Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Is It Spring Yet?

Nice orchid shots (varieties unknown) throughout this posting. These were all seen up at Olbrich Botanical Gardens this past weekend. Winter is a great time to travel to your local conservatory or even garden center to get your horticultural fix. That's not to say that our winter gardens aren't interesting but the lack of flowers can be discouraging after a rough winter and extreme cold. I've seen some really neat orchid shows over the years too. Check out www.orchidguild.org/ if you'd like to see some upcoming shows in this general area or "sniff around" your area for similar events.

I've been juggling lots of projects today and bouncing between seed ordering, presentation preparation, administrative stuff, etc. It's never boring, that's for sure! Larry brought in more garbage bins from the gardens for repair and repainting while Dr. Gredler continued to paint various items "in need." Bill came in to help Larry and we saw Janice, Maury and Chuck as well. Chuck (see below to the right) has been recycling our aluminum cans over the past 8 years from the horticulture center and donates the money back to the gardens. He's not shy about soliciting cans from other venues and keeps busy year round with this activity that has brought in thousands of dollars to the gardens. He and his wife are also very active volunteers here and elsewhere. What a great contribution (and contributor!). In the coming weeks, we're also getting prepared for the Wisconsin Public Television (WPT) Garden Expo up at the Alliant Center in Madison, WI (www.wpt.org/gardenexpo/) on February 12-14. Our booth is a great way to expose the gardens to 20,000+ attendees and both Mike M. and I will be doing presentations as well. Lots of work coming up in the coming weeks and despite my blog title, I'm not ready for spring yet...not even close. Well, back to seed ordering. I'm going to feature a gardening catalog of choice in upcoming posts. The intent is not so much a promotion of one company over another, simply an indication of where I'm ordering some materials and what I think about that source. I'll start with seed sources tomorrow!

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