Oh Florence!

It’s the calm before the storm here at PDN/JLBG…or to quote the late philosopher Yogi Bera, “Deja vous all over again.” In September 1996, a wild woman named Fran visited our Fall Open Nursery and Garden Friday, and now it’s another F’er…Florence. Florence currently sits in the Atlantic Ocean, with a strong desire to stop by the NC coast on her way to Raleigh.

Normally, the hurricane prediction models have coalesced by now, but instead, they are still diverging, with a wider range of potential impacts than a few days prior. NC has never had a hurricane come ashore with winds greater than 135 mph (Hazel in 1954), so Florence could be Fred Sanford’s “big one”, unless she gets dizzy from all the spinning and weakens on the way to land. 

Here in Raleigh, we’re still in the dead center of the average projected path, so everyone is busy getting prepared…as much as possible. All greenhouse covers are either being removed or battened down with excessive strapping, while potential problem limbs are being removed from trees throughout the garden.

Despite worst case predictions for 10-30″ of rain in our area, JLBG/PDN are located high enough that flooding isn’t really an issue for us.  Despite this, we’ve spent the last few weeks reworking several drainage issues in the garden, so from that perspective we should be in good shape…as best that’s possible for 30″ of rain.

Other than potted plants getting too wet, our biggest concern is a potential loss of power, and the subsequent inability to irrigate container plants once the rains subside. To prepare, we’ve stocked up on watering cans, since all of our ponds will have plenty of water. 

Our final open nursery and garden days for 2018 are scheduled for this weekend, so it may be a little damp and windy for anyone but the craziest of plant people. Just in case, we’ve already scheduled an additional weekend, weekend, Friday Sept. 21 (8-5), Saturday Sept. 22 (8-5), and Sunday Sept. 23 (1-5).

Our customer service staff will be setup to work remotely, so as long as they have power at home, they’ll continue to respond to emails and process orders. We’ve made sure our website was moved to a cloud that isn’t stormy, so there should be no issues for our remote customers…we hope you’re all enjoying the cool new plants in our fall catalog. 

Stay dry, staff safe, and we’ll keep you updated on our conditions as we can!

14 thoughts on “Oh Florence!”

  1. Do fervently hope and pray that Florence will turn out to be nothing more than a storm in the proverbial teacup. Stay safe, if not dry. It sounds as though you are prepared as well as you can be, given the circumstances.

  2. I can plant sit for you if you can quick dig up your plants and send them to Minnesota. Good luck and Godspeed to you and you’re lovely plants!

  3. Marsha McCollum Leutza

    I’ve seen quite a few photos of people strapping down their houses/roofs and now you mention it too. Is this new tech ?

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