If you're looking for unique and tasteful ways to decorate your home for the Christmas holidays, we invite you to visit the Christmas Shop at Almaden Valley Nursery. We offer distinctive and attractive holiday items you won't find anywhere else. Whether for artificial Christmas trees, ornaments, gifts or home décor, we invite you to make our garden center your home for the holidays.

Artificial Christmas Trees

These aren't the ordinary dull, plastic-looking, fake trees you find at your local hardware or discount store. Our artificial trees are designed to provide you with a tasteful and elegant alternative to fresh-cut trees. The companies we buy from go to great lengths to replicate the different types of trees they produce, so that you will be proud to showcase them in your home. These wonderful authentic trees come in all shapes and sizes, plain, flocked or lightly frosted. They are easy to set up and take down, allowing you to spend more time decorating and enjoying the Christmas season.

Christmas Ornaments

You won't want to pass up a chance to shop from our great selection of Christmas ornaments. Our Christmas Shop is filled with "themed ornament" trees in addition to stocking individual European, Scandinavian and American ornaments for any taste or style.

Christmas Gifts and Home Décor

Add the finishing touches to your home with our great selection of decorative artificial floral Christmas wreaths, door swags and garlands. Get into the holiday mood with our hand-painted ceramic Christmas figurines, cottages, snowmen, Santas and village scenes. Dress up your sofas and beds with our Christmas themed pillows. Enhance your home further with the wonderful aroma of our scented candles and potpourri.

It's time to put in the winter vegetable garden or, if you already have begun, to continue the job.

First, pull up and throw out or compost the remains of your summer garden. A thorough cleaning now really pays off in fewer bugs and diseases later.

Dig up the soil deeply with a spade, turning it over, aerating it, and breaking up the clods as you go.

Then use a garden fork to mix in organic amendments such as Bumper Crop.

Add a good vegetable fertilizer according to package directions; work this into the top 6 inches of soil. If you're an organic gardener, use instead blood meal, cottonseed meal, bone meal or bagged organic vegetable food (we recommend Dr. Earth Organic 5 Vegetable Food).

Then use a garden rake to level the ground. Use a hoe to make furrows between rows in heavy soils.

Plant tall crops to the north, and short crops to the south. Full sun is best for all winter vegetables.

1. Plant all types of permanent landscape plants other than bare-root and tropicals.
2. Plant trees, shrubs and vines.
3. Choose and plant for permanent fall and winter color.
4. Continue to shop for spring-blooming bulbs.
5. Plant lilies as soon as you get them home.
6. Buy daffodils, grape hyacinths, ranunculus, anemones and Dutch irises; keep them in a cool, dry place until planting time.
7. Purchase hyacinth, tulip, and crocus bulbs and prechill them in the refrigerator.
8. Plant cool-season flowers for winter and spring bloom.
9. Plant cineraria for late winter and early spring bloom.
10. Plant wildflowers.
11. Plant cool-season lawns; this is the best time of year for this job.
12. Overseed Bermuda grass with annual winter ryegrass if desired.
13. Plant cool-season vegetables, year-round vegetables, including carrots and some perennial vegetables.
14. Thin out sweet peas and pinch them back to force branching.
15. Divide, trim, and mulch plants that tend to grow in a clump and that need to be divided, including Kahili ginger, clivia, iris, daylily, moraea, bird of paradise, gazanias, and perennials like Shasta daisies.
16. Cut back zonal and ivy geraniums; finish pruning Martha Washingtons.
17. Divide hardy water lilies.
18. Divide belladonna lilies.
19. Dig up, divide and replant perennials, or mulch them.
20. Cut off runners from strawberries, gather them in bunches, and prechill them for November planting.
21. Feed fuchsias.
22. Continue to treat blue hydrangeas with aluminum sulfate.
23. Stop fertilizing chrysanthemums and enjoy the blooms.
24. Fertilize poinsettias with a complete fertilizer high in bloom ingredients.
25. Feed roses early in October; don't fertilize in November.
26. Water deciduous fruit trees more sparingly in fall.
27. Water roses with up to 1 1/2 inches of water twice a week, unless it rains.
28. Finish pulling out faded annual flowers and cleaning pots and beds for fall.
29. Make a ball-shaped basket of malacoides primroses.
30. Thoroughly clean up the vegetable garden; pull up the last of the summer crops and compost the remains (if you have had fungus or disease problems, skip the composting and get rid of them instead).

To fool hyacinths, tulips and crocuses into thinking they've had a cold winter, put the bulbs in the lettuce drawer of your refrigerator (in a brown paper bag, not plastic--it rots them) for 6-8 weeks prior to planting. If your lettuce drawer takes delight, as some do, in regularly freezing lettuce, it's too cold for bulbs; store them on a low back shelf. They must not freeze.

Also beware of fresh fruits that give off ethylene gas, including apples, bananas and pineapples. When these are stored in the same refrigerator with bulbs, make sure they're in airtight bags or containers; if the gas escapes, it can cause flower bulbs to either rot or grow roots and sprout.

After you remove the bulbs from refrigeration, plant them in the ground immediately.

Eric was born in Redwood City and moved to San Jose when he was 10 so his mom and dad could start the nursery.

He always had a love for music from an early age and was bitten with the rock 'n' roll bug right out of high school. He played in numerous night clubs during an 8-year career as a keyboard player in all-original hard rock "hair" bands and had a song produced by 70's guitarist Ronnie Montrose.

He met the love of his life, Lolli, 20 years ago and has been happily married to her for 18 years. They share an active lifestyle of hiking, whitewater rafting, skiing, scuba diving, traveling, shell collecting, wave running, and going to the movies.

Actively involved in volunteer work in the nursery industry, Eric has been involved in a number of landscape projects at the San Francisco Zoo, where he has been able to combine his knowledge of plants with his passion for wild animals.

He is a published writer in nursery industry magazines and is a guest seminar speaker at various events across the country. Eric is very involved in student and global ministries at his local church and works with Mission's Partners around the globe. He has participated on teams to El Salvador, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, and most recently was in Northern India.

My Celebrity Service staff and I look forward to serving you this year. We'll go out of our way to make your day!

Eric Wilder - President