notes and musings from a perennial gardener
A Pennsylvania gardener
These beauties never fail to lift your spirits because they bloom in late winter and earliest spring, when everything else is blah and gray. While heavy snows can knock them flat, most still manage to rouse themselves and thrust their fat buds determinedly into the frigid air. As soon as things begin to thaw, the flowers open, sometimes with snow still on the ground.
As the new year begins, piles of garden catalogs stuffed with all manner of flowers, veggies, seeds and bulbs start deluging our mailboxes. Those glossy photos look so tempting as we flip the pages and sip our tea. Whether we’re in a buying mood or not, it’s exciting to peruse new varieties and ponder others we still haven’t gotten around to acquiring but keep thinking about.
So you circle one here, dog-ear a page there… Finally you decide to commit your choices to the order form and hit send.
Or maybe not.
Maybe you just don’t trust mail order. Or you had a bad experience years ago and swore Never again. But mail ordering living plant material has come a long way. Let me lay out the pros and cons of gardening by mail.
With so many designs and styles to choose from these days, buying (or building) a bird feeder can be a bewildering experience. Should you get a “squirrel-proof” one with a wire that birds have to navigate? Will a simple tube feeder do? How much seed will that cute little plastic number hold?
Then there’s all those bags of food to put in the feeder. What’s in all those mixes, anyway? Are all those suet cake flavors necessary?