My Bluestone catalog arrived back before Christmas. With their new pricing, I'll be even more picky with what I decide to buy this year. Even at the higher prices there are one or two colorful, eye-popping things I'd like to add to my beds. I pre-ordered plants from Santa Rosa Gardens based on a 35% off promotion I received via e-mail. They'll ship the plants to arrive April 23. Their plants + customer service + packing/shipping method are amazing. I ordered seeds from Hazzard's on New Year's Eve hoping for free shipping but they didn't offer it this year. Still mulling over my order form for seeds from Diane's. I just tore up and threw away some lists from last year's seed orders!! Decided to clean up my desk and came across several old lists. The seeds on them have already been winter sowed and many were planted out months ago which probably gives you a visual of what my desk looked like! Sorry its not the best pic of the garden at its peak, its a work in progress. lilyfinch - what an enchanting flowerbed!! I don't know any garden that isn't a work in progress! I'm growing C. 'The President' which blooms in late May with huge, gorgeous deep violet-blue flowers. It would be stunning against the white fence. You might also like Vino and Miss Bateman. Nelly Moser is a pretty pink & white one if I remember my clems. I bought most of mine bare-root from a warehouse store but they're growing and blooming. White Flower Farm is within easy driving distance but I don't waste gas to go there to buy plants based on their catalog prices. Several nurseries closer to me feature their plants for sale and the prices are astronomical. In all fairness, the cost of doing business in Connecticut isn't overly friendly toward small business. The fact remains they're not competitive with many other reliable mail order nurseries. The catalog is informational at best for most average-income gardeners. Swallowtail Gardens has quite an extensive seed list of annuals, perennials & vegetables with good information about growing habits. I've only ordered a few seed types from them but germination rates were good on all.

Since I already have Sigourney (given to me as a seedling), I ordered 4. Oh, how I wish I had enough money and space to get both collections! I got Kona Coast, The Thin Air, and two I have been watching since their maiden bloom in Curt's seedlings fields... Mother Upduff and Paradise Bar and Grill. I think P.Bar&G is much prettier than the photo he used in the catalog. Sort of a Jerry Hyatt with intense magenta eye. I had such a difficult time deciding which ones to get. I have a seedling out of Rock Lobster that looks somewhat similar to Mother Upduff. I have been crossing it to big spiders, like Bali Watercolor. I think there is a lot of potential in what we can get from crossing these intensely pinched things to spideries. Sigourney is SO different. It intensely pinches all the time, and has the most unusual throat. Not easily fertile, but does pass it's odd throat on to it's kids. I have always loved the unusual stuff. Walking Curt's seedling fields is quite an experience. From mini's to 6 feet tall, unreal patterns, and forms. He is really working on this new thing he calls frosting or fractilized edges. Kirlian Photography is the latest intro with this. One of it's parents, Photon Torpedo has given me the MOST unusual things! By far my favorite parent to date. I've never been a fan of the look that is so popular now - the big edges, the wide petals...things like ruby reds with huge yellow chicken fat... blech! But give me one of Curt's "out there" things and I am a happy camper. I also got Piece of my Heart last year, and can't wait to see it blooming here! I'm waiting for Illusive Phase Shifter to increase enough to get a piece of it. If you like the frosty, fractal edges, an older one, Masked Emotions, and also Touch of Faust are very nice, and not as expensive as these newer ones. okbt, you mentioned "Film Noir"... I have grown both parents for years. Through Dark Waters is one of my all time favorite purples. Terrific performer here - even though its in the perennial border and not in the daylily beds, so it doesn't have the best soil or conditions. I really wanted to order Unpredictable You - but last fall I got his Fad Gadget. They are half sibs and remind me a lot of each other, but Unpredictable You does tend to be a bit more..... unpredictable... in form. LOL. I am not one for having a flower look the same each day. I much prefer one that's going to show me a different face depending on what point in the bloom cycle it is, or the weather conditions. Since I try to keep my cultivars under 100 due to health reasons, having flowers that don't look the same each day makes each morning I go look at them a gift of wonder. In response to why he does not list bud counts - it's because so much depends on weather, watering and the gardener's soil condition. I know I have many daylilies that one year will have bud count of 10 and the next 35. I use very little fertilizer, and being on a well, only water when I absolutely have to. Curt grows in very highly organic soil, and has a huge pond that he waters out of. His plants almost always have better branching and bud count than when I grow them here. I do find that his plants over all are tough as nails though, considering that I treat them like garden perennials and not pampered babies.

nice nice chicks...looks like hundreds...:) I "inherited" a large grocery box of hens and chicks this year.....Funny story actually. We had a family picnic and after the last car left, which happened to be my daughters, my cell phone rang. I went to answer it, and she said, mom...in the middle of your front lawn there is a large box of hens and chicks...do you know how it go there? I said nope..are you sure? Doubting her eyesight a bit, after all, how would they get in my yard during a party? I went out and looked and sure enough..a large box of nice sized hens and chicks...I sure wondered....it was not where anyone parked...smack in the middle of the front lawn....I waited a week, kept them moist, no one claimed them so I said ok..they are mine...still wondering how they got there....did I have some mystery drop from a fellow garden admirer? Was it like dumping kittens or puppies near a farm? My curiousity was peaked. But I planted them anyway..and about two weeks later, mystery solved. My other daughter recalled overhearing a conversation from my mom to another sister that she had a box in her car of hens and chicks for her. I laughed, thinking of the hens and chicks roosting in my garden now that should of been in hers. I am guessing mom set them down on her way to the house with her hands full and forgot about them.....finders keepers...sis will have to get her own now.. :) Anyway..nice chicks and nice urn too. I have two...resin (which I would not buy again, fell apart in two years) I have Mandella vine in.

Pam, To request a Willhite catalog, just go to the homepage. At the right is an image of their catalog cover. It has a little girl holding a slice of watermelon. Above that is a banner that says something like Request A Free Copy of Our Catalog. If you click on that banner, it takes you to the catalog request page. What kind of melons do you want to grow? Big ones or little icebox sized ones? Let me know, and I'll suggest some varieties. As with pretty much everything else in gardening, there are some melons that the commercial growers don't grow because the rind is thin, making them poor candidates for shipping. Sometimes market growers will grow them if they are not having to transport them too far to their local Farmer's Markets. Home gardeners can grow those. I used to grow big melons, but with a small family, I tend to grow just the little small melons nowadays. My personal opinion is that a fresh-from-the-garden melon always tastes sweeter to me than store-bought melons. It isn't necessarily that the melons at the store are bad, it is just that the melons from home are better. I also like to have melons available in a variety of colors, so when growing our own, I'll usually grow melons that have yellow, orange, pink and/or red flesh. I like having the variety of different colors. I have a certain degree of concern about your high hurricane risk there. The worst thing in the world for watermelons (next to the coyotes who like to steal them!) is excessively heavy rainfall. It can make them crack and split and rot before they are ripe enough to eat. So, if it is more or less inevitable that you're going to get hit by torrential rainfall at some point during melon-growing season, you need to evaluate that risk and decide if you want to take the chance and devote space to melons. Even when torrential rainfall doesn't make melons crack and split, it can just kill their flavor by watering it down. Since my torrential rainfall is pretty much limited to any month prior to July (usually it falls in April and May, and only rarely in June), I normally don't have heavy rainfall at the time of year that it would harm the melons. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Willhite Seed Home Page