Winter is almost over- it never was really even here.

Sign by road- we are coming back, promise!

Monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico. We overwinter away from the nursery. Turns out EVERY TIME you buy avocados from Stop and Shop, Trader Joe’s, and BIG Y, you are creating demand that results DIRECTLY in the extermination of monarch butterflies in Mexico. Limes too. Check out the blog in my ENVIRONMENT section of this website. None of those companies claimed to know (BULLSHIT) anything about it.

Maybe the days of playing hockey on our beautiful pond are over, with global warming giving our planet the warmest winter temps EVER in Antarctica and Europe. Warmest January on record. We are DOOMED.

Winter flowering native witch hazel flowering on time!

Arnold’s promise witch hazel flowering yesterday- a reliable friend indeed.

Parasol-shaped canopy develops slowly on witch hazel, topping out at ~12’

We screen our own topsoil. It’s covered so that in the spring it’s soft and fluffy and ready for you to spread easily. Zero rocks. That piece of plastic cost us $550- we spare no expense in order to sell the very best to you. I call our topsoil “homeowner soil,” because it’s so easy to shovel around. Perfect pH of 7.0.

Hoopsi blue spruce USED to be my favorite evergreen tree. Not anymore. The “needle cast” fungus that used to be a rarity is now commonplace for some reason. These unsaleable trees used to sell for $800 and up. They are worthless now.

Bald cypress (taxodium disticum) on the other side of the pond. Native from Florida to Maine. Thrives in swamps and desert-like crappy soils. It’s the OLDEST living native tree on the east coast living over 3,000 years. Second longest living tree is nyssa sylvatica at ~700 years, a fact discovered just last summer in the swamps of eastern North Carolina. I planted this tree in 1985 from a two gallon pot. It’s beautiful in the fall when it turns rusty-red and reflects off the dark water of our pond early in the autumnal mornings.

Dawn redwood (metasequoia glyptostroboides) I planted the very same day. They grow twice as fast as bald cypress and beautiful yet just not as beautiful as bald cypress in the fall.

Avondale redbud flower buds getting ready to flower in April. There is no tree that flowers more profusely than Avondale redbud.

Food applied on all our evergreen trees in December. Trees need food in the winter too- otherwise, they turn yellowish-green and are hard if not impossible to sell in the spring.

Winter gives us (me) time to surf in winter.

Incredible bamboo, yellow all year, takes on a classic brown look all winter.

Plants inside our hoop house sleeping till spring.