Plantaholics unite! Introduce yourself please.

Let me introduce myself a bit. I am new to posting on the PNW forum but have been a member of DG since March of 2001. II used to post a bit on the PNWforum years ago but never stuck around due to my having to caregive to my mother and health issues of my own. Hubby retired in May 2011 and we enjoyed a trip to the east coast to visit my 94 year old maternal Aunt in Salem MA and we were traveling for 9 weeks. On our trip home we stopped at several nurseries and filled our pickup truck and then had the rest of the plants we bought shipped to us. I am a hostaholic and plantaholic and proud of it. lol

I am a bionic woman from the waist down due to a bilateral knee replacements and also now two hips that have also been replaced but they were done at different years. I am in recovery now from having my right hip replaced on Oct. 25. Sheesh I hope I am done! Mom passed away in 05 and so now my main focus is tending husband, miniature horses, one big horse and our gardens. Then we also have our three ponds of which the half acre sized one is natural but we have planted it with about 20 different named water lilies and then we have a pond we just dug that filled with ground water that we raised Koi in for a few years. The osprey flew over and decided we had made lunch for them so cleaned us out of any colored koi we had out there. Our koi pond in the side yard is 4000 gallons but we no longer have koi in it since they all winter killed last winter so we now have a few goldfish and will put several water lilies in it next spring.

We have three miniature horses and two little dogs plus one 180 pound Great Pyrenees dog who lives in our pastures. He is a huge gentle giant to those he knows but keeps livestock and prowlers out of the pastures very well. lol

Well this is becoming a book so I will go and leave it to the next person to post.

Lani

Wow, Lani! I had to kind of speed read thru all the stuff on your spread. I hope you have LOTS of help! My name is Barb, and I inherited a man-made pond when we bought this house. It was of rather poor conception, but better than I could have done on my own. It's under our very tall cedars and doug firs, so catches tons of debris. I do my best to scoop it out in the summer with a net, and sometimes I wade thru in my rubber boots. The coons love it, but they are very hard on the plastic liner! Occasionally I just dump in a gallon of bleach when the smell gets too rank. I baby my pump in hopes it will keep on tickin'.

I, too, adore hostas, as they are gorgeous, like shade, are getting less expensive, and survive the winters. Mine are almost all in pots, as my soil is rather unworkable. If I ever get ambitious enuf with my whackers and hackers, I may actually be able to displace some of the weed patches with more hostas. Can you ever have enuf? I love the blue ones, the deeply chiseled ones, the gigantic ones, and the variegated ones that feature a really white white. I also adore Great Pyrenees---who wouldn't? However, I am the proud parent of four kitties....

Our dear kitties passed away these past two years aged 22 years and 20 years. They were both outside barn cats as I am allergic to cats but still love them around. Our pyr used to let them sleep with him in his dog house. He is so sweet to little critters and used to help our sheep clean up their babies then was the lamb slide when the lambs were playing.

Most of the time it is just my hubby and myself tending to our little farmette of 6.5 + acres but this year we indulged ourselves in help at times trying to keep up with the weeding. Ohh those weeds!! I think they grow while I sleep as well as while we are just figuring out how to get them out of the area they have grown in. I had some huge ones grow out of the roses and they were awfully hard to get gone. lol Anyway it all keeps us hopping and forces me to get out of my chair and DO something.

Yup there is never enough hostas for me. I love em all and that is now evidenced in having over 250 different ones planted in our yard even though we live in the high desert. We only get an average of 9 inches of rain or moisture per year so we are constantly watering.

You must be propagating your own hostas, right? Do you mail order them, or live near a really fine nursery? Barb

I have been buying tissue cultures from co-ops here at DG and elsewhere since 2002 and now have basically all that I can handle taking care of so if I get anymore I will have to get rid of one or more of what I already have. It will hopefully keep me from getting more than I can truthfully handle. lol

When you have time, will you explain about the tissue cultures---I won't be doing it any time soon! But, what a fascinating idea! Is it difficult? Does it require heat and/or a greenhouse?

Hi, I just saw this post, as I have been swamped with a busy life, but it looks like a good idea to introduce ourselves to new people who have joined. So here goes. I live on Vashon Island, which is in the Puget Sound between Tacoma and Seattle, a quiet, mostly rural-ish place just a short ferry ride away from the metropolis. My house is on an acre and a half of pasture to which I am slowly adding garden beds. I have a large veggie garden, some fruit trees and bushes, and a few more ornamental areas with flowers and such, though every bed has something you can eat incorporated into it...a blueberry bush, a rosemary or sage plant, etc. Part of my garden is unfenced, and there I experiment with plants the deer won't be as likely to devour. The rest of my place is enclosed in a 7 foot fence which the deer sometimes break through, jump over, or crawl under. I try to plant enough to share for these events, but have also been known to mumble dire threats, which I cannot uphold having no way to dispatch deer. We have a small coop and 6 chickens who pretty much have the run of the yard.

And I'm Deb up in the northern reaches of Snohomish County (about a mile south of the county line). My husband and I live on 15 acres, 10 is mostly wooded. We have a year-round salmon spawning creek than runs through a pond. We quit running any sort of lifestock about 5 years ago, have torn down many of our fences, and are enjoying the shift to a more native setting. Our youngest son recently obtained his degree in landscape architecture, which I plan to take serious advantage of. I have a lot of perennial beds around the house, converted my old veggie garden to an herb labyrinth, and am thinking of adding a small orchard this year. I'm happiest being a hermit, although my husband is more of a traveler, so we do both.

I'm Lauri from north central Washington. We've got 13 acres on the Methow river, a lot of which is fallow pasture or floodplain with trees - cottonwood & pine mostly. We've got a fenced vegetable garden (to keep out the deer) which has gotten smaller over the years to try to keep up with it. We mow way more grass than makes any kind of sense, but it's either that or noxious weeds. I've got a wonderful little greenhouse to extend my growing season - I love to start things from seed. I'm always on the lookout for plants that will thrive in our sandy, alkaline soil with hot summers and long, cold winters. I am especially drawn to ornamental grasses, which can have terrific movement in our sometimes windy spot. We keep a dozen or so laying hens as well as a couple dogs and cats, and every so often we'll raise a couple hogs. I've finally gotten out of the 'buy like mad with no fixed plan' mode in favor of trading starts with my sister. (Bonehead) I am utterly incapable of keeping up on the weeding!

This message was edited Feb 17, 2012 11:08 AM

Welcome, Ponditis and Lauribob. I'm Stephanie. I'm 37 years old. Married with 3 boys, ages 3, 5, and 7. 2 acres. I'm obsessed with starting things from seeds---I love the miracle. I'm also accruing quite a few roses. I love perennials, vines, and bulbs, too. I love growing vegetables and berries. Planning to make my own wine in a couple of years with my pinot noir grapes. We also have a small fruit orchard. I was a primary care doctor, but I decided to retire and take care of my boys. It broke my heart to bring my first son to daycare, and I couldn't get used to it.

I like a cottage garden look, but I also like formal gardens. I love pink, purple, yellow, and white flowers. I'm working to add some red beds, too.

I love to cook with my homegrown veggies. We have an outdoor wood fired oven, and when you roast veggies in it from the garden, it is incredible. We also make a lot of pizzas in it, plus salmon.

We have 7 chickens, and I'm adding more this spring.

I also love to sew, and right around September I usually quit gardening and make myself a fall/winter wardrobe.

We are also an avid skiing family. I think life in Oregon is perfect, because sometimes I ski and garden on the same day.

Pics: The website would not allow me to upload more than a couple at once for some reason, so these will be fragmented.
1--me and my brood
2--Me as a little girl (i'm the smaller one)---both of my grandmothers (and my mother) had amazing gardens. I'm at a grandmother's house here. I think that is a healthy clematis vine in the background.
3--some of my crop. This I turned into salsa which I canned, and we are still eating it.
4--I love my boys. First day of school pic last September
5--Our chicken coop. Hard to find plants to put in the bed surrounding it that the chickens will not eat when they are allowed to free range (They really love hollyhocks and sweet alyssum unfortunately). 2 fatalities from an owl last fall, so they don't get to free range very often anymore.

Pic 3 and 4

Pic 5. My files must be too big for me to be able to upload 5 images at once. I use a fancy camera, so perhaps that is why. Files are too large, I guess.

Clarification: boys are aged 3, 5 and 7. we only have 2 acres. (Not 7.2 as it looks in first message. But I wish I had 7.2!)

Good to see you. You raise beautiful crops. Kids and veggies.

Stephanie has the most amazing garden; it belongs on "Downton Abbey." I have some beautiful photos of it that I might post somewhere.

Hi Ponditis and Lauriebob, I'm Patricia and I'm 73. Been on here since Jan. 08. For some reason participating in DG makes me very happy. Sort of took the place of being in Master Gardeners when I had to quit. Loved that too. I have just moved to Bremerton after living on Hood Canal for 23 years. I have one daughter and by marriage two sons and a daughter who have 11 grandkids and 17 great-grandkids among them. DH and I have been together for 31 years. We have two poodles and a cat. We are beginning to adapt to the new way of life. It is nice to have you both on PNW. Hope you enjoy it.

Beautiful photo of you, Patricia!

I have been thinking about this for a bit. Lake Stevens has been my home for all of my life except for 4 years while my husband of 30 years went to school. That was a fun time in our lives but San Francisco was not for us! We have 2 boys 20 and 21 (soon to be 22) both are at college. Since they are gone I keep thinking of becoming a master gardener. Maybe next year, the program starts in January.
I love heuchera and heucherella! Container gardens are a passion and am aways looking for new combos to try. Also, have a 6x8 greenhouse were I grow annuals and over winter geraniums and coleus.