Bulb Shipping has ended for 2025
We have wrapped up bulb shipping for the 2025 season, and will be shipping out the last few orders this week. The fall alpine and rock garden plant catalog will be updated online sometime in mid-late September as the weather cools and we can get back to shipping live plants. If you are a NARGS member, look for us selling plants and bulbs at chapter meetings this fall, and if you are not a NARGS member you should sign up now and get in on those awesome meetings where you can learn a ton about plants, rock gardens and members get in on special sales and lectures as well as national meetings.
Viola congesta blooming in a microplung in the bulb house, 20% shade cloth cover, Dionysia soil mix, regular fertigation.
Happy Labor day! Cheers to the workers, who without us the billionaires and CEO’s wouldn’t have the yachts, helicopters, private jets, mansions and power to do whatever they want with our social networks and political systems of inequality. Today we celebrate the workers, all of them, the ones that worked to build this country from the farm fields and factories, shipyards and mines…..oops thats sounding way too much like a Dropkick Murphy’s song. The workers that are fighting fires in the wildlands trying to keep us safe from raging wildfires, the fruit pickers and slaughterhouse workers who put food on our tables everyday, the garment factory workers, the auto mechanics, the tire shop workers, the restaurant back of house staff, dishwashers and table bussers. The workers whose toil has made life so easy for those of use that don’t have to go dig fire lines or spend the hot summer roofing houses, or moving irrigation pipes around a farm field or nursery. Today is the day to thank the worker and maybe ask yourself, does it really matter to you where these humans come from? Why does it sound so strange to use humans in that sentence? Because we have become conditioned to the worker as a nameless/faceless individual, or even a collective mass whose relentless industry has lined the pockets of everyone but themselves since the founding of this country. To say humans instead of workers or assets or resources to the employing class would mean they have to put themselves in the same position on the playing field and not in the grandstands watching as the worker is the modern day gladiator fighting for their lives in an arena where the fight is against the increasing cost of everyday living like food, housing, clean water, and god forbid a moment to relax and vacation. All the while the weapons the gilded class give the gladiator workers to fight against the social inequity are stripped away until they are left barehanded to brave against such odds.
If they are willing to show up here and work hard to make a better life for not only themselves but for all us that consume the goods they produce and harvest does it really matter to you how they got here or where they came from?
I see the army on the streets of America now and masked men driving around in unmarked cars abducting workers from places so unimaginable as a wildfire raging in the forest and I think what is the greater threat to us? The worker out fighting a fire or the masked gestapo who would wrestle this person to the ground and put them in shackles to be carted off to an undisclosed place and perhaps be sent to another country, not even the one that they might be from. Next time you think you are in the land of the free, take a minute and think about what that really means. The last bits of cherished freedom are being strip mined at an alarming rate right now and if you are someone who answered the question above that it does matter to you how and where they came from, you need to realize that right now it’s the workers who are being denied due process, illegally abducted and disappeared to government sanctioned concentration camps. But tomorrow it could be you, for like Thomas Paine said when this country was fighting against the tyranny of kings ‘“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.”
No doubt someone reading my writings for the fist time will come flying in from right field with the old “shut up you whining communist” and to that I preemptively say, I am not a communist, I’m not a democrat, nor a republican, i’m not a socialist, libertarian or even an anarchist, I’m not a christian, muslim or buddhist, I am simply a humanist, who believes that the potential for betterment of mankind exists in this world, but it suppressed at some level by all of those religions, politics and social structures, listed above and most certainly by the exploitation of the worker by the greed of the out of control billionaire employing class.
Viola congesta in a microplunge, I am working on an article going into the details of some of the lessons learned cultivating the rosulate violets the last few years. Hopefully coming soon to a publication or journal or live in person as a presentation!
“Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” Thomas Paine.
My society is the workers, those in the current state of power seek only to divide and destroy and punish. Don’t forget when you look around you what your society is, most of you reading this aren’t billionaires but are probably still served by the workers who make up your society, the current society of the worker out fighting a wildfire who is put in shackles by masked men from the government and hauled away for trying to help our society not hinder it.
Freedom