I tried to resist buying starts before Vicki’s and my annual outing to the opening of Forni-Brown in Calistoga this weekend but I had some free time this past weekend and I decided to make the trek to the famous Petaluma Cottage Gardens – a nursery with a huge reputation and following. I had never been there before so I was dying to see it. And it did not disappoint!
It was beginning to rain as I arrived but it didn’t deter me from racing around every inch of this incredible nursery. My first stop? The vegetable starts!
They didn’t have a large variety of vegetables yet (“It has been too cold”) but they did have a lot of varieties of the vegetables they were carrying. They had all of the herbs you could want plus about 80 varieties of tomatoes! So, yes, I came home with this summer’s tomato selections – 6 in all including San Marzano, Brandywine, Super Sweet 100, Marvel, and Pruden’s Purple (a new one for me).
I also bought a six-pack of Gold Coin Cipollini onions which we will love, in about 110 days, according to the label. Aren’t they irresistible? Reminder, if you buy these: in each pod of the six-pack you have to separate each budding onion start. In my pods, I ended up with 14 different individual plants, so my one six-pack yielded almost 84 starts!
The next section I ran to was the clematis section and I bought two of these beauties that I can add to my border on one of my rust-metal 8′ obelisk trellises. They love our Oakville border garden. I have asked my gardeners to add some Dr. Earth plant starter to each plant’s soil so they will get a healthy and robust start.
The nursery has a beautiful succulent area with petite plants like the ones above to large ones in every imaginable variety. I’m not very knowledgable about succulents, so I didn’t catch all of the varieties, but there are plenty if you’re a lover of succulents.
Petaluma Cottage Gardens is a great place to go if you’re looking for vases, containers, trellises, wind chimes, bird houses, bird baths, or garden objects in general. They have more on these few acres than another other nursery I’ve ever visited.
I found the staff to be incredible knowledgable and able to answer very specific questions about their plants (I overheard more than one conversation). This nursery is very special and should be visited early and often!
