plantlilies.com

I don't know about you but it sure feels like it was an extra long winter. It was also more overcast, something that doesn't sit well with people like me, who crave light. I am so happy to see the sun on an almost daily basis the past few weeks!

Usually, I spend my Easter weekend preparing bulbs and orders as it lands smack in the middle of our busy shipping season, this year I was looking forward to a relaxing family weekend since Easter was much later than usual...but it was not meant to be and I didn't get to relax and visit family after all. Since spring has been late to show across the country, it was much too early to send bulb orders out the 1st of April as usual, and I found myself holding onto them until the last week of April thus my Easter weekend was spent packaging orders anyway, ha ha - must be Murphy's Law at work again!

I've had great pleasure giving FREE bulbs away on the Valley K Facebook page these past few weeks. The requirements to win are simple; must have 'liked' the page, have freebies shipped with existing order or pay shipping cost in full, cannot be a relative of mine, cannot have won in the last year (we gave things away last fall too). Also the freebies were only available to ship in Canada this spring. So far this spring 6 winners have typed 'PICK ME' to win! You could be next, so why not go check out the Valley K Facebook page and don't forget to click 'like' at the top of the page so you are eligible to win too. There is a link to the page in the column to the right, thanks for checking it out!

Posted: 2011-04-26

Well, 2011 started out great I thought, but rapidly deteriorated for me in a hurry! I was away with my family for my daughter's trip, granted by the Children's Wish Foundation of Canada for the first week of January, and upon returning I found my web site had been attacked by bandwidth suckers. I suppose they were irritated since they could not steal or link to my images so they decided to download my print catalog files repeatedly, until the site bandwidth limit was used up. When the bandwidth is all used up, no pages show, no emails get through, nothing. Sometimes this happens in July or August when our catalog is quite active and thousands of visitors are browsing, so I have a HUGE bandwidth limit in place anyway, which certainly is not cheap but necessary with so many photos on this site.

I thought this was a perfect opportunity to do a major re-design of the site and layout, so I took it down and thought I'd have it back up within the week. Ha, its now a month later and I am just getting it back up - and it is the old design, not the new!

My efforts to get it done were hampered by my daughter's health, which took a turn for the worse within a day of taking the site down. She ended up in hospital for a week, and by time we returned home I was so far behind in my work I didn't know where to start any longer. Her health has been in a downward spiral since the first of January with something new popping up on a weekly basis it seems. I for one, and I am sure she as well, will be quite happy to see the end of the flu & cold season this winter!

I started on the site design, and found once again my efforts were hampered by my internet connection randomly dropping, sometimes for seconds, minutes or hours on a daily basis. Saying I am frustrated is putting it mildly! Dropping connections makes for corrupt files when you are downloading or uploading, and before I knew it I had quite the mess on my hands. I ended up abandoning my goal of re-designing the site and tried to get the old one back onto the server. My connection is still dropping on me, but I've figured out its pattern so if I work all night and early in the day its fairly reliable.

I hope to continue with the new site layout as soon as time permits although when that may be is likely weeks down the road as I am quite behind in my winter work now! I also need to ensure this connection issue is resolved.

Next is to update the online catalog with the spring selections we are offering, since that never left the web server in the first place it shouldn't take me long to get it published. Hope I'm back before the end of the week with more news - take care!

Posted: 2011-02-14

September...what a month for harvesting bulbs, it rained every single day almost! Until I was done of course, since then the sun has shone almost daily - it feels like summer has finally arrived!

Digging in the rain was no fun, but with no end in sight on the weekly weather forecasts, I felt I had no choice. It was keep digging, or cancel all orders because there was no way they would be ready and in the mail before mid October otherwise. October may be ok for some locations, but for many of our customers its getting too late by then. Remember last year? It was the first week of October when the last orders went out, and the next day it snowed here, and continued for a few days. The snow disappeared about 2 weeks later I believe, but its early presence made for a lot of frantic gardeners in this province wondering what to do with the bulbs they just received.

I do all of the digging and cleaning of bulbs myself, it is the only way to maintain quality control, so that I personally inspect each and every one before it is packaged. Sometimes I have help bagging them, but most often not. Same applies to packing each individual order, some times I enlist some help but I really do prefer to do it all myself as I then am the only one responsible for any errors! Years ago I did have help with all stages of harvest and order prep but I found a host of errors such as wrong bulbs in the wrong bags, wrong quantities, etc., and it was unacceptable to me. I found the errors only occur when there is more than 1 person working together in the same room, and I myself am certainly not immune to the same kind of errors if someone pops in to visit while I'm working.

The volume of orders has grown such that I think it is time to introduce dedicated help to each stage of order prep, and find a way to make it work so we can all work together without mistakes. We also need a dedicated person to answer and/or return phone calls - since time was critical due to the weather, I was rarely inside or near a phone unless it was extremely early in the morning or late at night. In September I typically call it a day around midnight. I was unable to return many calls that came after our order deadline, most messages indicated they wanted to place an order yet.

Then there was the bulbs themselves, how deceiving some of the stems were above ground! Mature stems I thought would yield nice sized bulbs in fact did not. Many were no larger than the stem diameter, some even smaller! This resulted in either 2 for 1 bagging or including extras to make up for the size. In many cases, there just were not enough and very few orders went out without something missing. I have learned this was not unique to our operation, gardeners and other commercial growers found the same thing in various parts of Canada and the US. I attribute the small bulb sizes to lack of sun, and think that any that were a nice size were already a good size from last year. Anything that needed fattening up for this year though, failed to do so. I am quite glad its all done now, the last order goes out tomorrow and I hope I never see another September harvest like this one!

Posted: 2010-10-17

Rotten botrytis, and a host of other fungal plant problems such as black spot in the roses showing up lately. I have one large lily bed that did not get weeded before I headed out for a 10 day camping trip recently - why on earth was I surprised to see the weeds taller than the lilies when I returned?? Thankfully, it always looks worse than it actually is when it comes to weeding here and within 2 days that problem was taken care of. However, the botrytis in that bed is running rampant! Since it is already August, I'll not waste my time or money to spray them as they'd be naturally starting to brown off in a week or so anyway.

The lilies started out shorter and coming up later this year, no doubt after effects of the terrible drought here last summer. Once the rains started there was a noticeable improvement in the health and vigour of the lilies within two weeks. One note of interest I found was the Orienpets came up sooner than usual, about the same time as the asiatics as a matter of fact. Typically they sprout later as they are planted deeper and seem to take their time coming up even where they are not planted deeper. I suspect they came up earlier as we had a pretty mild winter overall, with only a night or two lower than -30 and enough snow to maintain a cover all winter long. Since they came up early, they are in full bloom right now which means I shall be able to harvest in a timely manner this fall providing rain does not hold us up in September.

I have received many notes and emails from customers thanking me for adding the letter regarding my daughters current state of health to the recent catalog mailout, it makes me really glad I did! I was himming and hawing about whether I ought to in the first place, but I figured it might save me some time in answering note after note asking about her, and it certainly has. We both are truly grateful for all the kindness and concern shown for her health and well-being. She had a wonderful July with a little setback in August but we hope to get back on track shortly. Unfortunately, this setback results in the end of her treatment extending into spring 2012 now, so I am not so certain we shall open our gates to the public again shortly after as planned - I guess we wait and see what the future brings!

Posted: 2010-08-13

Once again I find its been a long while since I updated - I could have swore I did just after Christmas, but it appears not!

For those wondering about my daughter, she's doing great and has reached the maintenance phase of her treatment protocol. That means we travel to the Stollery Children's Hospital only once a month for chemo treatments now, and the rest of her treatment is now by pill the rest of the month. This will continue until November 2011, we can hardly wait for that date already!

I sent out a one page flyer in the mail to current customers at the beginning of March. It is also available online as a downloadable pdf from our catalog downloads page. Please use the link above in the navigation bar to find it if you need it. Customers who did not receive a print version of the catalog in the mail last summer also received a coupon for a $5.00 discount with the flyer. This was due to my inability to finish printing and mailing after Cassie's diagnosis. Those customers who never received the paper catalog also never had the opportunity to order any of the exclusive varieties we had available and I felt it was necessary to make up for that in some way. I hope by giving a deadline of SEPTEMBER 2011 I shall be forgiven!

Orders were coming in quite briskly considering the lateness of getting the flyer out, and we have sold out of a number of items including TIGER EDITION and SIXTH SENSE, but I did manage to get my hands on a few more so they are listed online once again. If you cannot find them, they are sold out again. Not too many STAR GAZER bulbs left now, fewer than 50 as of today I believe.

Posted: 2010-03-23

My how time flies, wish I could say it was because I was having fun! Our fall harvest was a week to 10 days delayed by my absence while I was in Edmonton with my daughter's therapy. I was not terribly concerned as the weather was certainly warmer than average at the end of September, I should have known it would turn in an instant - which it certainly did!

The last of the orders were ready to go out October 5 and out they went, and the cold, chilly winter weather began the very next day! Fortunately it warmed up after a week or so and is STILL unseasonably warm, although at times it feels bitter with the wind blowing. I trust all who emailed me in a panic regarding the cold when they received their order have now planted them safely in the ground.

I am receiving many inquiries lately from those concerned about my daughters health, likely as I have not been updating the site nor answering the phone much lately. In a nutshell, she is doing OK, at this time going through an 'interim maintenance' phase of the treatment so only sick a few days of the week. This will change around Christmas we expect as the treatment gets intense again and will require chemotherapy daily and weekly at times, until spring. I am glad now that I already made the decision NOT to produce a spring print catalog, it would have been too much to handle just yet. I still trust that we will be back on track with a print catalog and a huge selection of fabulous lilies for Fall shipping! Until next time, take care of you and yours - don't forget to smile, its contagious!

Posted: 2009-11-14

Typically our peak bloom is the 20-30 of July, so we are about 2 weeks behind! How are they looking so far? Well, the majority are half the height of their normal selves but others are just as tall as ever and worthy of noting them as more drought tolerant than the average. Quite a few of the early bloomers were blind as they were frozen hard in early June and thus did not bloom.

Overall a prolific amount of blooms per stem was what I noticed last night - perhaps my friend Terry is correct in his theory that the colder the winter the more blooms we see, we did see a very long period of close to -40 degrees celcius last winter.

The Doctors told us we were in for a rollercoaster ride with our daughters recent diagnosis of Leukemia and by now we know they were so right! She is doing well at home and has completed the first month of treatment with no major issues. Now the intense treatment starts, we pray she will continue to remain stable and have only small issues with her health along the way. It was definitely a wise choice to close our gate to the public, I can barely find time to get outdoors and get any photos of the newest lilies, let along manage business other than the orders coming in at the moment.

My sincerest apologies to those still waiting for return calls by phone - this too is something I can not seem to find the time in the day to do, we have a hectic schedule as it is and the added running for treatments and necessities of our new life takes a huge amount of time. Add to that the family and friends who drop in unexpectedly and I don't get much accomplished in a day!

I have not answered the phone these last 3 weeks to save myself from the constant litany of why our gardens are not open after all. This week we start daily treatments so it may be into September before I can return calls at a reasonable time of day. Please bear with me, I know many of you will from the huge amount of emails, faxes and messages sent to us in support. Some of you have made me cry with your kindnesses, my faith has been restored in the goodness of people once again - THANK YOU!

Posted: 2009-08-08

I have decided to continue accepting orders as the bills must still get paid, and we can only remain positive and show her how very hopeful we are by leading as normal a life as possible. The mail order catalog should go in the mail before the end of the month as well.

Already I see numerous supportive emails in my inbox, very few of which I have had time to answer and I thank each and every one of you for your understanding. I have a plethora of phone messages to return, which I hope to do before the end of the week. Having just returned home we need to get our bearings straight, and make some big adjustments to our lifestyle before continuing with business. Keep up the positive thinking - it is working so far!

Posted: 2009-07-19

For now, I am leaving the online catalog active, although the print version has been printed they have not been mailed and I am not certain when they will be as we do not know how long we'll be at the hospital yet. If necessary, I may cancel all orders already submitted and take the online catalog down. I'll only do this if it appears I cannot do a harvest in Fall and be there for her at the same time. At the moment we do not know how long her treatments will last or what the future will hold. I am a firm believer in the power of positive thinking, so please think positive for us!!

Posted: 2009-07-08