Shipping Dates 2010

For details about Spring Shipping scroll down.

Currently, we're at the beginning of a long hot summer. Some people like to plant in the Summer and for most plant materials that isn't a problem as long as you have good irrigation. However, shipping can be another story. For many plants it isn't a problem, but for some it can be. There are certain plants we just can't ship in the heat such as Scotch Moss, Corsican Mint and Elfin Thyme. For others it can still be risky so from June 20th to September 10th you receive plants at your own risk. Please specify in the field labeled "Shipping Instructions" whether you want to receive your order now or wait until Fall. If you choose to wait until Fall, we'll watch your local weather and ship when temperatures fall to the mid-to-low 80s for several days both in your location and in ours. 

Spring 2010 Shipping:

First we should mention that some people want their plants earlier than their climate would normally permit because they have a greenhouse or coldframe and that's fine with us. Just let us know what ship date you would like in the shipping instructions, otherwise we'll determine the shipping date as described below.

For those who don't give us instructions to ship early:

We don't use hardiness zones (like some sites do) to decide when to ship, since two cities with the same exact average low temperature can have average dates of the last freeze a month-and-a-half apart. Unfortunately though, there aren't any easy tools (like there are for the hardiness zones) that we've found where we can plug in a zip code and instantly find the average date of the last freeze. So this is what we do:

We go to:

http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/reallylonglink

There we look up your city or town (or the weather station that's closest to it) by clicking on a state in the list menu. Let's say you live in Abilene, Texas. We would click on Texas and then see the listing for Abeline's Airport weather station:

We've circled the date we use as an approximate ship date for your order.

What the chart says is that after

April 2nd, in Abilene, there is about a

10% chance of having temperatures

under 28° F.  You might be saying

"Oh no! There's still a (greater than)

1 in 10 chance my plants will get below

32° F and freeze!" That would be true

if we were talking about annuals. But

these are perennials and all but 7 of our plants (6 perennials and 1 groundcover)

are rated as hardy in Zone 5 or colder.

In Zone 5 the temperatures can get as

low as -20° F and these plants, once established, will survive. Of course your plugs won't be established so they'll be more tender but if you plant them well

and mulch them and make sure they're watered well before any cold snap hits,

they definitely won't even be phased if the unlikely happens and temperatures drop into the teens for a day or two. As for the 7 plants that are more tender, they will delay your order (click on the link to see the length of the delay) unless you tell us in the shipping instructions to ship them earlier or unless you notify us that you want to pay additional shipping to ship the more tender plugs on a later date than the rest of your order.