27 How Not to Remove a Wort
February 12, 2021
29 Hello, Hellebores!
March 5, 2021
D uring my travels, I have made many notes about nurseries and their personnel. These notes include: "Idiots." "Need people skills." "Can’t find good help." And my favorite: "Where in the hell IS everybody?" So annoying.
But I'm here to tell you that Green Acres Nurseries have ample personnel and many are assigned to a specific department. So if you need help, they tend to know their stuff. If a customer has a question the staff member can't answer they will find someone who can. Sometimes that someone is me if I overhear the question. And I can usually help find specific plants because I have a photographic memory of where plants are located in most nurseries. (Oh, just deal with it!)
Because Green Acres stocks the necessary amount of inventory for landscape installs, I do 70% of my shopping for customers there.
Occasionally I will run across uncommon or rare plants, like this beautiful Tecoma I bought in a 3-gallon for $26.50.
Tecoma stans (Bells of Fire Tecoma)
It went into a customer's landscape and I get to enjoy it when I do maintenance there. (No one but me is allowed to do maintenance on my installs. Can you imagine me allowing some "mow and blow" company to touch my plants? No. You cannot.)
Tecoma blooms profusely and I keep its interior pruned so it stays airy.
Green Acres has 5 locations in the Sacramento Valley and a 6th under construction in Citrus Heights. That location happens to be on the way to visit my in-laws! So it’s like Green Acres asked me where to build the next location. And they delivered! LOL.
Not every location carries the same plants—which is nice because otherwise how boring would that be for me?
FROM TOP: Anemone coronaria Harmony Double White
Anemone coronaria de Caen ‘Hollandia'
Anemone coronaria de Caen ‘Mr Fokker'
(Anemones are one of my top 5 favorite flowers.)
Roseville's Green Acres is very compact and though I am not a fan of its crowded layout I do shop there for my Roseville customers. It was the first of all the Green Acres, and each one since has gotten better and better.
You know how I love Yucca 'Bright Star.’ Here is another fabulous Yucca at Green Acres.
Yucca filamentosa ‘Color Guard’ (Adam Needle’s ‘Color Guard’)
The Rocklin store is a favorite. It's the half-way point for Aunt Patti and me to meet up, shop and waltz around oohing and aahing.
It is smaller and—at least to me—cozier. It is well laid out so I can cover it pretty quickly when "on the hunt" for a plant or a good container.
To give a modern and simplistic design to many of my installs, I have used these Green Acres' gray fiberglass containers.
Gray goes with every color and allows the plant to be the star. Unfortunately, when moving them around, the containers get a beating. My advice is to buy a gray Sharpie to cover up any white chipped spots.
My "go-to" Green Acres is the Folsom location pictured at the top of this post. It sits at the base of the central Sierra Foothills region where I and most of my customers live. Here's a brief tour...
In a recent visit—lucky me—I came across some must-have plants, like this Lupine.
LEFT: Lupinus Staircase Blue at Green Acres. RIGHT: In my garden.
In the past, I have purchased Lupines from Annies Annuals & Perennials and a few nurseries in Oregon. All of those Lupines are dead now. Don’t know why. But let’s try again! And again and again.
Research on this plant tells me the Staircase series is a collection of compact Lupines providing long lasting blooms. Well, let’s see if that is true. Keep you posted...
Some Green Acres locations carry outdoor furniture. Their Adirondack chair is made of plastic bottles and costs $420. My chairs made of resin cost $300 at a different store. Both products will last a lifetime but if you have trees such as a Sycamore or Oak nearby, the leaves will stain the chairs.
That's the houseplant department in El Grove's Green Acres. I got to know this entire location quite well a few years back when our construction company had a job down the road from it.
The job entailed hauling out hazardous materials, and my husband needed my help with the truck operations going to and from the landfill in Davis. With the trucks loaded and headed out to the landfill, I knew I had 2 1/2 hours to go shopping before needing to be back for the next haul.
I always remind Mike he should not have me work at a jobsite because it is going to cost him. It sure did that time! Two and a-half hours of shopping daily for a whole week. So awesome.
The Sacramento Green Acres acts as the hub for receiving plants from growers and distributing them out to the other locations. This means you can find more plant varieties and quantities there—such as this selection of Euphorbias (one of my BFYB plants).
This location used to be Matsuda's, a family owned business that opened in 1957. Now Green Acres has bought up the retail nursery plus the wholesale business. When that happened, they invited landscape contractors to a seminar at the growing grounds. When the speakers finished their presentations, we toured the grounds to see their propagating operations.
Life cannot get much better than spending a day watching plants grow.
Green Acres has made life better for busy plant-passionate me. I'm not on their marketing staff but I can say, "Watch for one where you live" and mean it.
Photos courtesy Sheri Lynn Burke. All rights reserved.
