Saturday was a day of accomplishment. Despite the unseasonable April showers here in the San Fernando Valley, my wife and I headed out to our local independent nursery to pick out our favorite edible Monrovia plants to add to the garden this spring — our own personal “Splurge on Spring”, you might say!
Find your own local garden center here
Monrovia plants all in a row – Click to find more plants at Shop.Monriva.com
Our first nursery stop
As I mentioned in my first post in this series, we were specifically looking for grapes and berries of some sort, probably blackberries, to add to the back wall of the garden.
While this garden center didn’t have any Monrovia grapes for sale, they did have a good selection of berries, including these:
Since Blackberries are my wife’s absolute favorite and I am fond of them, too, this was a fairly easy choice. We picked up the best looking Black Satin Blackberry to our cart and then quickly headed inside to pay. The rain had been a soft mist when we arrived at the nursery, but by the time we made our selection it was pelting down quite hard. This made it a bit tricky to grab photos and video, but I’ll have a video montage of our adventures posted in the next day or so.
Off to the next nursery
Find your own local garden center here
We really wanted a grape vine for the garden, too, though so it was now time to head over to another local nursery, this time part of a small chain to see what grapes they might have in stock. After a few more minutes driving in the rain, the clouds parted a bit just as we arrived. At least we wouldn’t have to pull up our hoods trying to stay dry on this stop.
Sure enough, this nursery had a few Monrovia grape varieties available. It wasn’t a huge selection, but something was certainly better than the nothing we found at the first nursery. Of course, you can find more grape varieties on Shop.Monrovia.com if you want a larger selection. Our choices here basically came down to choosing between a red and a white seedless table grape. Again, my wife is the arbiter of all things “Grape” in our house, and she much prefers red grapes over white, so the choice was fairly easy.
Here is our choice, a Monrovia Ruby Seedless Grape. Again, this will be planted along our back wall, along with the blackberry as a big kickstart to the edibles available in our garden
Now, of course, the goal is to get this out of the greenhouse — where I am storing them temporarily — and into the ground. The rain is supposed to stop today (although I never say “Rain, Rain. Go Away” here in drought-stricken Southern California) and that should mean I can move the greenhouse a bit further forward and prep the area between the greenhouse and wall to accept these new additions. I am really looking forward to both look at — and eating from — these plants for a long time to come.
Biding their time in the greenhouse until the rain stops
For more information:
Previously in Splurge on Spring from Monrovia.com: