Welcome to the Willow Creek Garden Center home page! We are a family-owned nursery and garden center on the county road just north of town, and we've been helping folks in the area plant their yards since my father put up the first greenhouse in 1975. We grow a good part of what we sell right here, we know what does well in this climate because we've killed our share finding out, and we'd rather sell you the right plant than the most plants.

This page is mostly for our fall customers. Fall is the best planting season for trees, shrubs and perennials, better than spring, and every year we have to talk people into it. Read on and we'll try to talk you into it too.

In Stock Now - Fall 1999 Garden mums, hundreds of them, in 8-inch pots, yellow, bronze, rust, purple, white and pink. $4.99 each, 3 for $12. Budded and just starting to open, so they'll give you color into November. Fall asters, purple and pink, in gallon pots, $6.99. Hardy perennials; plant them and they come back. Ornamental kale and cabbage, $2.99. Pumpkins, gourds, straw bales and corn shocks for the porch. Spring-flowering bulbs just arrived (see below). Shade trees (maple, oak, linden, honeylocust) and flowering trees (crabapple, serviceberry, redbud, dogwood) in containers and balled-and-burlapped, 6 to 12 feet. Evergreens: spruce, arborvitae, yew, juniper, boxwood. Shrubs: lilac, hydrangea, viburnum, spirea, burning bush, forsythia, red-twig dogwood and more. Perennials: everything left from the season, and it's ON SALE. Bagged mulch, topsoil, compost and peat moss; lawn seed and fall fertilizer; burlap and tree wrap for winter protection.

The tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, crocus, alliums and grape hyacinths are in. Buy them now while the selection is good, but plant them in October or November, once the soil has cooled off; a stretch of nights in the 40s is the signal. They need the cold winter to bloom. Around here you can plant right up until the ground freezes hard, so there is no rush, but don't leave them in the garage until March either. Quick tips:

• Depth: about three times as deep as the bulb is tall. Big tulips and daffodils, 6 to 8 inches; small crocus, 3 to 4 inches. Pointy end up.
• Plant in groups of at least 7 to 12 of a kind, not single file along the walk. They look better in clumps.
• Drainage matters more than anything else. Bulbs rot in soggy ground.
• Water once after planting, mulch, and forget about them till spring.
• Squirrels and chipmunks dig up tulips and crocus. Daffodils they leave alone (the bulbs are poisonous to them). Lay a piece of chicken wire over the planting and mulch over it, or plant daffodils.
• Daffodils and most of the small bulbs come back and multiply year after year. Most fancy tulips fade out after two or three years; treat them like a party, not a marriage.

Prices from $3.99 a bag for crocus to $8.99 for the big Darwin hybrid tulips, and we have bulk bins of daffodils by the dozen.

In fall the air is cool and the soil is still warm, which is exactly what a new tree wants: the top stops growing and asks nothing of the roots, and the roots keep growing until the ground freezes. A tree planted in October has a whole extra root season before it has to face a hot July. Fall-planted trees almost always do better than spring-planted ones in our experience, and there's less watering. Here's how we do it:

1. Dig the hole two to three times as WIDE as the root ball, but NO DEEPER than the root ball is tall. The most common mistake we see is planting too deep. Find the root flare (where the trunk widens out into roots) and that should sit right at, or an inch above, the surrounding ground when you're done. If the tree came with soil piled up over the flare in the pot, scrape it off to find it.
2. Set the tree in the hole and check the height by laying a shovel handle across the hole. Adjust before you fill.
3. Container trees: slide the pot off. If the roots are circling the outside, cut through them in three or four places with a knife or tease them loose; otherwise they keep circling and strangle the tree years later.
   Balled-and-burlapped trees: set the ball in the hole, then cut and remove the twine, fold the burlap down off the top third of the ball (or cut it away), and cut off the top rings of the wire basket if there is one. Don't try to take everything off; you'll break up the ball.
4. Backfill with the same soil you dug out. Don't fill the hole with peat and potting soil; the roots will stay in the cushy hole and never venture into the real ground. Break up the clods, fill halfway, water to settle, fill the rest, and water again. Don't stomp it down.
5. Mulch 2 to 3 inches deep in a wide ring, and keep the mulch a few inches away from the trunk. No mulch volcanoes. Piling mulch against the bark rots it and invites mice.
6. Water deeply once a week (a slow trickle from the hose for a half hour, or a bucket or two) until the ground freezes, unless it's raining regularly. This is the one thing you must not skip. Next spring, keep it up through the first summer.
7. Stake only if you have to (a windy spot, a top-heavy tree), loosely, and take the stakes off after one year.
8. Wrap the trunks of young, thin-barked trees (maples, crabapples, lindens) with paper tree wrap in November and take it off in April. It prevents frost cracking and sunscald.
9. Skip the fertilizer the first year.

Shrubs, same rules, smaller hole. Evergreens should go in by mid-October so they have time to settle before the ground freezes; give them a deep watering in late November before you put the hose away.

Every tree and shrub we sell is guaranteed for one year if you plant it the way we tell you and keep it watered. Bring your receipt.

Fall is also when the lawn is made or lost. Cool-season grasses (bluegrass, fescue, ryegrass, which is what we all have here) do their real growing in September and October.

Fall hours (through Sunday, November 21): Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. After Thanksgiving we're open for Christmas trees, wreaths and greens on weekends only until Christmas Eve, then closed until the greenhouse opens again in March.

Delivery: we deliver anything you can't get in your car, within 15 miles of the nursery, for a flat $25 (free on orders over $300). We'll set a tree next to the hole; digging the hole is up to you, unless you've hired a crew. Usually next-day, two days at the busiest times.

We're on the county road about two miles north of the town square, on the left, look for the big willow and the red sign. Cash, check, Visa and MasterCard.

Questions: [email protected], or call us at (555) 555-0142 during business hours. E-mail is checked every evening when we close.

My father, George, started Willow Creek in 1975 with one plastic-covered greenhouse, a pickup truck, and a field of bare-root trees he'd planted the year before and had to keep alive long enough to sell. My mother kept the books at the kitchen table and ran the cash register on weekends. I grew up potting up perennials for a nickel apiece, went away to study horticulture, and came back in 1987 because it turns out I couldn't stay away. My wife and I run the place day to day now; Dad still comes in most mornings to walk the tree rows and tell us what we're doing wrong, and he's usually right. Our kids are the third generation to pull weeds in the perennial beds, whether they wanted to or not.

Twenty-four years on, we're still small enough to know what's in every pot and who bought the last one. Thanks for stopping by, and come see us this fall.

- Nick P., for the whole family

Some gardening pages on GeoCities we enjoy: Betty's Backyard Vegetable Patch (a good customer), African Violet Addict, Hilltop Herb Farm, and Hartley Hardware & Garden.