Greetings! Generally, from necessity, we’re the type of people who stick to our own little world, growing our plants and minding our own business. As other gardeners are well aware, especially in spring, there’s not a lot of time for much else. With our recent water issues, we’ve had to come out of our comfort zone and focus on this huge issue. We’ve had to ask for help, primarily in the form of asking people to sign our petition. We now have over 2000 signatures between our online and physical petitions. Our topic of conversation for months has been water. We’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by your respone to our situation and it’s hard to adequately express our gratitude. We’d like to send a huge thank you to everybody for your support. It’s an ongoing issue and we’ll try to keep you updated on our facebook page. We’d especially like to thank the “Friends of Thimble Farms” for all your efforts on our behalf…we’re at a loss for words and get quite emotional just thinking about what you’ve done for us.
As a result of our unusually cold winter, we’re a bit behind our winter schedule. It was hard to get much winter cleanup accomplished when we were frozen for several weeks (rare for us) and we won’t be able to determine how many plant losses we suffered until spring. Keep an eye on our ‘sold out’ page for anything that might become unavailable due to the cold weather as well as selling out. We’ll update that list from time to time as we become aware of those plants.
Our first major event in 2017 will be ‘Helleborganza’(Hellebores), February 14th-March 31st . Helleborganza is our celebration of hellebores and other early blooming perennials including species snowdrops, flowering cherry trees, Adonis and double hepaticas to name a few. We are absolutely hellebore crazy and love to see the reaction of people (especially those new to hellebores) when they see the incredible diversity in both blooms and foliage at a time of year when we can all use more colour in our gardens. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the dedicated hellebore breeders around the world who have toiled over the last twenty odd years to bring us so many fine plants. The event will run over a month this year as every day more and more plants come into bloom. As we did last year, we will also offer an assortment of smaller and larger plant sizes. Please see our website, www.thimblefarms.com for mouth watering pictures. This year we have increased our numbers in the varieties and strains we believe have the best flower colour and put on the best show, like the Winter Jewels strains. Discounts and specials will be offered at the nursery at this time.
Our next event, March 1st (?) – April 14th will be our Yukiwariso festival, a celebration of hepaticas. We would really like to encourage people to look at some of the images on our facebook page that show the incredible diversity in this group. Timing of this event is hard so in early-march we will post an update on the events pages as to the best time to visit on our facebookpage. I encourage those interested to look at our events page and our Japanese hepatica page.
We would like to offer a PDF version of the catalogue via email as well as occasional emails about new offerings. If you would like to receive these emails please see the instructions on page two.
New plants will be posted on our Facebook page as well as a new page on our web site called ‘New Plants’ before being posted in the main listing of the website. This way we will be able to post new plants throughout the year.
There are new plant introductions scattered throughout the catalogue in almost every group of plants we grow. Please keep in mind we have thousands more plants available at the nursery (not listed on the website) including a huge selection of nursery stock, annuals, hanging baskets and one of the most diverse offerings of food producing plants anywhere.
We would like to thank our customers, staff and suppliers for a great year and we’re looking forward to a fantastic 2017,
Thank you, Richard and Nancy Fraser
