GoodSeed Nursery - Early Spring 2015 Newsletter

Volume 13 Issue 1

April 2015

Growing With Us

Meet Mr. Fluffy!

Would you like to replace the soil in your garden, raised beds and planters with super high-quality dark, rich, fluffy garden soil? Let “Mr. Fluffy” do the hard work of tilling and mixing for you. Mr. Fluffy is our handsome new (to us) soil mixer. His powerful Detroit Diesel engine drives a hammer mill that breaks up all the clumps, mixes in lots of air, and otherwise takes the hard work out of having perfect garden soil.

Chris worked all last fall to restore this veteran machine to peak working condition. Meanwhile, Stephen mixed various combinations of soils, planted test plots to find the best recipe, and settled on the perfect soil mix for containers and raised beds. What’s his recipe? He’ll never tell, but we can say that you won’t find a better bulk garden soil anywhere for any price.

If you have a pickup or trailer (or there’s one you can borrow), you can get perfect container mix for a fraction of what it would cost you in bags or bales. Let’s do the math: Our best bagged Professional Container Mix costs $9.99 for a 1.5 cubic foot bag. It’s better (and cheaper) than Miracle -Gro Potting Mix, but 13 bags would set you back $129.87. One scoop of Mr. Fluffy’s GoodSeed Garden Mix gives you the same amount of potting mix for only $39.99! That’s a savings of almost $90!

Don’t have a pickup available? Let us deliver GoodSeed Garden Mix right to your door. Sound too easy? Well, you still have to do the planting…

SPRING GoodSeed Nursery Hours: Monday through Friday, rain or shine ................................ 10 AM to 7 PM Saturday, rain or shine ............................................................ 9 AM to 6 PM Sunday ............................................................................................ Noon to 5PM

Maps, Directions & Schedules at www.goodseedfarm.com

Start Your Garden: Boston Ferns, Pansies Seeds, Onion Sets Topsoils and Mulch ProMix & Peat Moss

Growing With Us

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“Steve’s Soapbox:” The Next Generation I get a little choked up looking at photos like this one of Stephen, at five years old, behind our old tiller. We moved to Adams County in 1997, just after his fifth birthday, and it’s been a rollercoaster ride ever since trying to get our family business off the ground. Stephen has spent most of his life in the thick of it. Our kitchen table has been our boardroom the entire time, so he’s seen all our ups and downs up close and personal.

Those of you who made the pilgrimage out to GoodSeed Farm back when it was in Peebles are accustomed to seeing Stephen as he grew up. During the busy season his home-school classroom was Marjorie’s office in our old store barn, and he was always in the middle of things on busy weekends. In those days he managed the beverage concession and offered farm fresh eggs from his flock of Golden Comets.

As he got older he was on the tractor, helping at the checkout or loading our customer’s purchases into their cars.

I remember his presentation on bird-watching at one of our Country Garden Festivals. He worked for several days in the rain helping Charles Reed paint our quilt barn mural, a project that got nationwide attention.

Stephen never intended to have a career in the nursery business. His interests ran more to music, film and cars. He spent hours wandering the fields and woods of our farm. Working in the garden center was more an obligation than a pleasure, and he absolutely hated working on our landscape crew. It took a few years at Ohio State for him to really appreciate life in Adams County; the peace and quiet of our rural farm was tonic after life in Columbus.

We appointed him manager of our garden center out of necessity. Our new location needed someone to really dig in and pay attention to it, while Marjorie stepped back into an office role and I focused on design-build landscaping and CROSSROADS magazine. This is his first full year in the role of retail manager. I’m happy to report that he’s bringing a fresh new focus to the job, and a level of energy that Marjorie and I really appreciate. They say “a new broom sweeps clean”, and it’s true.

Stephen came home from OSU with skills that will take us to a whole new level. His soil experiments and ambitious raised bed vegetable gardens have made him the “voice of experience” our customers can tap for guidance and technical support. Look for him behind the checkout counter wearing his “Dr. Bonide” lab coat, our new “go-to guy” for plant diagnostics.

They say an apple never falls far from the tree. I’m proud to say it’s true.

NEW LOCATION, SAME PHONE NUMBER! Our phone number, 937-587-7021, has been the same for so many years we decided not to change it when we moved. It’s still the best way to get in touch.

Those of you from Adams County know that 587-7021 is a Peebles phone number, and that’s where our office and landscape division are still located. Dial 587-7021 and your call will reach us wherever we are.

Growing With Us

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Marjorie’s

Perennial Pick

Clematis Clematis needs lots of sun but wants cool, moist soil to grow in. Dig a planting hole as large as possible (two feet deep and wide is ideal). Pretend you’re planting a tree. Mix plenty of composted manure, Flower Tone and peat moss with the planting soil. Avoid burying the plant too deep.

Use groundcover plants or mulch to keep the sun off the root zone; shallow-rooted perennials like creeping phlox, hardy geranium, candytuft, or vinca vines cool the soil without competing. In dry seasons, water deeply once a week.

Clematis vines are happiest when they can climb as high as possible during their growing season. Vines can easily climb ten to fifteen feet each season, so give them as tall a structure as you possibly can. Old-fashioned chicken wire makes the best support for Clematis vines, since they can’t grasp thick branches, smooth or heavy trellises. If you use a decorative trellis, attach chicken wire to the back. Allow a few inches of ventilation space behind your trellis.

Many Clematis like a high fence or wall in full sun, but some large-flowered hybrids fade badly if they get too much sun and these should be planted in where they’ll get morning sun only or partial shade. Clematis roots should be in cool, moist, rich soil, without competition from shrub or tree roots. Roots should be well protected from damage or disturbance.

Early-flowering Clematis and large-flowered hybrids bloom in spring, from buds produced the previous season. Prune these back as soon as possible after bloom but don’t cut into the woody trunks. Prune again in February or March by removing dead and weak stems, then cut back remaining stems to the topmost pair of large, plump green buds.

Late-flowering Clematis bloom on the last two to three feet of the current season's growth. In February or March cut each stem to a height of about two to three feet, saving some good stems and buds.

Clematis plants are often sold “bare root” or in tiny pots. It’s well worth it to get larger plants with a big root system; these will perform much better much sooner.

Clematis “Nelly Moser”

PULVERIZED TOPSOIL, COMPOST, SOIL BLENDS, MULCH, SAND & GRAVEL

..for pickup or “next business day” delivery: call 937-587-7021

Growing With Us

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COMMUTER Certificate $10 Value!

We’re Open After Work!

Would you like to do your garden shopping at GoodSeed Nursery after work? We’ll keep the doors open for you! This coupon should help.

If you come to the checkout between 5 and 7 any weekday, present this certificate for $10 off any purchase over $20.

Valid until September 30, 2015. Not to be combined with any other discount or offer.

Limit one per customer.

After a hard day’s work, wouldn’t it be nice to stretch your legs in our garden center on the way home? Unwind among the flowers, daydream about beautifying your yard, and reward yourself for your hard work with some of our luscious flowers!

It’s a brand-new kind of “HAPPY HOUR”!

Stock up for your weekend gardening projects after work, on your way home, or after supper if you like. We’re open weekdays until 7PM, just so you hard-working commuters can make it to GoodSeed Nursery after work. Stop in on your way past, or send someone after supper for that load of mulch. That way you can start gardening bright and early in the morning, with everything you need.

Last-minute gift buying? Here’s another option: beautiful plants make terrific gifts! You can get that shopping errand taken care of on your way home and impress your family and friends with the gift of healthy, colorful plants!

We’re keeping extended hours through the gardening season, until it starts to get dark early. Clip this handy coupon for $10 off the first time you stop in between 5PM and 7PM, and enjoy extra savings along with more convenient gardening…

SAVE $20 OFF DELIVERY CHARGE for any bulk order (minimum 6 scoops) prepaid now through April 30th!

GIV CO E THI U S OU PON T RD ON RIV O DE LIV ER ER Y!

Garden Mix, Topsoil, Gravel or Mulch!

Growing With Us

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Enjoying Boston Ferns

BOSTON FERN HANGING BASKET SALE! Save $8 on two (Net cost $15.99 each) No Coupon Required. Sale Dates: Wednesday, April 1 through Thursday April 30, 2015

A lush display of Boston ferns hanging in a shady porch is a classic image of Victoriana, and adds a lush tropical feel to your outdoor living area. Many families have a tradition of displaying Boston Ferns in profusion every year, putting plants out as soon as danger of frost is past. Some fern devotees start even earlier, bringing plants indoors on extremely cold nights.

Boston ferns look really good indoors, and if you have a brightly lit spot for them you can grow them as houseplants.

They certainly don’t mind being indoors for a few days at a time. For longer stays you’ll need a humidifier, since Boston Ferns shrivel up and make a mess unless they have 40-50% humidity. That’s why it’s not usually practical to over -winter the plants indoors.

Indirect sunlight is ideal for Boston ferns. Too much direct sun will toast their leaves, and too little sun makes them spindly and thin. You want to keep them actively growing, since the new foliage has the most vivid green color.

Generous fertilizing and ample sunlight will keep them lush and full.

Like any hanging basket plant, you get what you pay for with Boston Ferns. Have you ever tried ours? Quality growers use more and better soil in the pot, and space the plants in the greenhouse so they get plenty of light. There is also a size difference in the starter “plugs”; bigger and healthier plugs mature into fuller fern baskets faster.

Regular feeding is important with any hanging basket.

When feeding ferns, mix liquid fertilizer at half the recommended strength. We like using Neptune’s Harvest fish emulsion on ferns. Take a bottle home with you when you pick up your Boston ferns this year.

WALL ROCK SALE! $1.49 each by the pallet $1.59 individually.

TIME TO GET THAT WALL PROJECT UNDERWAY! Valid April 1-30. Delivery available.

No coupon required. While supplies last—no rain checks.

Growing With Us

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Secrets of Raised Bed Gardening Raised-bed gardening is the key to Plants breathe through their growing lots of healthy plants with the least roots, so air is the secret effort. Raised beds are containers of soil ingredient of healthy garden soil above ground level, with space to walk around them without packing the growing soil down and squeezing out all the air.

They also prevent the surrounding grass and weeds from invading and competing with the garden plants. Gardening in raised beds takes less space, less effort, and less time.

Most gardeners in southern Ohio struggle with hard clay soil, making it difficult to grow nice vegetables. It’s rare to find a row-crop vegetable garden with loose, rich, well-drained and healthy soil. Raised beds help with the compaction problem since you never walk on the planting soil.

So, what’s the best soil to fill your raised beds with? That depends on what you’re planning to grow, but here are a few basic rules: First, raised bed soil should be very light and fluffy. Plants breathe through their roots, so air is the secret ingredient of healthy garden soil. Heavy soils expand when they freeze, which will tear your raised beds apart over time. Light, fluffy soils in raised beds drain quickly, so plants won’t drown.

Commercial growers never use topsoil or dirt; they prefer “soil-less” growing mixes made from sterile ingredients like well composted sawdust, peat moss, vermiculite, perlite and mushroom compost. These soils have the ideal texture for plant roots, won’t swell when frozen, and won’t pack down.

Different plants need different soils. Acid-loving plants like strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries like acid soils, so raised beds for growing them should be filled with shredded pine bark, peat moss, well-composted manure and Holly-Tone fertilizer. Holly-Tone is an old-fashioned, meal-based ground fertilizer rich with trace minerals and soil microbes.

Vegetables do best in a rich mix of Mixing plant foods into the soil is better than composted manure and wellcomposted sawdust, with perhaps spreading them on top some coarse sand added for texture.

That’s basically the recipe for our bulk GoodSeed Garden Mix. Each vegetable has its preferred plant food, but you can’t go wrong mixing in a good organic fertilizer like Espoma Garden-Tone when you first prepare the soil for planting. Fertilizers that are high in nitrogen are good for leafy crops, but fruits and root crops do better with less nitrogen but more potassium and phosphorus. The important thing is that mixing plant foods into the soil is better than spreading them on top.

Growing With Us

Good planting soils have lots of organic matter like compost and peat moss. These ingredients keep the soil loose so it can breathe and drain, and roots can spread easily. Compost also contains hundreds of valuable trace minerals and live organisms like soil microbes and earthworms.

These ingredients help plants digest their food, and prevent diseases caused by malnutrition. No amount of concentrated fertilizers like Miracle-Gro or 12-12-12 can replace the natural goodness of rich compost.

There aren’t many things you can do as effective, easy and cheap as adding bulk mushroom compost to your garden soil. A by-product of mushroom farming, this wonderful dark, rich, mixture has a magic effect on your vegetable garden. It is a quick, sure-fire way to boost the performance of almost everything you grow.

Costing only a few cents per pound, mushroom compost is an organic blend of wheat straw, peat moss, cottonseed meal, cottonseed hulls, corncobs, cocoa bean shells, gypsum, lime, chicken litter and/or horse stable bedding. Genuine mushroom compost is completely sterile, so unlike most compost it won’t add weed seeds to your garden. It is much too rich to plant into it directly, but mixed with other ingredients it is a magic booster for flowers, vegetables and even lawns. We sell it in bulk and in bags.

Here’s where many raised bed gardeners go off -track. Mixing any kind of dirt, whether it be “topsoil” or clay, will make the soil in your raised beds eventually pack down into a brick. The word topsoil can mean many different things, because no two topsoils are exactly the same.

Topsoil in farm fields has been turned over, mixed, and very often exhausted by repeated crops. Topsoil is heavy. Topsoil often contains clay. It also contains weed seeds, soil bacteria and funguses.

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Mix in a good organic fertilizer like Espoma Garden-Tone

Smart gardeners avoid adding anything that might contain weed seeds.

Weeding is the most tedious drudgery in gardening, so why plant weeds in your fancy raised beds? Manure can introduce pasture weeds into your garden unless it’s scientifically composted. Soil-less mixes are sterile, either from high-heat composting or because, like peat moss and vermiculite, they come from deep underground.

Does all this mean you have to buy expensive bagged container mixes for raised bed gardening? Not really. We offer Manure can introduce pre-mixed, weed-free raised bed soil in bulk, or all the ingredients to mix your pasture weeds into own. Call us at GoodSeed Nursery if your garden you’re having trouble finding bulk soils.

Whatever your mixture, it should be fluffy enough to drain well and stay loose. In future years you can just add a few inches to the top at planting time.

If you’ve invested in raised beds, make sure you fill them with soil that will make your plants thrive. Good soil is the key to raised bed gardening. If you take care not to pack it down, plant roots will rapidly fill it and you’ll have the best garden you’ve ever had.

9736 Tri-County Highway Winchester, Ohio 45697 937-587-7021 www.goodseedfarm.com

PRSTD STD US POSTAGE PAID PERMIT 5400 CINCINNATI OH

WE’VE GOT FLUFFY DIRT!

CALENDAR

GARDEN CENTER & LANDSCAPING

GoodSeed Nursery

Fill your raised beds, pots and planters with supercharged, rich, moist garden soil with NO LUMPS, CLUMPS, CLAY OR WEED SEEDS! How? Meet “Mr. Fluffy”!

See inside for details...

PLAN TO VISIT GOODSEED FARM OFTEN THIS SPRING! Mark your calendar so you can enjoy our special events, take advantage of special savings, bring your family or friends for special times!

April 1 Spring-Summer Hours: Monday-Friday 10AM-7PM, Saturday 9AM-6PM, Sunday Noon-5PM March 1- April 30 MULCH MADNESS! Save $20 on bulk mulch delivery of 6 or more scoops of Garden Mix, Pulverized Topsoil, Black Gold, Dyed Black, Dyed Red or Pine Magic.

April 1-30 Wall Rock Special! $1.49 each by the pallet, $1.59 individually April 1-30 Boston Fern Special $8 off on two Boston Fern Hanging baskets!

April 1-30 Early Season Tree & Shrub Sale! 25% off on selected evergreens, shade trees and shrubs!

May 8-9-10 Country Garden Mother’s Day Party!FREE Butterfly Bush for every mother.

Specials, food and fun 10AM-7PM Friday, Saturday, and Mother’s Day Sunday June 13 GoodSeed Garden Expo! Spend the day with experts on gardening, plants, hardscaping and soils! Meet master gardeners, plant experts, representatives from premier nurseries and garden supply manufacturers. Seminars, workshops, exhibits, door prizes, specials, FREE samples. An indoor-outdoor event tailored for home landscapers, vegetable gardeners, lovers of plants & flowers. Rain or shine! Delicious food by Big “E” BBQ and ‘Buckeye Confections”. 10AM -6PM Rain or shine!

August 8 Mum Season Begins! Gorgeous mums, fall décor, late vegetables.

October 17-18 Clearance Sale! Everything discounted 50% or more! Come early for the best selection. (Bulk items and RR ties not included).

October 19-31 Fall Hours: Open weekdays 12-5, Saturday 10-4, Closed Sunday.

October 31 CLOSED FOR THE SEASON! Bulk Mulch, Soil & Stone Delivery, Landscaping still available by calling 937-587-7021