Flowers & Greens Newsletter # 5 April 2007
Alstroemeria. New and proven selections
Pacific Sunrise has proven as vigorous as initially tested and is now available without restriction to time of year.
Cream Burgundy is another selection that has proven highly vigorous and is available year-round. I urge alstroemeria lovers who strongly desire a whitish selection to try it. At most times the white aspect dominates the floret display.
Patience is a virtue. but with some of the new selections (and even some of the older ones) that I had hoped to have widely available in 2007, I now appreciate fully the wisdom of that adage. I know that many years of field trials are required to establish survivability and vigor of any selection that appeared highly attractive in greenhouse trials (which in themselves ran 3 years). So keeping patience in mind, please read what follows with gardener’s empathy.
Lipstick. This selection is increasing rapidly and should be available to meet all demand by the end of 2007 or early 2008.
The Whitish selections remain too slow-growing to make them generally available. I continue to use a backorder file to notify clients whenever they are ready for digging and sale. So, if whitish is what you want, please order and I’ll keep the same kind of back-order file that I have had for two years. At the present rate of increase, I expect to have a sufficient number to meet all requests by 2009.
Alstroemeria caryophyllaceae will be available in 2009; it is now growing at the Russian River location with sufficient vigor. 
A Deep Blue selection, now out of the greenhouse, is growing well but I do not have a sufficient number of clumps to do much more than test its survivability in Davis and the Russian River location.
Other Problems.
Climate and Freesia. January 2007 was the coldest and driest (no rain) on record in central California. As a consequence of successive night temperatures dropping into the teens, we lost above-ground foliage of almost all geophytes. Production of Freesia alba corms from early sowings may have been lost altogether and overall production for 2007 will be less than half of what it was in 2006.
Shipping. Not a horticultural problem, but it remains as the most difficult issue to explain to clients who may not read the retail catalog for caveats; namely, shipping costs must be determined by me at time of shipping using weight and zip code. We may be able to insert that sentence somewhere near the bottom of the order form, but only efforts by the webmaster's interactions with shipping cart people will alter things. Each clump weighs about 0.5 lbs so, with that in mind, clients can estimate the shipping costs for "x" clumps mailed from 95616 to their own ZIP code by going to the USPS web site. Usually I can get 10 clumps in a flat rate box which ships anywhere in the US for $8.10.
This newsletter is written for those with dirt permanently imbedded in their skin and/or under their fingernails. Traits that I can match and then some.
Go to next issue
For more information, E-Mail: Roy Sachs, owner
or go to the Contact Us page.
© Flowers&Greens
