Last year’s CENTS show was pretty slow due to a giant snow storm that prevented a lot of people from attending. This year there were only a few flurries, and much more traffic at the show!
Willoway Nurseries had a neat booth that included a lookout platform, where you could see out over the top of the whole show. (The picture only shows about a quarter of the show.)
2 Comments 
This year I’ll be helping to staff the booth at the Columbus CENTS show. CENTS, as you can see from the logo, is the “Central Environmental Nursery Trade Show”, but it’s better to say “CENTS” because a) it’s shorter, and b) people who aren’t in the know do a double take. “The what show?”
Of course, my favorite show name, hands down, is the PANTS show. The Penn Atlantic Nursery Trade Show. How can you not get a kick out of saying “I’ll be attending the PANTS show?” The only way it could be better is if it offered short courses, like CENTS does. Then you could attend a short course at the PANTS show, and all would be bliss.
Juvenile musings aside, I’ve never worked this show before, and am excited to find out if West coast shows differ from East coast shows. Plus, I’ve been informed that Jenni’s Ice Cream is not to be missed, and it’s right near by. There is nothing like ice cream in January.
Come visit us, January 25-27, in booth 2004-2006. See you there!
At the beginning of the year, I finally took the time to do some much-needed garden cleanup. It felt good to get out of the house and futz around with plants.
Portland went through a few spells of cold weather in December, and most of my vegetables froze and then thawed into mush. Since then, the mush had rotten into Uck. Some nice colors, though.
Over the holidays I went to visit relatives who live in Phoenix, Arizona.
Portland in the winter is often rainy. Also, it rains a lot. And it’s often wet. That’s normal. Phoenix, on the other hand, is in a desert, meaning that it is dry, a bit dusty, and with some dessication thrown in just for kicks. It was nice to have some sunshine and blue sky for a change, though I was ready for a dose of humidity by the end of the trip.
Since we were in a desert, I lobbied successfully to go visit the Desert Botanical Garden. I’m quite fond of desert plants — it’s like a quick trip to a different world. Gone are the large green leaves and perennials, and in their place are trees and shrubs that are often dull from a distance, but fascinating up close. Cactus and succulents both provide outlandish sculptural shapes and crazy details. I love them!
Some of them look like brains! How can you not love a plant that looks like brains?
A few weeks ago I was looking at the garden and thinking that there was a lot of color in it for December. The chard was blazing away in the brilliant way that chard does, complimented nicely by the bright green parsley. The carrots were beautifully feathery. The leeks were perky.
Wasn’t everything supposed to be gray and mostly colorless? I remember last winter as being very un-green (expect for the moss).
Then we had a week of freezing temperatures, and when it thawed, the garden turned to mush. This picture was taken right after the mush began.
For a little while I thought that some of my more tender vegetables, like the chard, were going to make it through the deep freeze, but I was just being overly optimistic. As soon as they lost their support network of hard frosts they flopped down and gave up. (My husband was OK with this. We’ve been eating a lot of chard lately.)
Things I Learned:
1) “Recent mush” quickly turns to “rotting mush”. Be careful what you ask for. I was looking for gray, and I got gray, by golly.
2) It turns out that carrots that have been frozen solid do not, in fact, taste as good as carrots that have NOT been frozen solid. Ditto daikon radishes. Radishes DO, however, look really cool when they have been frozen and then thawed — they were almost translucent. I tried to eat them, but they tasted a bit too much like rotten vegetables for me.
3) When you hear of a frost coming your way, pick what is left in your garden! You may think it’s going to make it through the frost, but any number of gardeners in colder climates are silently shaking their heads at you. Pay attention to the silent, head-shaking, cold climate gardeners in your mind.
4) Look into banning freezing temperatures in the Portland area.
Feb 1, 2010 
Subscribe to our RSS feed