Yesterday buying, today planting!

Spent a lot of time in the car yesterday going to a nursery that has exclusively native plants. My quest was for 5 or 6 more fuchsia flowering gooseberries. Alas, the nursery had the gooseberries, but they were 1 gallon size plants in a 5 gallon pot at $40! Yikes! Needless to say I didn't get them. I did manage to find elderberries (something I haven't been able to find elsewhere). I also got a California fuchsia, a snowberry, some yerba buena and three of what I thought were the giant alum root but I see this morning are really something called fringe cups. Unfortunately, looking them up I see that they need more water than the alum root so I won't be able to plant them under the oak as I had planned. Oh well, they will be pretty over by the redwood or in the camelia garden when the construction is over.

After the long drive to the nursery (complete with wrong turns and back tracking) and the sort of unproductive trip, we had a great lunch. Salmon fish tacos for me, a chili burger for El Esposo. Then we headed to Sierra Azul nursery. There we found lots of the plants I had wanted at what I thought were more reasonable prices. I ended up with a few more coffee berries, some coyote mint, idaho fescue and blue fescue for El Esposo, and some penstemon. We also ordered the gooseberries we wanted and if she can get them, she said they would be available probably tomorrow. I think that most of my shopping for natives (other than those I can pick up close to home) will be at Sierra Azul. It isn't exclusively native plants, but it has a lot of them. It also has demonstration gardens (although they aren't with just natives as at the other nursery) and even has some of the plants in 4 inch pot sizes. I noticed this after we had selected our 1 gallon plants and were on the way out. Next time I will check the 4 inch pots first! Although it is much more satisfying to plant a bigger plant, I must say.

So it turned out to be quite a productive day in the end. I no longer have the feeling "if I could just get to the native nursery. " I got almost all the plants I had planned on and others I hadn't! We had a great lunch, it was a beautiful day of sun playing hide 'n' seek with clouds and I got lots of time to work on the aran cable sock that has been hanging around for so long. Today, off to plant!