4 Great Daffodil Bulbs For Your Garden

Bright golden yellow daffodils (Narcissus) are the quintessential flower for the spring garden. But did you know that daffodils come in thousands of different flavours? More correctly, these flavours are called 'cultivars' or cultivated varieties and vary in size, shape, colour, height, growth habit, bloom time and other characteristics.

This year, we're featuring four different locally grown daffodil varieties:

Saint Keverne

A beautiful early daffodil similar to the classic King Alfred types. Features
rich yellow flowers with a broad cup. The trumpet is held either horizontally or is slightly uptilted, and the perianth petals are angled forward. Grows to 18 inches high and flowers in early spring.

Ice King

A double form of daffodil, Ice King has white perianth, a lemon yellow collar  and a burst of lemony petals in the center. Yellow flowers turn creamy white as they mature. Ice King is showy and enduring in the landscape. Grows to 16 inches in height.

 

Accent

This daffodil is ivory white with a salmon-pink cup and has been a favourite for over 50 years. Grows to 16 inches. Blooms in early to mid spring. Deer and rodent resistant.

Yellow Salome

Yellow Salome is mid-height daffodil growing between 12-24 inches in height. It is yellow with a slightly orange cup. Blooms in mid to late spring. Deer and rodent resistant.

 

All of these varieties are available bulk, for $0.39 cents per bulb. A special volume price of 20 bulbs for $5.99 is available until the end of September.

Planting & Care
Daffodils are easy to grow and undemanding. Plant, fertilize and watch them grow. They are best purchased and planted in late summer through eearly fall. Make sure they are planted at least 5-8 inches deep and 2-6 inches apart. For best flowering, add bonemeal or top dress with a bulb food like our GardenPro brand.

Daffodils prefer rich, organic, well drained soils. Water regularly until blooms are finished and the foliage begins to die back. While summer foliage may be unsightly, wait until at least mid-summer before removing spent foliage. This allows the bulb to grow and store energy for future year. Full sun or light shade is best. Hardy in zones 3-9.

Daffodils are best used in borders, woodlands, meadows and even in containers. For best appearance, plant them in large groups or drifts.

For More Information
For more information about Daffodils, call or visit us today! The best selection of bulbs is in late summer and early fall.

An Evergreen BlueBerry ? The Sunshine Blue BlueBerry

Yup, its true. There is such a thing as an evergreen blueberry shrub.
Its technically a semi-evergreen, and a semi-dwarf 3-4ft high plant good for large containers or in the garden. It features hot pink flowers in spring that fade to white and produce abundant crops of large tangy fruits. It's self pollinating, meaning that only one shrub is required to produce fruit. However, it will produce more fruit if more blueberry plants are nearby.

For best growth, plant it in full sun, in acidic, moist but well drained soils. Feed it in early spring with an acidifying fertilizer, like those used on Rhododendrons and Camellias. Hardy in zones 5-10.

Sunshine Blue is available at Arts Nursery in limited quantities. Please call ahead to confirm.

Fall Garden Event Wrap Up!

A special thank you to all those who joined us this past weekend for our 9th Annual Fall Garden Event. Especially those that braved the miserable wet weather on Sunday!

Its always been our goal to educate, inform and inspire our customers with great plants, and expert information about gardening and landscaping. By supporting events like these and coming out to support our guest speakers and exhibitors we make gardening more fun and rewarding.

Again, a sincere thank you to all exhibitors and attendees!

P.S. Keep in touch as our Holiday Open House is our next special event!

Fall Gardening Seminar Dates

At Art's Nursery we want to help you become a better gardener. This fall we are offering a series of seminars designed to increase the beauty of your garden or containers. PLease call in advance to sign-up.

Fall Magic Planters
Summer planters looking ho-hum? Let Michele show you how to pot up
a fabulous fall creation using a variety of plants, pots & decorative accents. Bring a friend and have some fun!
Saturday, Sept 25th - 11:00am

Fall Magic Baskets
Don’t put away your baskets yet! Let Michele show you how to put
together a gorgeous basket that will be the envy of your neighborhood.
We’ll use a variety of plants and accents that will brighten any dreary
day. Bring a friend and enjoy this wonderful class.
Saturday, Oct 2nd - 11:00am

Designing With Spring Bulbs
Enjoy a beautiful container filled with lovely autumn hues followed by
cheerful blossoms of spring bulbs. Come and join Michele and learn
how to build multi-season planters filled with foliage and layers of bulbs
for a long spring display. Makes a great gift or enjoy it yourself!
Saturday, Oct 16th - 11:00am

The sign-up fee for each person is $10.00 / seminar
The entire amount will be credited towards the cost of materials you use in designing and creating your projects. Please sign-up by calling 604.882.1201 in advance as space may be limited.

Arts Fall Garden Event - Sept 11-12, 2010

Plan on attending our 9th Annual Fall Garden Event, this Saturday & Sunday, Sept 11-12, 2010.

As always we'll have a great line-up of speakers, garden exhibits and of course, a big plant sale!

More information can be found on our website, http://www.artsnursery.com

7 Great Trees For Fall Colour

Sunlight on colourful leaves – that’s fall to me. Here at Arts Nursery we have some wonderful and varied choices of trees with great fall colour:

	Japanese Maples Japanese Maples are hard to miss in the fall, with their flaming red, orange or yellow fall colour. Red leaved cultivars turn red or scarlet in the fall, and green leaved cultivars turn fabulous yellow, orange and red. Some of our favourites are Acer palmatum Emperor 1, Osakazuki, Tamukeyama and Sangu-kaku. They generally grow 15-20ft high by 12-15ft wide. Japanese maples prefer part shade but will tolerate full sun if kept adequately moist. At Art's we have dozens of varieties and hundreds of these plants to choose from.
	Katsura Trees Katsura trees, Cercidiphyllum japonicum, have small heart shaped leaves with outstanding fall colour from yellow to wine, early in the season. The spicy sugar scent just before leaf drop is a bonus. Katsuras have stiff arching branches, and grow 35 – 50ft tall and 25 – 35ft wide. Part shade or sun. Excellent shade or street tree. Come have a look at a great new variety called 'Red Fox'.
	Persian Ironwood Trees Parrotia or Ironwood trees have sensational fall colours, turning bronze, then crimson and orange, finishing brilliant yellow. They are coloured well into October. For the best fall colour plant parrotias in full sun, although they will grow in part shade too. They grow 20 – 40ft high and wide at maturity.
	Sourwood Trees Sourwood Trees, Oxydendron arboreum, have lance shaped green leaves that turn a striking blood-red colour in the fall. They also offer sprays of creamy-white flowers in late summer to early fall. A great tree for smaller yards or as a specimen.
	Red Maples Red Maples, or Acer rubrum, are trees for people with slightly larger properties. They grow 40 – 60ft high by 25 – 45ft wide. Their fall foliage begins early and is a brilliant scarlet, that persists well into October. Acer rubrum are tolerant of many different sites. We have several different cultivars, including Armstrong, Bowhall, Brandywine, Red Sunset and more. A classic Canadian favourite.
	Sweetgum Trees Sweetgum Trees, also known by their botanical name Liquidambar styraciflua, are another great mid-sized tree for Fall interest. Their green, maple-like leaves turn striking shades of red in fall. An excellent well-behaved tree often recommended for boulevard or streetside plantings. Makes an excellent specimen or shade tree as well.
	Ginkgo Tree Another classic favourite for fall colour is the Ginkgo tree. Featuring unique fan-shaped green leaves, their foliage turns striking colours of yellow-gold in the fall. This is a significantly sized tree ideal for larger yards and bigger spaces, but tends to grow slower.
The above trees are only a small sampling of the varieties here at Art’s Nursery. So treat yourself to a visit, and enjoy the fall ambience.

Things You Didn't Know About Apples

The birthplace of the apple is just at the border of Kazakhstan and China in a place appropriately named Almaty – which translates as full of apples. The first apples were found growing wild there.

Today there are over 7000 varieties of apples worldwide and approximately 1500 varieties we can grow here in BC. China is the number one apple producer, followed by the US, Iran, Turkey, Russia and Italy and India. Apples are relatively cheap here but were once valuable enough to trade for land!

Hmmm, just when you though an apple was a kind of ho-hum fruit...
In Japan, apples are painstakingly thinned, bagged and turned in order to make a perfect blemish-free apple, which goes for about 10 dollars an apple. The biggest ones often have stencils applied to them which when peeled off creates a stencil shadow of pale gold. These sell for over 100 dollars each!

Health benefits? Apples are a good source of vitamin C, some varieties having more than an orange! They are also a source of dietary fibre and antioxidants and are of course…low in calories.

At Art's, you can find a number of wonderful varieties, a bit more exciting than the three or four you may commonly find in the grocery store. If you are adventurous, you may just be able to try growing your own varieties in your yard or even in a large pot if it’s a dwarf variety.

If you hunt, you may just be able to find some of the wonderful old and new varieties such as Ribston Pippin (the parent of the Cox Orange Pippin), Cox Orange Pippin, Lady Apple (one of the first named varieties from the courts of France in the 1600), Burnside Large Cooker - a farmstead variety from Cortez Island – one will make a pie!

There is also Winter Banana, my sisters’ favorite; when ripe it tastes a bit like banana bread. Chenango Strawberry tastes like strawberry ice wine. Sweet Sixteen is one of my faves and tastes like strawberries and banana. Goldgelb is another; it looks like the innocuous Golden Delicious, but has a lovely sweet tangy citrusy crunch. Macoun is a wonderful sweet, tangy apple that I love using in salads…it stays white when cut for a long time! Haralson has a lovely peppery bite, and Pink Princess is sweet and juicy and bright pink inside! Pitmastons Pineapple is a smallish uglyish apple that tastes like…yup, you guessed it, pineapple.

Lodi apple is one of the best for apple sauce and get ready, because with Lodi you’ll be making a lot of it!

Liberty is one apple I like to call the Sherman Tank of apples, I think you could probably drag it behind your truck, plant it and it will still try to give you fabulous apples. I have a Liberty on dwarf rootstock I forgot to stake and the huge crop of apples one year tipped it over. I now call it my grouncover apple tree, and yes it still produces! If you think that an apple is just an apple, think again!

(editors note: not all are commonly available but we'll do our best to hunt them down for you if you're interested! Special orders on some varieties can be arranged)

You can grow your own and find some of these and more cool varieties at Arts, or you can check out your local Fraser Valley Farm Fresh Guide, they have it online too or you can come and visit me and some of the other BC Fruit Testers in apple tasting events around the Lower Mainland like the UBC apple festival, and Derby Reach Apple days, and have your own pomological adventure!

Now, in order to produce an apple, a tree has to be mature enough to bloom usually about 3 to 5 years. Then once the blossoms are formed it needs to be cross pollinated with a different apple tree which has fertile pollen, and yes, all this is done by your friendly neighborhood bee. That means you need at least two trees to produce apples. Crabapples with long bloom times will often do the trick nicely too! Can you grow an apple from seed? Yes…though about 1 in 5000 produces a tasty apple. Feeling lucky? Because the apple seeds are a combination of the two different apples (the tree that produces the blossom and the pollinator, the seed you plant will not make the same kind of tree as the apple the seeds came from. Cool eh!

Art's Nursery carries many varieties of apple trees as well as many other types of fruit trees, including: pears, asian pears, plums, cherries, peaches, persimmons and nut trees. We also carry a large assortment of small fruits and berries. For more information, call us at 604.882.1201, 9:00am to 5:00pm Pacific Standard Time.

September 2010: Upcoming Events

Some upcoming events you might be interested in are:

Arts Nursery Fall Garden Event, This Weekend, September 11th-12th, 2010

Country Celebration at Campbell Valley Park on September 18th and 19th.

Historic Stewart Farm Apple Day on September 25 from noon to 4 pm.

Apple Day at Derby Reach Regional Park on October 2 from 11am to 2pm.

Ioco Ghost Days on October 3 from noon till 4pm.

UBC Apple Festival on October 16th and 17th.

There are plenty of other events; you can check your local paper for cool stuff in your area!

Feature Plant: Echinacea Hot Summer

Echinacea 'Hot Summer'

This wonderful new Echinacea is a great addition to any landscape. It has not only all the wonderful qualities of other Echinaceas—long blooming, beautiful cut flowers, attractive to bees and butterflies, but it has a wonderful flowering habit as well; the flowers emerge yellow and then darken to red as they mature, leaving a lovely mix of flower colors on each plant! Echinacea ‘Hot Summer’ will grow to about 90cm tall. Come check out this Echinacea and all the other varieties available at Art’s Nursery now.

September In Your Garden

Finally, apple season has arrived and yours truly will begin the Tour de Festivals assisting the BC Fruit Testers with heritage apple displays. I get to start off my season with the eclectic and entertaining Alive in the Garden Event at Art’s and I learn tons of interesting stuff from the speakers and those with displays.

For your amusement you will get to see a kind of Iron Landscape Designer challenge which pits two designers in a head to head challenge. As we get near the actual event I am a bit regretful that I opened up my big mouth and volunteered to be one of the designers!

Without further ado, here’s a few tips for this September as well as a number of tips from last year (below):

By mid-month with the onset of the cooler temps and hopefully a bit of a water by Mother Nature those of us whose lawns were dormant (beige) through August and actually a bit of July too will start to see green up. Alas, this also means we have to step up the mowing.

For those who need to renovate their lawns, now is a great time, the same steps apply as in spring; aerate, top dress, overseed and the only difference is the type of fertilizer you’ll be using – a fall fertilizer which less readily available nitrogen as we don’t really want to encourage all that top growth only to be knocked down by first frost!

Fall is also my favourite time to install new garden beds!! Because it has been such a dry summer, if your are renovating or making a new garden bed save the planting and plant shifting for when the ground is not so bone dry. Hopefully towards the end of this month, beginning of October you’ll be able to safely move things around. If you do need to shift something sooner, make sure you soak the roots before and after moving.

For your perennials, flowering shrubs and annuals, continue to deadhead and clip back as necessary.

Celebrate and bring those dahlia blooms inside! Bouquets are just the thing. Forget subtle, add a little pizzazz to your kitchen table or windowsills.

Staking may be necessary for those tall fall flowers.

Seed saving! It’s a great time, there are tons of great books at your local library as well as internet articles. If you have a favorite veggie or flower, consider saving some seeds or taking a division of your perennials and having a plant and seed exchange with your friends. Less calories than cookie exchange, though not as tasty.

Bulbs! The best selection is available now at Art's. Draw up a bit of a plan if you can or a photo of the garden area that you can actually draw little x’s on to avoid accidentally mashing through your bulbs when moving a plant. I like to get my bulbs early and then plant mid October.

Prepare bowls and bulbs for forcing paying careful attention to the time needed. Stagger your blooms so you have something cheery throughout the winter.

Make sure your pond fish are well fed so they can build up their reserves for winter.

Continue to remove debris from ponds and water features to avoid the toxic build up of decaying plants at the bottom of the pond adversely affecting your fish.

Start to phase house plants back inside if they’ve had a summer vacation. A well lit garage is a great temporary quarantine. This way you avoid infecting all of your house plants if you’ve missed some aphids or white fly. After about 1-2 weeks and a careful inspection bring them into the house and decrease the watering.

It’s a great time to pot up houseplants if they need it.

Continue to harvest the bounty of your veggie and fruit garden if you have one, and pick up your local Fraser Valley Farm Fresh Guide from the nursery or check out the online Farm Fresh website for local farms near you!

Cheers,