Welcome to the podcast. My exquisitely wonderful daughter and my exquisitely adorable three of my five grandchildren, the other two come from my other son. But anyway, they show up at the house, and actually, the oldest one, Sage, who was eight, had to spend the day with me, but I couldn't spend the day because I had doctor stuff to do yesterday. So my son, Zach, came over, and he hung out with Sage all day, and then the other kids came, and by the time I got home, and I brought McDonald's home for dinner.
Such a good dad. And it was just crazy. There was no way I was recording anything last night because they were everywhere doing everything, and they don't sleep. I don't understand.
I'm too old. I love my grandchildren dearly, but, man, they just, you know, they just do that. They just, God love them. Middle grandson there, River, just absolutely adores me, you know, and had a rough time going to sleep last night, and I'm in my bedroom sound asleep at 2 o'clock in the morning, and he is up, and he is not happy with the world.
And I'm, okay, this is how these things are going to go. Oh, well, you all have grandkids. Not all of you have grandkids, but someday you will. And grandkids are, you know, generally so much better than normal kids.
You know, you have your kids. You love your kids. I love all my kids. I love them all.
But then you have grandkids, and grandkids are just so darn cool. They're just so awesome. I just, I'm just, I just love them. But, you know, a little bit of them seem to be going a long way these days.
I don't know. Enough about that. What do I want to talk about today, besides my yard, which I'm totally not happy with, but getting that way. I want to say that this is the, I'm recording this on the 17th of January, and you know what?
I did not get one single solitary thing of this year or last year. Usually in December, they start to come. I did not get a seed catalog. And boo-hoo to the seed catalog people who are, there's not very many seed catalog people left.
I think Burpee's out there and some of the other, a few other large ones. I don't even know if they put out a catalog anymore, because it's been a couple years since I got one. And you know what? For the past 35 years, I get these catalogs.
Especially when I'm on the radio, I get these catalogs. And guess what I always, always, without fail, always do every year? I buy seeds. I buy seeds I'm never going to plant.
I go, I, you know, I don't like to do this on the internet. I like to do this with a catalog that I sit down on my dining room table and lovingly go through. And if somebody sends me a seed catalog, I'm going to spend money and buy seeds. Now, you don't spend a lot of money.
Sometimes you do. But I would say, in my height, when I was getting a lot of seed catalogs, I was spending three, four, 500 bucks a year on seeds and starter plants and things like this. And most of which I gave away to friends. But, you know, a bunch of them, I planted.
And I used to plant them like crazy. I just planted a lot of seeds, a lot of perennials, a lot of annuals, just a lot of seeds. I just, but I gave them away to all kinds of people I would give seeds away to. And this year, I didn't buy any because they didn't send me catalogs.
I guess I'm supposed to go on that thing, that internet thing, and look for them. I don't want to look for them. If you want to sell me something, present it to me, I guess. I don't know, especially when it comes to seeds.
Not so much anything else, but seeds. That's just like a spiritual thing for me every year, getting these seed catalogs. And I would get seed catalogs that were actually, back in the day, mimeographed from, you know, heirloom seed people. Mimeographed seed catalogs that were just stapled together.
And I would order from them. I would do that. I would get literally gads with these catalogs and send off for things like this. I remember once a seed catalog or seed company from out in, I believe, Oregon.
They sent me a catalog that was so amateuristic, but you could just tell it was so wholesome. And I think I spent 70 bucks with them. And I did this, and they sent me a bunch of seeds. They sent me all the seeds I ordered.
But they were so grateful that I'd spent the money that I'd spent with them, and I'd talked about them on the radio. They sent me a collection of seeds that were 80 years old. And that they had somehow come in contact with and said, do you want to plant these? And you know what?
I did, but I was busy at the time. So I gave them to a lady, a horticulturist lady friend of mine down in Pinellas Park, Florida. And I said, I don't even know what these are. You know, and she had a couple of ideas of what they may be.
So she laid out flats, and she planted every darn one of them. I think she put out four or five flats and planted all of them. And I was thinking, you know, these are 30-some-year-old seeds. Are they even going to come up?
You'd be surprised. About 35% of them came up. It was pretty cool. And she just loved it.
It was fabulous. It was just absolutely fabulous. But no more seed catalogs. Home Depot.
Yeah, that's right. I was trying to think about it. Home Depot or Lowe's. I was at Home Depot buying spray paint and had a piece of garden furniture I wanted to.
I bought Rust-Oleum. I've never used Rust-Oleum before. I'm old, and I've never used Rust-Oleum before. But anyway, I bought Rust-Oleum.
I go by, and I see a seed thingy there, an old platform of seeds. And I said, I'm going to look at seeds. Nobody's going to be catalogs. I'm going to look at seeds.
I'm probably going to buy some seeds. And I looked at the seeds, and I just sat there, and I decided I was going to buy some annuals. And, you know, they were cheap. I was going to buy some annuals.
I'm walking to the cash register. He kept saying, you're not going to plant those. We get up to the cash register. And, by the way, we went to the self-checkout.
I'm kind of a fan of self-checkout. A lot of people are not, but I'm kind of a fan. And we get up to the self-checkout, and he goes, tell me when you're going to plant these. Just give me an idea of when this is going to happen, because I want to document it.
I want to come over and see if you actually do it. And I said, I'm going to probably do it, you know, tomorrow. What time tomorrow? I don't know.
He said, hey, listen, we're working together. Why don't we just take them now, and we're going to go straight to your house and plant them? I said, we have to go someplace else. We have other things.
You're not going to plant those seeds. By the time I ran my little can of rust-oleum through the thing, it was a lot more expensive than I thought, too. But by the time that all happened, Zach had the seeds in his hand, and he set them up on a shelf up on the counter. He said, you're not going to buy these.
I said, okay, I'm not going to buy those. And now, had they come in the catalog? I would have bought the darn things. Would I have planted them?
Who knows? Probably some. Maybe not. I don't know.
I've been busy lately. But I probably would have, but one store didn't buy it. That was it, up on the shelf. They didn't get bought.
Now somebody there at Home Depot is going to take these things and put them back where they belong. But the other thing, he said, yeah, usually when you buy stuff, you see that a lot of stuff is missing that it's gone because it's been selling. And I said, yeah, did that stand there look like they've sold a lot of stuff? And I said, well, no.
He goes, no. And I said, all right, maybe the seed thing is over. Maybe the seed thing is over, which brings me to yesterday when I had a doctor's thing I had to do. And I drove by what used to be Jim's Harley-Davidson's in St.
Petersburg on the way to the doctor's. And guess what? It was gone. It was absolutely gone.
And I said, what? And so I went to my doctor's thing. I came back that way. I said, I want to drive in there and see if it moved because I have friends.
I have lots of friends. My friend Ralph and Jim, they bought two motorcycles there. I have other friends who bought. I'm not a motorcycle person.
I have lots of friends who are who have bought motorcycles. And by the way, none of these friends have motorcycles anymore. And I just wanted to drive in and see if there was a sign on the door that said, you know, moved. And there was no sign on the door.
It was just everything gone, everything out of there. And as I did that, a guy drives in with a Harley-Davidson on a trailer. And he said, are they closed? I said, looks like it.
He goes, wow. So I guess motorcycles, I guess Harley-Davidson's are kind of, you know, it's like seeds, seasonal. That for many, many years, they were very popular. And now, not so much.
Because Jim Harley-Davidson was like gone. And just vaporized. Gone. Out of there.
What can I say? It's like gardening radio shows. There used to be a ton of them. Now there's just, you know, a very few.
Oh, well. You're listening to Ask the Garden Geek. Oh, by the way, I sent my book out that I gave away to another guy. And guess what?
He didn't send it back. Yay! Yay! Yay!