Monday, February 13, 2012

Flower and Garden Show 2012

     This was our sixth year participating in the Seattle Flower and Garden Show.  The mason bee booth has been a lot of fun over the years and I have especially enjoyed having my children and grand children involved.  For the last three years Rachel Kang has served as our cashier.  This year Rachel passed the baton to her younger sister, Autumn. However, she still ended up working at the show for three days due to some emergency staffing problems.  I couldn't have gotten through it without a lot of help from family and friends, including the two smiling helpers pictured below.
Beth Tunnell and Sarah Kang showing off big smiles and this years mason bee shirts.

     I  didn't take many pictures to speak of because I didn't think to bring a camera besides my new iPhone, which was being used to process credit cards at the booth.  Whenever I was able to take a break and walk around the show I always had to leave the phone behind.  That little piece of technology worked very well. There were only a few times we had to imprint a card manually to be ran later at the store. Not that I wasn't already very thrilled with the new iPhone. Since the capability for real time credit card processing at the garden show was the original justification for the fancy phone it was very nice that it worked out so well.

    I have mixed feelings about doing the show again.  Linda has already made dire threats if I do it again next year.  On one hand, I love being at the show and the great experience it has been for some of the grandkids.  On the other hand, it is a lot of work.  We didn't do as well this year as we have in the past, That is probably a reflection of our sour economy more than anything else.  As always, I saw a number  of our regular bee store customers at the show and met some interesting people.  I guess if I don't do the garden show next year, the grandkids will just have to settle for quality time with grandpa at the bee store.

    This year our booth was directly across from the Italian Country Home and Kitchen booth. The booth belongs to a pleasant Italian woman from Cremona named Francesca.  Among other wonderful things, she sells traditional hand stamped Italian linens. She buys them from a family which has been making them for a number of generations.  She had a few of the hand carved wooden stamps on display at her booth.  It looked like a very worthy carving project, only I would have to make something with bees and straw skeps.  The stamps in the picture were hand carved from pear wood.
hand carved wooden stamps


        The booth on our left was selling these wonderful "Roo" garden aprons which are really just very nice apple picking aprons.  That booth belonged to a very nice young couple from Spokane. I thought the aprons were very reasonably priced so I bought one.  I also stocked up on seed potatoes and onion plants and sets at Irish Eyes Seeds, located just around the corner from our booth.

       As of the morning after the end of the garden show the score stands at Ducks 14, Chickens 0.  The chickens are falling farther and farther behind.
 

2 comments:

  1. Cutest mason bee shirts yet! :) Miss you all.

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    1. We miss you too. I wish you could have been here for the garden show. I could have shared my seed potatoes and onion starts with you.

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