Your Local Garden Center

September in Truckee is Summer AND Fall. Most of us have LONG considered Labor Day the official start of Local’s Summer. In this summer of the COVID… who knows.
We have not written a blog-post since April and we’ve yet to send out a nursery newsletter (who needs more e-mails?), until now.
It has been the most challenging and fascinating summer of my 36 years in this retail nursery.
We are a very locally-oriented business, naturally. We offer plants and supplies appropriate to Truckee – Donner and the Martis Valley, Donner Summit, the Tahoe Basin, and the Sierra Valley. Our business survival strategy has long been to provide sound advice and do everything possible to insure our clients’ successes. Our customers are locals and they’ll trust us if they succeed and so we have many, many, many clients and customers that we have known and worked with for decades. On an average busy spring day, we can walk around the nursery and know well or at least by acquaintance, three quarters of the people who are shopping. We are always excited to see a new face, a new plant-lover finding us for the first time. This spring and summer was very different. There were days when we’d walk around the nursery and only see two or one or no clients we recognized and it was confusing. There are so many fine details and unique challenges with regard to our soils, climate and weather and there is so much that first-time gardeners need to know here that we were simply unable to fully help them all in the manner to which we are accustomed. We did do our absolute best. We had several new and all returning staff who wanted to work and were up for the challenging of explaining our complete lack of native “topsoil”, our low humidity, intense sun and wild and unpredictable temperature swings. We had frequent and frustrating conversations trying to explain that SOME plants need to be protected from frost… “what is frost?”… “It occurs when temperatures drop below freezing.”… “What does that mean?” … “It means that the night temperatures drop below 32ºF” …. “So?”..and so on. I don’t think we realized what a highly sophisticated clan our local and regular customers really are. Good on you and thank you. There were among the new customers MANY kind and enthusiastic first-time gardeners and we are always thrilled at their joys. So many people have sent pictures or shown us their phones with images of their gardens and their happiness is ours.
So we wanted to do a local’s sale. Those savvy enough to subscribe to our rare newsletters or perhaps follow our irregular and infrequent fb, twitter or Instagram posts are invited to a sale, starting now through September 21, 2020. All you need to do is VERY slyly show an image of the newsletter or print out the small coupon below. Tell us “Can you identify this for me” and show us your phone with the newsletter 🙂 The idea is that this is a reward for a summer of super-human patience with those other people who have arrived here and who really don’t want to be a part of this community and who treat us and our town as amenities for their own personal enjoyment without care. We have all spoken with so many persons working in Truckee’s essential businesses, through all of this, who face “mean people” every single day when we, or they, might normally only encounter one or two in an entire summer. Everyone seems to be hoping for a MASSIVE winter with giant berms.