Life Lived

Saturday’s effort to enjoy the sun took us to GardenPalooa 2016 at Fir Point Farms in Aurora, OR. It was a collection of smaller nurseries and garden vendors showcasing plants and wares in tents and greenhouse buildings.

The location for this outing was not quite an hour south of home in an area where there are many growers and nurseries. We wanted to go just to get away from home and be able to walk around in the sunshine and enjoy the air. We weren’t expecting much so we were not disappointed whenever there was not much at this event to get excited over.

Several of the nursery vendors specialized in the type of plants that they grew and sold though some were there selling varying items. Basically you could walk through the different tents and greenhouses to a vendor’s stall or location and purchase something if you liked what you saw. Ground covers and smaller plants were on display in many vendor’s spaces including those grown by other commercial nurseries in the area. It is always fun to see these as we could never grow anything like this in Bakersfield where it was too hot for them.
One vendor, who specialized in geraniums, was there and brought out other limited plantings such as daisies and heucheras. By the time we had arrived it looked as though she had gone through most of her plant inventory. We looked over the different items she had and waited to get her attention. She was a popular vendor. We saw some great daisies but deciding where to plant them was a challenge. So, we purchased a few geraniums for pots that we have available since these plants were grown specifically for acclimation to the outdoors of our PNW home.

We walked the rest of the grounds as well as looking through each and every tent and greenhouse, even the on sight food building to see what was offered up. One of the vendors at this event was an ironwork creator that we had seen on tv several times. Having wanted to see his work we had the opportunity to do that today as well. No, we did not buy the rusting round arbors that seemed to be strategically located at entrances and exits. We did not even buy the cheaper garden art offerings he had. We just took the event in and enjoyed the sunshine content to leave with our two geranium plant.