Summer Greenhouse Musings

What an incredible year this has been -- so incredible that it's been difficult to sit down and write the blog. I promise to do better!

The greenhouse is overflowing with spectacular plants, some of last year's seedlings are now more than two feet tall, and this year's crop looks like it's going to be even better. We missed getting any Mexican seeds in a series of miscommunications but it looks like the trees in Key West will more than make up for it.

The funny thing is, I really thought we had lost those trees. They went through four major storms last year -- including Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma -- and lost every leaf every time. After Wilma, they stood in 2.5 feet of salt water in the worst storm surge seen on the island in at least 100 years. It wasn't until late this spring that they grew new leaves and you could see a few sporadic flowers if you looked hard.

I flew home last week for Hurricane Ernesto -- my mother has lived there her entire life and won't leave -- and was absolutely astonished to see hundreds of seeds on their patio and even more still up in the trees. Somehow they'd managed to ripen without anyone even noticing them. We were lucky again and Ernesto blew just hard enough to knock the rest of the ripe seeds to the ground so I could pack them up and bring them back to the greenhouse in Brandon.

Some of them had started to sprout even before we could get them in pots and they're coming up now with a vengeance. The trees here are fruiting too, so we should have seedlings available for quite a while. We won't be able to ship seeds overseas though, because all the trees we're harvesting from are too high to pick the seeds before they hit the ground. Governments don't like that because they could pick up a disease -- not that anything is likely to attach itself to a neem seed, but it's the law and we obviously need to follow it.

We'll start shipping the sprouted seeds in the US beginning Monday with the same special offer for regular customers as we're making on most other greenhouse products -- buy one set and get one for half off. The price on the sprouts hasn't changed -- they $10 for 10 or $15 for 20. You have to ask for the special though, just include a note in the comment section.

Thanks for your patience -- I'll write again soon, we've got some really great things happening on the research front (compiling the nearly 500 articles PubMed on neem into easy-to-search reports) and new products, including an anti-itch formula that's getting rave reviews from the people who have tried it!