Shop Local
by Theresa Fowler
Chamber of Commerce
As the weather improves thoughts turn to home improvements and gardening. The Presque Isle area has a number of businesses that can help with both! Enjoy some time visiting local businesses and seeing what inspires you.
There are many garden centers in the area that can provide plants and offer gardening advice. It looks like we may not have frost again this spring, but we all know that we can’t be sure for a few weeks yet.
Bonnie Kinney of Kinney’s Flowers offers the following tips about choosing plants for your garden:
When purchasing Perennials you should look for Zone 3. Zone 4, if put next to a building sometimes will survive. To be safe only get Zone 3.
Some think that if you plant perennials you will have color all season. While selections of perennials can be made that provide blooms from earliest spring until killing frost or even somewhat later, mixed gardens consisting of perennials and annuals provide a more colorful, continuous display than gardens devoted entirely to perennials. This is because most perennials, as compared with most annuals, have comparatively short periods of bloom and so a garden filled with perennials is likely to have only a small proportion of its total area in flower at any one time. When arranging perennials it is important to leave definite areas between the groups of perennials to put in annuals if desired.
Another misgiving people have is they should not dig up and divide perennials until fall. You should dig them as soon as they go out of bloom. You can just put a shovel down through them and divide that way. The plants root system must get established in the ground in northern Maine to survive the winter. Perennials planted in late fall will not get their roots established and the frost will push them out of the ground.
People love tulips but don’t like the mess they leave when they go out of flower. The leaves must stay uncut for the tulip to get its food for the next year. A suggestion: you can plant your tulips with your Hostas, the tulips will go by and the Hosta will grow and cover up the tulips leaves.
Annuals: At Kinney’s Flowers they have hundred’s of hanging baskets in over 50 different combinations and a good variety of bedding plants.
With the economy, vegetables are a must! Kinney’s has again this year the ever popular tomato in hanging baskets. For vegetables, they have cucumbers, squash, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, dill, onions red and green peppers and more.
Kinney’s Flowers is located at 732 Houlton Road. Going south just 7 miles from the college on the left or one mile north of the Westfield four corners on right. They are open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; Wednesday and Saturday from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday from 1-5 p.m.
You can also see their flowers at Graves Shop N’ Save, Star City IGA and Washburn Food Mart.
Enjoy shopping, planting and the bounty of your garden, whether it is vegetable or flower.
