Re: Happy New Year, a little belated

Yeah, I like print catalogs, too. I like reading the hoopla about seeds and plants that I'll never grow. But I suspect the days of the print catalog are numbered. I noted this year that Pepper Gal's PDF download has color illustrations, something her print catalog has never had.
Browsing is something that nursery web sites need to think about. Most are based on some variant of key word fetch, which is great for the buyer who knows what he or she wants, but probably loses lots of add-on sales. Amazon tries to deal with this with its "people who purchased X also purchased Y," and the rest of the alphabet. It always annoys me when that page comes up, but it likely works as well as trash newspaper racks at supermarket checkouts work for add-on sales. 

On Jan 5, 2007, at 1:21 PM, Johnson Cyndi D Civ 95 CG/SCSRT wrote:


Happy New Year everyone! I see you were discussing seed catalogs during
the last couple weeks. I'm perusing a pile of them myself this week. I
still like printed catalogs best, although more and more companies are
going to web only. There's just something about flipping the pages.
Online I know what I'm looking for and I go right to it; in print I flip 
through every page, so I see things I might not have thought of
otherwise. I need to get my act together and order my vegetable seed
soon; and I have a list of other things I want, of course. I think I am
going to buy a lot of heucheras this year; I have two or three vacant
spaces that have been bugging me and when I saw the page with heucheras 
in Bluestone's catalog I thought, ah-ha!
Our weather was pretty nice over the holidays, it did get quite windy
for a couple days, but mostly sunny. We did some work outside but (as
always) not as much as we should have. Every time I thought about leaf
raking it was either too windy or the dumpster was full - I wonder if my 
timing was simply off or if I really didn't want to rake leaves? I
thought about pruning but it seemed too early.  My lemon tree in the
greenhouse seems pretty happy and I think - I think - I have managed to
pollinate quite a few blossoms into lemons. My fingers are crossed that
some of them will stay on the tree and no critters bite them off when it 
gets moved outside.
Over the last year I've lost more plants in my dry garden than I like. A big penstemon - I think it was the Rocky Mountain penstemon, huge spikes 
of brilliant blue/purple flowers - died in late summer, maybe from the
heat. Two lavenders, both of them good size, also keeled over around
that same time. My opuntia started looking really unhappy after we had
that very cold spell in December; I don't think it was meant for temps
in the low teens. But I think it can recover. While husband was taking
down the christmas lights he brushed up against a big Texas Ranger which promptly fell over. Gophers had eaten through every root. This was not a 
small plant! The gophers are a real plague in there, either I need to
start making wire baskets for root protection (what a pain) or I need to 
limit myself to stuff they haven't attacked. They love agaves and the
hesperaloe but so far seem to leave the salvias alone.
Over the holiday week we went riding several times; in the hills around
my sister's house, around our neighborhood, and at a little trail a few
miles from our house. We're all getting more experience. We bought
another horse trailer as our antique one wasn't big enough for two
horses plus gear, and we're going to get a used camper for trips this
summer. I am not sure how I'm going to work all this in and garden too,
especially since I want to do more preserving, but we'll see how it
goes.

Cyndi

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Island Jim
Southwest Florida
27.1 N, 82.4 W
Hardiness Zone 10
Heat Zone 10
Minimum 30 F [-1 C]
Maximum 100 F [38 C]

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