A great garden center in Flushing and Bayside - Garden World

Now most of you who read the blog know that aside from a few links on the side, I don't do a lot of advertising. Part of it is because I do it for the love of indoor gardening, but another part is that I get so sick of bloggers who just seem to sell out with every other post being "sponsored".

That said, when I find a place I really love, I gotta talk about it. And this place is Garden World in Flushing, New York. I should start off by saying that they don't know I'm blogging about them, but I was plenty impressed with them that I figured I'd write a post on them. By the way, if you're in the NY area, there's a Groupon you can use to get a discount.

The shop itself looks pretty nondescript on the outside, just a shack sitting to the side of an H-mart. Walking in, though, you immediately see a huge area filled with supplies. They just started to put up the Christmas products as well, so there's a festive feel about it. There were also fresh apples in the back from area orchards.

The part I wanted to see was in the back--the greenhouse. This was stocked full of wonderful, healthy plants. For someone who's been buying dead and diseased plants from a K-mart under Penn Station, I was like a kid in a candy store.

They had most of the plants we've been talking about--huge golden pothos plants, dracenas, and plenty of other tropical plants. 

The proprietor of the store couldn't have been nicer to us. I read, in broken Latin, the plants I was looking for and he walked me through and showed them to me. I wanted a Bamboo Palm, but the one they had was way too big for me.

Another goal was to get a ficus robusta (rubber tree plant), but the 8" one they had was just too big for me. But I'll be back to see if I can get a 6" one next spring. 

I was happy to find a lot of the plants I'd been searching for. Clockwise from the upper left below is the Boston Fern (#1), the Peace Plant (#7), the Spider Plant (#26), and a Ficus (#15). You'll be reading more about these in the coming weeks as I transplant them. 

Something else I got? A bag of potting soil which was completely free of fungus gnats. For all the coupons I get from K-mart, one thing I learned is that buying soil or plants from a place like that, no matter how cheap you may think it is, ends up costing a lot more in the long run. 

If you're in the Flushing or Franklin Square areas, definitely check them out.