The Greenhouse Is Here!

I cannot tell you how happy I am to finally have a real greenhouse again after all of these years trying to make cuttings without one!  Upright fuchsias are pretty hardy and I was able to make thousands of cuttings in the past without a greenhouse because I used a breathable sheer cover for them. 

But out here in the oak woods, it is an entirely different game and I've been struggling every since I moved the nursery here 8 years ago, to try and do anything at all beyond just keeping my stock plants alive and protected from all of the wildlife.  The deer adore fuchsias....

So do the gophers and worst of all, the rats.  Not little pet store rats.  Great big wood rats that destroy everything looking for edible seeds and shoots.  And gophers will chew right through the bottoms of thick black plastic pots to get at the roots of the fuchsias.  Squirrels looking for a safe place to bury their acorns, dig in all of the pots, dislodging vital name tags... 

The first year, it was my dream to have a huge display garden of all 350 varieties planted along a long slope.  So I spent a huge amount of time clearing that slope, digging 350 holes big enough to put 5 gallon sized fuchsias into, and then planted all of my stock plants here.  Only to have them all freeze that winter in a freakishly cold winter snap here by the ocean.  And when they tried to come back up from their base stems, the deer mowed them down.  This meant building a deer proof enclosure, and digging all of them back up, re-potting them, and moving them into the enclosure.

During this time there was no material to make cuttings with, so I had no inventory to offer.  And no income.  Without the ability to be here and monitor all the different needs of small batches different varieties of cuttings in person, while I worked other jobs and went back to college, it was basically impossible to create a new inventory.

With great expectations this winter, I started out by sowing over 20 varieties of flower seed in order to raise funds and be able to start making fuchsia cuttings again.  But as soon as I moved them outdoors to the grow shelves, the bumper crop of rats (everyone in this entire county is screaming about the rat population explosion this year) immediately broke into everything and dug everything up in their search for anything edible.

That just about did me in.

But I can't give up! 
I opened an Amazon Handmade shop ( Amazon.com/handmade/Pedricks  ) to sell the lavender items I've been making from the field of lavender I planted to replace the field of fuchsias. 
The Etsy shop is still up as well, but fewer people even know Etsy exists (Etsy.com/shop/Pedricks)
And I will be adding another 100 lavender bushes to it as soon as they are big enough.  It is my hope that sales of lavender will continue to fund my efforts to get the plant nursery restarted.  With a focus on the hardy upright fuchsias I fell in love with way back in my days at the once famous Antonelli Brothers Begonias Gardens where I had an acre of greenhouses growing ferns.

With this little greenhouse, who knows?  I just might finally be able to sow some fern spore again as well!

Thank-you to everyone who helped me get this little greenhouse!  A second one, twice it's size, has a space reserved for it down below if all goes well this spring and summer.

Of course it is raining cats and dogs right now.  But as soon as the greenhouse is put together, I will post more photos here!