Warm Comfort Farm

Our colder than usual winter and spring continue to set back shipping dates for some varieties.  Our winning "positive customer quote" of the week from Joyce in Texas is below.  All customers like this are encouraged to order with us! :-)

How wonderful! Such personal attention is greatly appreciated. I will not expect to receive any discount as long as the plants live after I receive them. No one controls the weather - and the service you provide more than compensates for any lack of top growth when I get the roses. Thank you so much - I'll watch for a shipping notice e-mail in the next couple of weeks.

Everything's Coming Up Roses!

It's that great time of year when the rose babies in the cold frames are starting to do what we all expect of roses - bloom! We're still more than a month away from peak bloom in the garden, so it's always great to have some early blooms - especially if it's a variety that is new to us and we need a good photo, or I need to see if it really IS fragrant, etc.

These days I'm inside in the office most of the day (and sometimes into the night) getting your shipping paperwork in order, so there are usually a few deliveries of flower heads (no long stems allowed) to my desk by Tracy as the day progresses. Today included Pope John Paul II with the strongest citrus fragrance of any white yet. Tracy and I decided it was bordering on grapefruit. Earlier flowers seemed to have some green in them and this one has more cream color. Certainly a rose with a long happy history in front of it. Let's also hope that J&P will continue their liner program of this rose or we won't be able to sell it again until the patent runs out in 2027 and by then we definitely WON'T be in business! I'd better reserve my plant of it now, for my own garden...I've also got a flower of Dream Come True on the desk along with Velvet Fragrance.

A few days ago he brought a Talisman rose and I still remember the first time I realized it smelled exactly like the Gewurztraminer grape juice from Navarro Vineyards that we are fond of.

Last week in flowers I had a Marketing 101 refresher course. Tracy brought in a HUGE 6+" flower of First Prize. There was no wonder that this rose was named that as the form was perfect, the bloom was huge and could not be ignored. A friend walked into the house and made a bee-line directly over to the flower saying she rarely liked pink roses, but the color of this one was superb. I was left wondering why we had so few orders for this rose plant this season when I checked the photo of the one on-line . Ugh - wonder-no-more! In this case it probably would have been better to have no picture than the one we had of two not even open buds with some brown water-damaged edges. I've really learned that "better than nothing" still has to be "good enough to showcase the roses' best features". So, here's the new photo we are using of that big bloom from one of the baby plants. Let's see how it sells now!

Until the next chance we get to write...