Dateline: 2015-11-22
Way back in September, at the end of the summer season, we talked about ours plans for a winter crop. Unfortunately for “life happens” reasons, we didn’t really get around to doing much until November. It’s a little late to get planting for winter, but San Francisco winters are mild and we figured it was worth a shot anyway. A few weeks ago we tried Home Depot for winter plant products… and it was depressing. However with a little research I found the Half Moon Bay Nursery which is less than 30 minutes from SF. It gets mentioned on all sorts of nursery lists for the Bay Area and its Yelp reviews are hard to pass up. Streams of rave reviews like “a destination for any California gardener”, “Best nursery around”, and “has just about anything that you can imagine” sold me, so off we went.
There is no single picture that can truly convey how awesomely large the nursery is. The Google Maps photo on the left (with a red outline of the nursery itself) should give you some vague idea. On the day of our visit we were on a very tight schedule and shopping at possibly the worst time of year, even then we still took a solid hour. Since I don’t have a panoramic shot and it would be a very lengthy article trying to describe what is better visualized, here’s an image tour:
So after a brief stint, we came away with a ton of plants. The entire point was to make sure we had enough for the new GreenStalk Garden System and that was accomplished handily. Even with 30 pockets (the 5 tier system) about half the pockets had to double or triple up. I fully expect some plants will die, but I’m in full on experiment mode! More details on that later, but do note what you see on the right being ~20 plants containers and the total cost was only $75. The staff were extremely nice to us (and helpful) and even gave us a discount because a few of the plants we selected weren’t looking so great (hey, I picked blueberries in November; it’s not exactly season for them).