and Summer or drive around and look at other people's flower beds and see what you like the looks of. If you see something you like and the homeowner is outside, most homeowners are delighted to have their gardens praised and asked questions about specific plants.
If you want to do a colorful flowerbed this summer, use annuals. There are lots of really lovely petunias now, with unusual colors and color combinations, stripes, etc., low growing and higher growing. And there is the ever faithful impatiens if you don't have all bright sun all day. Both will give you lots of color all summer until frost, while you get a good idea this summer of what you want more permanently, and you can start in the early Fall with planting some perennials (they come up every year) plants and plant bulbs in the late Fall.
Whatever you do, get your soil tested. Take small samples from several spots where you want to plant, and take them to a good garden shop that does free testing, or get a test kit. Then, add what you need to make the soil the way you want it for what you want to plant. For example, azaleas like a more acidic soil, so you'd use something like Hollytone to feed them in the Spring. And most of us need to add lime to our flower beds every couple of years. If you have a soil with a lot of clay, you want to dig in gardening gypsum, which is wonderful for breaking up heavy clay soil. And you need to dig in a lot of compost. (In my community you can get free compost because the township recycles garden waste separately and composts it, but you have to go to the compost depots during the work week/day.) When you are doing this kind of adding nutrients and compost to soil, either rent a tiller from a garden shop or use a digging fork (looks like a pitchfork), and don't use a shovel.
After you plant, be sure to mulch well. A good mulch will (a) keep down the weeks and (b) help hold in the water so you don't have to water as often and your flower beds won't dry out. I prefer to use soaker hoses on my major flower bed in front of the house (they are regular hose size but made of a dense foam, and the water sort of oozes out all along the hose), rather than a sprinkler or hand sprinkling. This way I can hook up the soaker hose and walk away and forget it for a couple of hours, they use less water overall, and the water soaks directly into the ground instead of getting on the flowers and leaves.
Another way to keep weeds down in areas where you want to plant perennials is to put down a kind of "fabric" cover. This is a black tightly woven plastic. Lay it down where you intend to plant after you have added the nutrients, lime, compost and whatever, spread a layer of mulch over it (to help hold in the moisture and cut down on watering, and because it looks nicer than just the plastic), and begin planting. Just brush away the mulch and cut an X in the ground cover for each plant, spread the X, pop in the plant, and push the fabric and mulch back. You should have hardly any weeds at all. Or, just put down a heavy layer of mulch (like Licorice Root Mulch) and then put in your plants. I am a fairly lazy person and believe that "efficiency is organized laziness", so I'd rather put the mulch down first and plant through it instead of carefully spreading the mulch around each plant afterwards, trying not to damage all the little green things I have just planted so carefully.
If you have a good garden shop in your area (not a chain store, but a family owned multi-generation garden shop), spend some time there looking at plants and asking questions about what grows best in your area, in shade or sun, etc. You will get better information from this kind of store, and you don't really have to buy from them if their prices are too high. Certainly for good garden tools (and you want good ones, not the cheapest ones. Good quality tools make the work easier and they hold up better so you don't have to replace them often), Home Depot or one of the chain stores will have better prices - just be sure to buy good quality. For plants, I tend to get the cheap ones from Home Depot or Franks (like petunias or impatiens). I get the more expensive ones from my local family owned garden shop because I trust the quality and know if I have a problem I can go back and will be listened to.
Oh, and if you have really shady spot, or a tree making lots of shade where you want some color, I strongly recommend ever-blooming begonias. Here's the Dutch Gardens page which shows the kind I mean (they are not the "wax begonias" people so often plant as borders in front of their houses):
http://www.dutchgardens.com/Shopping/department.asp?DeptPGID=21092
They are very colorful, and really want almost all shade, just an hour or two of sun per day at best. What my mom did was take a very large pot - about 2 feet square and two feet high - and fill the bottom half with old pantyhose stuffed with styrofoam packing nuts, then fill the top half with planting soil and plant three or at most four of this kind of begonia, the ones with really large flowers. We had two or three of these pots under the Japanese Maple tree next to our driveway, which gives a lot of shade. Once they started blooming they bloomed all the way through to frost, providing lots of dramatic color. But you have to be careful not to over-water - they can stand the dirt getting almost completely dried out before you give them a good soaking. You can either take out the rhizomes (sort of skinny sweet potato like root things) after the first good frost, cut off all stem and green stuff, and let them dry out, keeping them in a cool but not freezing place over the winter (mom used to dust them with a sort of anti-mold powder you get at garden shops and put them in panty hose legs, tying knots to keep each one separated from the next so they wouldn't get moldy, and hang them in a cool spot in the basement) and plant them again in late Spring. Or just buy some more rhizomes the next year if you like the looks of them.
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