Common Questions

Everyone is welcome at our nursery!  We are open Wednesday to Saturday 9am-5pm. We do retail sales from our extensive display garden, and each item is priced individually.

We are located at 9660 Pelly Road, in East Chilliwack less than five minutes from the Annis Road exit off TransCanada Highway 1. 

We officially shut down at the end of November and re-open our store on March 1st. During the winter we work on maintaining our gardens and plants, prepare the nursery for the next season, and plan our crops for the next year.  We still have many plants on the nursery during this time and we remain available by appointment during the winter months.  

If a holiday falls within our regular business days we will be open. 

We offer in person garden consultations in the lower mainland and as far West as Vancouver and as far East as Hope. Our consultations are generally 2 hour sessions and they help homeowners answer questions about  how to layout a new garden, or develop a planting palette for a difficult site, or create a theme for their garden among other garden design related questions.

Most of our grasses and perennials are homegrown, as well as a large proportion of the shrubs.  Some of our trees and fruit trees are started at other nurseries as field grown plants which we purchase as bare root trees and grow on in pots until they are ready for sale. Not all of the plants in our nursery are grown by us.  Our selection is too large to be able to grow every plant that we sell. 

We are not a certified organic nursery.  We grow all of our plants without the use of pesticides and herbicide sprays. Our soil is a bark and peat moss based medium with some fertilizers and soil amendments present to help feed the plants. Our vegetable starters are grown without chemical fertilizers since we have found a way to give them the nutrients they need with a blend of our own homemade compost. 

We grow our vegetable seedlings in living soil because we believe that most soil organisms are beneficial to plant health.  The compost that we use has been aged for at least a year and often contains earthworms and other living organisms that establish early interactions with the plant’s roots.  Most growers use sterilized soil that has had all beneficial microbes destroyed which we believe is detrimental to plant health.

Hardiness is a relative term depending on where you live.  In Chilliwack we are considered a zone 6, which refers to our winter cold temperatures that can drop into the negative teens. We sell mostly plants that are hardy to zone 6 or colder to help ensure your success with plants.  We do offer some plants, such as dahlias, that are not hardy but can be taken indoors for the winter months.

Generally your plant will be happier in the ground then it will be in the plastic pot that it came in.  If for some reason you can not get to planting them right away, place them in a protected spot out of drying winds and hot sun within easy access of a tap.  Water them regularly until they can be planted out.

When planting the plant into the garden, dig a hole larger than the pot and mix in a liter or two of compost.  Place the plant into the hole and position the top of the root ball to be at the same height as the existing topsoil.  Back fill the hole with a mix of compost and existing soil.  This is a general rule but each plant will have its own preference for soil fertility and composition.  Water the new planting with “Root Rescue” mycorrhizal fungi to get the new plants off to a great start.  In the beginning the plants will require watering every few days  until they have established. 

You can leave the plants in pots but they are more likely to thrive when planted in larger containers or into the ground. Keeping a potted plant alive in the winter can be challenging and we recommend either burying the entire pot in the ground or surrounding the pot with a mound of sawdust or bark mulch.