Well, I don't have Jan's excuse. I live about 5-7 min from the Garden Center where we have our show. But I cut it too short and was only able to enter two flowers as I got there just past 10 when entries had to be in the building. But I was very tired. The two flowers entered were Baby Blue Marine which got a first and Revision which got a second. That 88 Friday and 80+ today really pushed things and Revision (TB) opened last night. Wired was opening this am as was Chilly Willy, but I didn't pick.
I have been successfully transporting iris to shows for 48 years now, off and on. I'll start a thread when I can get some pictures of my methods. My methods include a tire in the trunk and low vases with large pin frogs for small varieties placed in boxes with newspaper. I forgot to get the exact figures of how many per class but we had our largest early show in history with 189 specimens. I didn't hear how many blue ribbons won sweepstakes, but runner-up was 24. We even had 7-8 arils.
I am very pleased as it was my idea to push the dwarfs and median growing and have an early show. We started around 1972 or 73, There were two other women at the time who grew a lot of little ones. For years I wrote the schedule including the artistic, mailed the schedules and handled premiums which then were given out more generously. I was the show chairman and ran everything on the cheap so no one could accuse me of overspending. We even used stickers instead of regular ribbons for many years. But now the vast majority of our members grow many types of iris. Our mini show held two weeks ago Monday night was also larger than normal. I think we only had one TB and all the rest MDB and SDB and possibly a few IB.
