After coming home from a few extended trips away, my boyfriend and I were inspired to do a little work on the small yard we have. As a talented cook, my boyfriend always has fresh herbs growing in the house. Additionally, he is always able to resuscitate the brown leaved plants that I seem to create with my lack of plant care skills. So in addition to the small basil, cilantro and lavender plants that were germinating and sprouting, we went out in search of additional plants to plant in our new garden to be.

This proved to be a difficult mission. One place that we had gone to previously was Plant Depot located on Route 9 in Fishkill. Though they had a decent selection, the prices compared to was I was used to growing up was outrageous. The hanging plants were priced between $35-40. I ended up leaving there completely disappointed. While I have a real appreciation for Adam’s Fairacre Wappinger Farms in Falls, their plant selection was not very big and they were out of hanging plants with flowers.

That lead us to our next stop which was Blooming Hill Farm in Blooming Grove, NY.  This is one of my favorite places in the valley, and I pretty sure I have mentioned it in earlier posts. They are a small, independently owned family farm that offers monthly farm dinners, has breakfast on Saturdays, and supplies products to many top rated restaurants in New York City (They also make a few of the farmers markets in Northern Jersey!). Including an outstanding homemade and local produce breakfast, we were able to pick up another lavender plant as well as a rosemary one. We also got a few beautiful flower planters, one with Black Eyed Susans, and another of Zinnias. These we planned on using to spruce up our deck a bit, as well as our home office.

After Blooming Hill Farms, we left in search of a true plant nursery. There used to be a decent one located on Rt. 94 in Salisbury Mills. Pennings Nursery was closed with a sign that said for sale when we drove by. If you check out their website, the latest update says that they are selling wholesale to the public and to call for information. Adament to continue our mission, we looked on yelp for more nurseries, and drive to two more when were both closed.

This lead us to Adam’s Fairacre Farms in Newburgh, NY, our final stop of the day on our gardening mission.

Here we were able to fill up our cart with plenty of perennials to plant in our back yard, a lilac plant, a planter for my front porch, as well as a hanging plant. The price for all of this as well as four bags of soil was approximately $150. We are really happy with how it turned out, and I have a small table in the kitchen with even more plants germinating (small spider plants from the one bigger spider plant that I have managed to not kill on my own!).

I’m excited to see how our garden will grow. In the meantime, I am going to continue my mission to find the smaller farms/nurseries and greeneries to support as well. It was disappointing to see so many out of business in such a lush and farm friendly area. I will not resort to purchasing my plants at a Lowes or a Home Depot. While we didn’t make it to Warwick or New Paltz, both are places I would like to check out in the hopes of finding farms like the ones I had as a child.

Does anyone else know of local farms that sells plants (flowers, herbs, veggies) to the public in the Hudson Valley? I’d be curious of those especially in the mid and upper valley areas. Please share any that you know of!