CobraHead is actively involved in the Mailorder Gardening Association.  Anneliese and I attended the MGA summer conference in downtown Chicago this past week.  In addition to the seminars, workshops, roundtables, networking and evening fun, we also had an afternoon tour of the Ball Horticultural Company in West Chicago.  Ball has been around since 1905 and is the second largest seed distributor in the United States.

Ball’s President and CEO, Anna Ball, welcoming our group.

The operation at Ball looks a lot like a pharmaceutical company.  Here’s Anneliese learning about seed weighing.

Finished product is often packaged in vials, just like prescription drugs.  Ball moves a huge volume of seeds from all over the world.

While the seed facility tour was very interesting, the trial gardens are what makes Ball a really special place.  They don’t plant the monotonous rows one sees at most nursery growers.  The purposely landscaped and meticulously kept grounds rival any botanical garden.

It was a perfect day to tour.  An overcast sky made for good photos, and even though Chicago has been smacked with the same heavy rains and high heat as we have here in Wisconsin, most of the plants looked great and were in gorgeous bloom.

Water gardens.

Most of the plantings were plainly identified.

Lots of photo opportunities.

The plants, themselves, contributed to the color.

Swaths of color intersected the different areas.

There weren’t very many places on the grounds that didn’t have some colorful plantings.

What would it take to get my yard looking like this?  I know, lots of money.

A walkway of hanging color.

At Ball, ornamentals far outweigh food crops in the amount of seed that moves through, but they acknowledged that vegetable seeds are, by far, the brightest part of their business, right now.

Lastly, an interesting vertical wall of color that uses a timed drip watering system.

Judy just posted a few days ago about how she is trying to pick the zucchini before they get oversized and unusable.  I’m not going to go too far about her best intentions going awry, but as you can see, I found a couple of lunkers in the summer squash bed, yesterday.  You can see a penny on the big one to give you an idea of its size.

I can’t fault Judy for not keeping up.  The garden is close to impossible to work in, right now.  We have had over a week of humid, over 90 temperatures, and for Wisconsin, that is hot.  Additionally, extreme rainfall has encouraged a hatching of mosquitoes of biblical plague proportions.  It really is no fun to be outside.

Hopefully, ace cook Judy will figure out how to make something useful out of the overgrown zukes.  Otherwise, they will become an exercise in growing compost, and I’ve already got enough practice doing that.