What a blur the past two months have been! We’ve had record breaking floods and tornadoes, spent five days in St. Louis, held a couple events here at the nursery, and are getting ready to head off to Chicago! Despite all the doom and gloom about the economy, our spring season has been relatively good to us. That is, as long as you don’t take into consideration the fact that we meet ourselves coming and going!

We kicked off the spring on Mother’s Day weekend with our Spring in the Country Open House. The weather cooperated for the most part, though Sunday was a little wet and windy. We’ve dealt with much worse! We had an excellent turnout - thank you to everyone who stopped out that weekend! We are especially grateful to a couple special friends who pitched in to help keep things moving smoothly. Everyone seemed to be eager to get dirty in the garden after the long, snowy winter and it was great to see so many friends again.

Just a few weeks later in early June, we headed to St. Louis for the National Hosta Convention. This was only my second National Convention and Jim’s first, so we were both looking forward to it. We were signed up to vend and packed the mini van tight with our goods. Because of the very limited space in the van, we could only take a small selection of plants. The plants we took sold extremely well, though. In fact, we only brought home a couple flats of unsold plants. Of course, you couldn’t tell with all the new things we bought! We also expanded our hosta gift items to include mouse pads, key chains, checkbook covers, coasters, bookmarks, and three new t-shirt designs. These fun hosta accessories were quite popular and we hope to add some of these to our online store soon.

Hostas bring people together from around the world at these events. I enjoyed seeing friends I talk to often, but only see once a year at most. I also met many new friends from all over the United States, Europe, and even Australia! I look forward to crossing paths with them again in the future.

Little did I know that this Convention would turn out rather eventful for me, in more ways than one… After lunch on Saturday, awards were announced for club newsletters, photography, and a few other miscellaneous things. I was completely surprised to receive an award for the “Best New Author” for contributing to The Hosta Journal over the past year! Later on during cocktail hour, I was approached to take over the position of Website Coordinator for the American Hosta Society website. The website was completely redesigned earlier this year and looks very classy. I’m still “in training” and trying to figure out what I’ve gotten myself into. I guess I’ll blame it on the cocktails and hope I can uphold the high standards of the previous Website Coordinator and bring even more improvements. I’m humbled that my friends of the AHS trust me to handle their website!

When we left for St. Louis, the flooding was just starting to get serious. We wondered if we would have trouble getting there, but it was no problem at all. As we watched the news coverage every evening in our hotel room, we quickly began to wonder how we were going to get home. You know it is serious when the Iowa floods are the big story on the national news! What should have been a five hour drive turned into a nine hour, round about trip home. We finally made it, though.

To see more pictures, see the American Hosta Society National Convention 2008 photo gallery.

After returning home, we had five days to get ready for our second annual Hosta & Dessert Social. The day was perfect and we had an excellent turnout. There was much hosta-talk among old and new friends and we were glad to welcome visitors from as far away as Illinois and Wisconsin! About 25 people participated in the hosta swap - the main activity of the day. Doug Blanchard of Denver, Iowa was the winner of the Biggest Leaf contest and won a $20 gift certificate with his mammoth leaf of Hosta ‘Big John’.

Here it is July already and we find ourselves getting psyched up for the Midwest Regional Hosta Convention in Chicago on July 10-13. The nursery will be closed July 10-14, so please keep that in mind if you are planning to stop out in the near future.

The Harshbarger Hosta Society, based in Iowa City, is stopping by on July 20. Hopefully the weather won’t be too unbearably hot by then. Hopefully we get a nice, soaking rain between now and then, too. After all of the devastating rain we received in early June, it is unthinkable that we could actually use some rain! I guess that’s Iowa for you!