Gardenpalooza is here!

Well it is that time of year again. Gardenpalooza has arrived. People get really excited about this event. It seems to be the place a lot of people come to get their plants for their summer gardens. Gardenpalooza started 7 years ago at KPTV when I was producing the Good Day Lifestyles garden segments. There were a lot of smaller nurseries that couldn’t afford to advertise on the TV show. I was looking for a way to get them some exposure and to get people excited about the TV show (and about gardening). This event seemed to fill a need. Boy, did it ever! The first year we held it at the OSU Research Station near Charboneau and we overwhelmed the property. We had people parking nearly a half mile away and walking to the event. It also was a foreshadowing of future events. It was COLD and wet. We had the Millstone coffee cruiser there and they ran out of hot coffee, one of the few times that had ever happened to them. The OSU people loved us, but asked us to leave. It was hard to control all the people and keep them from wandering through some of the research plots!
The next year we moved to Hoffman Dairy Garden near Canby. It was a great location with lots of permanent covered areas in the barn. The only drawbacks were muddy parking and vendor space. The event really started to grow! After a couple of years Hoffman’s moved most of their activities to Hillsboro. I decided that we needed to stay south of Portland and near the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival, more activities in the same direction and we had become good partners in promoting each others events.
So we moved to Fir Point Farms! We have had the great pleasure of working with 3 different groups of managers at the farm and are excited to be working with the Femrite family for the first time this year. The Gardenpalooza event is now the property of Gustin Creative Group and the Garden Time show. It has become a labor of love for the Garden Time crew. We are still bringing smaller nurseries and other garden vendors to you. They have the latest in unique plants and cool tools, and in the past few years we have started to include garden artists too. Some estimate that we have been getting between 7,000 to 9,000 people every year and most of those years have been in the rain! We always hold out hope for dry weather, but local gardeners have shown us that they love their plants no matter what weather we have.
If you have visited in the past, we hope that you have had a good time. If you haven’t been out to see us, give us a try this year.

Jeff and Therese
Garden Time owners/producers