I'll let you in on a little joke. Local TV news (or even big bad national TV and print news) is nothing but a string of cliches. One of my personal favorites is referring to Memorial Day and its 3-day holiday weekend as the "Unofficial Start to Summer". Some Yankee must have dreamed that one up, because in all of the places I've lived, summer unofficially starts about a month before Memorial Day.
Petals from the Past. Pictures from their Facebook page.
So Nonna unofficially kicked off summer at beautiful Lake Martin, Alabama. The water is warm, the sun is hot, and the rain seems to be nowhere to be found. I took a little adventure with my green thumb father-in-law to Petals from the Past in Jemison, Alabama. It's just off I-65, and I've wanted to stop in for a while, but we've always been in too big of a hurry or driving by when they were closed.
I was thoroughly impressed. PFTP bills itself as a place that "specializes in antique roses, heirloom shrubs and hard to find perennial flowers and herbs." It's fair to say they do that and more. In addition to having a really unique selection of plants (including a lot of tempting items that wouldn't work as far north as Franklin), they have a significant amount of fruit production on site starting with blackberries right now and running through the end of the year with kumquats. They were already picking blackberries, and I picked up a pint. The very nice lady at the checkout said they were BOGO, so I ended up with 2 pints. Seeing how early it is in the season, I'm not sure if they were really BOGO or if she was just giving me the "y'all come back now, ya hear" special...
A dog wearing sunglasses. Sadly, I only saw the garden cat and not this very good boy.
On top of all of this, they do a lot of great educational events. Check out their events page and their Facebook page. And here are a couple of snaps I added to my Instagram from the adventure.
It was a fun trip, but my annuals were hurting for water when we finally made it back. Hopefully I got to them in time. Since the last blog, I harvested all of my carrots and planted my San Marzano tomatoes. I have 2 full raised beds dedicated to paste tomatoes to make my sauce. After last year and how strongly the plants grew, I made the choice to spread them out more. They seem to have transplanted well. I even picked some suckers off of a few of them.
In other news, my cucurbits have sprouted! I have squash, zucchini, and cucumbers. Similar to the tomatoes, I'm planting my garden with intention -- more room to breathe for each plant. I think this really limited my zucchini and squash production last year. I didn't leave enough room for them to ramble, and they developed some sort of mold/rot/nastiness. Now I just need to finally dig in the last of the new raised beds and we can really get growing!
I was thoroughly impressed. PFTP bills itself as a place that "specializes in antique roses, heirloom shrubs and hard to find perennial flowers and herbs." It's fair to say they do that and more. In addition to having a really unique selection of plants (including a lot of tempting items that wouldn't work as far north as Franklin), they have a significant amount of fruit production on site starting with blackberries right now and running through the end of the year with kumquats. They were already picking blackberries, and I picked up a pint. The very nice lady at the checkout said they were BOGO, so I ended up with 2 pints. Seeing how early it is in the season, I'm not sure if they were really BOGO or if she was just giving me the "y'all come back now, ya hear" special...
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