Hi ncrescue,

I live in W-S and alot of the speciality gardenening stores such as Briar Patch and LA Reynolds has already had their major markdown. They usually do it around the July 4th. LA Reynolds had, 40% off their entire gardening store including plants/trees. Briar Patch had their perennials at 65% off a couple of weeks ago.

Lowe's constantly have markdowns on their plants on a weekly basis - you just have to hit it at the right time. I've got several things from Lowes for a $1.00 or $2.00. After a little bit of nurturing they seem to do ok for me.

I hope this helps. What does PD and BB stand for?

Thanks,

jdbheartease

This is a copy of what Triangle John wrote last year:

"Years ago this website was constructed and administrated by a man named Spike. There were 'monitors' that visited all the various forums and made sure everyone played by the rules. If people complained about your responses or if anyone suspected you of breaking the rules the monitor would step in and settle things. You could be banned for a temporary amount of time or forever, all depending on your offence.

Nowadays this site is owned and operated by iVillage and they don't seem to have as many monitors or they wait til folks send them an email detailing something going wrong in the forums before they take action. One of the actions they took was against the nursery you're asking about. This nursery supposedly sent out spam messages to folks visiting and postin on this forum (Carolina Gardening). So now if anyone uses the name of that business in a message the message is blocked and if you try to use it again you can be banned from the forum. All of this is silly since the nursery in question barely has their website up and running and were no where near as computer savvy way back when the banning took place. So we can't mention their name but none of us believe they did what they were accused of doing. It clearly states in the rules that any mention of any businesses name is a form of advertising whether you own the business or not so no one is supposed to be naming names anyway - but like I said, there don't appear to be the active monitors that there once were.

BB stands for two words. The first word is a three letter word meaning "large". The second word stands for "flower", begins with a "B" and is also used to mean ladies underwear (at least in old jokes). The nursery is in Sanford about an hour south of Raleigh on Hwy 1. They grow everything - and I mean everything."

I will add that PD is a nursery near Raleigh that is open only on specific days and specializes in mail order. They have mostly new, cutting edge things. P rhymes with ant, and D with all right...the word was brought into the public eye years ago with a song called "Afternoon D." Guess I am showing my age!

Thanks for your info on WS places.

BB's has a website and you can sign up for updates on sales and events. Perennials almost never go on sale but the owner was thinking about it this year. Don't know if he will do it or not. Right now all annuals (which includes some tender perennials and some outright perennials) are all half price. If you sign up you will automatically be sent an email when they are having sales. Adele

I apologize for mentioning those Businesses names in Winston-Salem. I know now not to do that for future responses. Thanks for informing me. jdbheartease

Sticking with the secret code: a certain garden center on Raleigh's southside, lets say on the corner of Campbell Rd and Tryon Rd, is having their greenhouse clearance sale. A lot of large tropicals are down to $5 and after a while they drop them to $1 but they can be pretty picked over. They have other things on sale but the big tropical sale is always a hit with local gardeners.

jbheartease - I wouldn't worry too much about it. Things aren't as strict as they used to be. I also believe that this website is for sale (again!) so it will eventually have new ownership and the rules will change - again.

I think that part of the problem is that many businesses surf the web and check out what gardeners are talking about. If an employee sees a lot of chatter about a certain business that caught them by surprise because they assumed it was too far away to have much impact on triangle shoppers... they might get upset enough to write in a complaint and have that business' name banned from use on this website. Charges that are totally false and unfounded but they linger on and on years after all this happened. This is one of the problems with the anonymity of the web.

On some other forums, we're always recommending seed companies, mail order places, plants from certain growers, etc. It's just that one of our NC faves (BB) got caught up in this unfortunate situation. Once in awhile, I still type in their full name and get that slamming message not to do it. Too bad.

I've been surprised by the lack of discount sales at our local retailers so far. If there's rain in the forecast, I'll plant all summer long. September is my favorite month for planting.