Now available: native clematis! Plus upcoming markets and bookkeeping changes

It has been stupidly hot here – last week’s heat wave brought us up to 95 or 96F, plus this week has been your bog-standard midsummer “in the 80s and humid.” (That’s 30-35 C, for you metric lovers). As much as possible, I’m trying to stay inside – I have a lot of repotting to do, and I can do that in my cool plant dungeon basement! But unfortunately that’s not always possible…

Yesterday I ventured out to do a site survey – homework for my Plant Ecology class at Native Plant Trust. This involved marking out a 5m x 5m (or 15ft x 15ft) square and surveying the plant species therein, counting the number of plants and % of cover of each species. It instilled me with a new respect for people who do fieldwork like this!

In addition to the heat, and the deer flies, and mosquitoes (pretty chill at that time of day, tbh), there was the fact that like a genius I decided I needed to include some woody plants, so I ended up putting my plot right around a thicket of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia)… an understory shrub/small tree with trunks close to the ground. There was a lot of crawling around on my hands and knees as a result.

Plus, do you have any idea how hard it is to count individual plants for a species like Gaultheria procumbens (teaberry) or Mitchella repens (partridgeberry)? Their growth habit is to send out trailing stolons that produce new shoots vegetatively, so it’s hard to know what is the same plant. And there is also witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) there, and the aforementioned mountain laurel, whose growth habit is to form clonal colonies from the same rootstock. By the end it was very unclear to me what I was supposed to be counting.

And I’ll probably need to go back out there again. sigh

Annnyway, enough about my adventures!

New plants!

We are proud to announce we have new plants available!

• Doellingeria umbellata - tall white aster 🆕
• New York Ironweed - Vernonia noveboracensis 🆕
• Red Columbine - Aquilegia canadensis 🆕
• Spotted Joe-Pye Weed - Eutrochium maculatum 🆕
• Virgin’s Bower Clematis - Clematis virginiana 🆕
• Wreath goldenrod - Solidago caesia 🆕

All of these are still very small plants, in pint-sized containers, for $5.

If you’d like to purchase any of these, please see our Buy Plants page, or email me at lise@redtrilliumgardens.com

Next Markets

Still status quo with not knowing if we’ll be at the Fitchburg or Leominster Farmer’s Market next month! (Full details in the last update).

So I am also applying to the Ashby Farmer’s Market in Ashby, MA, another nearby town. Their markets are held the second and fourth Sundays of each month through October, 9am - 12pm on the Ashby Common. The next market is thus Sunday, July 14, 2024. Hopefully they are a little more on the ball about getting back to me, and I can set up at that next one. 🤞

Bookkeeping Change as of July 1

ETA: we are reversing course on this decision! See this update.

As you may know, decorative plants – most of what I sell – are subject to sales tax. Thus I’m required by Massachusetts law to collect the 6.25% sales tax.

Until now I’ve been including this in the cost, just to keep things simple for you. So if I charge $5 for a plant, technically the cost is $4.71 with 29 cents of tax. Then I submit all of those amounts to Massachusetts at the end of each month.

The problem is… it’s a nightmare to keep track of, and very much does not match how the MA Tax Connect website wants you to submit your information. So I need to do a lot of math (or create a Google Sheet to do the math) to even get the numbers the state wants… when their portal could be doing the math for me.

… nobody said there would be math in running a native plant nursery!

This will also make it easier to accept payment with credit cards through Square, since their software will also calculate tax automatically.

(Btw I accept credit cards now… or I will as soon as I set up the doohickey!)

So yes, in essence this means that I’m increasing the cost of my decorative plants by 6.25%. But this is consistent with how other native plant nurseries, like Native Plant Trust, charge for plants. And like before, that extra 6.25% is basically just going to the state of Massachusetts. Just consider it a charitable donation to maintain your roads and public libraries!

Note that food plants (i.e. my non-native garden plants) are tax-exempt in Massachusetts, so the cost on those will remain the sticker cost.

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Featured photo credit: Red maple behind my house, Lunenburg, MA. Taken 25 June 2024, by Lise Fracalossi. Took this while I was doing my site survey!

• Updates