The Fall Season is getting closer every day and that means thinking about your fall gardening plans. If you’ve kept your garden tended; pulling weeds, keeping the ground well-watered and past-prime spring veggies culled, you’re well on your way to your fall planting. Keep up the good work, add your Nature’s Blend Compost in early-August, and start planting tomatoes and peppers shortly after. Remember to wait on cool weather crops till late September. If you’re like me and let the heat and weeds get ahead of you, then now is the time to start cleaning and weeding so to be ready by mid August planting time. A little every day will make the work bearable and water from the heavens or your hose will help with the clean-up.
-Debbie
Hope Pettibon, the 2016 Texas Honey Queen, will speak with local gardeners on Friday, August 5, 2016 at 4 PM at Gill Nursery 2810 Airline Rd. She will talk about best practices to help support local honeybee populations and steps ordinary gardeners can take to benefit directly from honeybees. Local gardeners are encouraged to bring questions about how to maximize the use of honeybees in our area and improve the performance of their own garden.
We are forever grateful for your support and kindness to our Alameda staff over the past twenty nine and one half years. We are thankful for the kind words shared by you all, whenever we run into you, all over town. Always smiling and telling a good story about something someone did to help you in our store. We are thankful for our staff, many who joined our team not knowing a whole lot about plants but wanting to learn and always, good people. We are thankful to Garnett Brooks and his Texas Star staff for providing us with a great location and support over the years as our landlord. We are thankful to Dollie and Tom Hunt for being such amazing neighbors, helping us to be as successful as we were. 
And we are thankful for our vendors who many times would drop smaller than minimum orders off at Alameda to help get you the plants you needed. We are thankful for all the donuts you brought our staff, including Billie Johnson who made a run to Gates for us every Saturday morning for years. We are thankful for the fudge and cookies during the holidays, the many cakes from Martha Lewis and Raymond & Curtis from Simply Elegant and the ice cream from Armi Pigott in the summer when our crew was burning up!
How did the Alameda store happen in the first place? Back in 1981, we purchased our land out on Airline Road. It was the size we believed we needed for a full service garden center and space for our landscape construction department. It took a loan from both our parents to put the deal together. It was the closest land to town we could afford, but still way out, with horses and roosters and goats all around us. In the fall of 1986, we got this wild and crazy idea to open a second location in the center of town, just for a spring season. DeAnna (aka “That Tall Lady”) was working at our Airline store. 
We felt she would be the perfect person to run our spring garden shop for a few months. Well, we all know how that turned out. Twenty nine and one half years later, DeAnna Baumgartner, along with Gary Cring, who came on just a year after it opened, have been there ever since, helping you, along with many other talented nursery staff over the years, with your gardens and doing the best they could to take care of you.
-Marta
