Welcome to Honker Flats
2012 GREETINGS
Welcome to Gladiolus
Exoticus, our catalog of designer glads at Honker Flats. We are the
Wallace family, Lew, Tammy and Marcus. We are pleased with the
response from the past year and appreciate our new customers, friends
and repeat orders.
Special thanks go to hybridizers Bob Longhenry, Don Selinger, Dave Kollasch, Sue Jackson, Jeff Radunz, Robert Schalow, Lyle Madeson, Mel Schrimpf and John Meyer for allowing us to showcase their fine creations. The class of 2012 promises to be very exciting indeed!
We are delighted to have two more hybridizers join our glad family. Don Selinger’s son, David Selinger from Iowa brings us the exquisite 278 Professor Plum, a fine glad for cut or show. Reg & Marlene Powys-Lybbe from High River, Alberta, Canada created the luscious Velvet Mistress.
John Meyer captures his first All America Select award with Farmer’s Daughter, a hottie in neon-salmon orange. He also brings us Sacia Lynn, a 475. This was the one that we first saw in his garden in 2010. Just as awesome is The Kings Kisses. What a royal treat.
We’ve watched Mel Schrimpf show Miss Amery to 3 seedling championships. What a great play of colors and show potential he has in Happy Hour.
Don Selinger’s award winning Spritzer has been worth the wait, sparkling rose and refreshing. Don hits the exoticus mark with William Tell, what an unbelievable glad.
This year’s intros are loud and exotic, promising to yield loads of joy. Thanks hybridizers for sharing your best.
We are pleased to have enough stock again of Morning Princess, the 2009 exhibition sensation. One prominent showman already has some reserved! You will also see several of the 2010 class back; Horse Feathers, Longhenry’s silver smokey pinkish grey; Madeson’s Wonderful World in chiseled light lavender. We’re lucky to have them back on the list after such foul weather in the fall of 2010.
Looking back on 2011, it had its challenges, with excessive weather. Too wet in spring. Extreme heat in mid July with damaging winds, the county is lucky to have survived. Several of our favorite trees are gone and we continue repairs to our greenhouses. The glads survived the heat and produced a great floral crop for the glad shows. The fall weather held and a fine crop of corms were harvested. What an unusually mild winter. We look forward to spring with renewed faith that all will work out.
We had a fun show season, exhibiting at our state show at New Ulm, the MN State Fair and the Honker Flats Gladiolus Festival. The Glad Society, such a talented group of people and we do have a great fun time together. Many of these people made the drive up to Middle River to make the Honker Flats Glad Festival happen. Our number of local exhibitors continues to increase, with many first time exhibitors. If you grow glads bring them to show, we also provide glads if you want to participate in the design show.
A big announcement! The Minnesota Glad Society is making plans to host the NAGC (North American Gladiolus Council) Convention, starting Labor Day weekend 2013 in the Minneapolis area. This will be the very first time the convention and full scale show will be held in gladiolus growing season. A big change from a January time frame! This is a very exciting time to belong to the MN Glad Society and NAGC.
Our main business of Honker Flats Greenhouse continues to flourish. We now prepare for our 38th season. We appreciate those that “come home to Honker Flats” each year to shop for their bedding plants, exotic annuals, perennials and nursery stock. The walk-in cooler is a huge success for our Bare Root Barn. It is cool and bright and keeps the bare root nursery stock in great shape, and makes for easy shopping. The cooler is also very useful in the fall when working with cut flowers and vegetables. We specialize in the newest introductions to horticulture.
We are taking orders for glad corms from our friends in Canada this year and are able to ship across the border for the first time!
We recently attended the Manitoba Horticultural Association Convention and spoke on Gladiolus. We had a great time and found energetic gardener friends with enthusiasm for growing glads. We look forward to shipping corms into Canada this year! Whether you purchase glads from our catalog, visit our greenhouses, visit a show, join a society, or come to our Gladiolus Festival in September, “Welcome to our Honker Flats Family!”
Lew, Tammy and Marcus Wallace
