Market Friday - In Search of a Protea Plant

Today is #MarketFriday, a project initiated by @dswigle, and this post is my contribution to this project for this week.

To learn more about this project and participate, visit today's post by @dswigle.

Join me this week in our search for a Protea plant.

The Protea, the King Protea to be exact, is the national plant of South Africa. It also happens to be my wife's favorite plant/flower. And although we've bought some Protea flowers (and occasionally my wife received some as gifts) to decorate inside the house, we've never had our own Protea plant in the garden.

Admiring Proteas in Monteseel.

On a recent outing, when we visited Monteseel to enjoy the views and capture the views on camera, we also came across some beautiful Proteas.

These two photos were taken along the road, on a sidewalk in Monteseel.

My wife's face lit up with excitement when she saw these Proteas and we decided that maybe it was time to consider getting our own Protea plant.

That will enable us to produce our own Protea flowers to decorate the house with.

The Search for a Protea Plant Begins.

So, as mentioned, we had a discussion and decided that it is time to consider getting our own Protea plant.

Last weekend was a busy one and we didn't get the opportunity to visit some nurseries to start our search and to start comparing prices.

But yesterday morning (Wednesday morning), I had some business to attend to in Hillcrest and I decided to start visiting some nurseries in the area while I was there.

It was a cool, rainy, wet morning.

Nursery #1: Steam and Cream Cafe

The first nursery that I visited is actually better known as a little coffee shop but it has a little nursery as part of the setup.

It is situated in Kloof, just off the M13 Highway.

I made a pit stop to find out what they could show me and what their prices would be like.

They only had one plant in stock. There are various species of Protea and the one they had in stock was a 'Veldfire' Protea and it was selling at R250.00.

The USD/ZAR exchange rate at the time of writing this post is R18.06.

That means it would cost $13.80 for this Protea plant.

Nursery #2: Gillits Nursery.

As the name indicates, this nursery is located in Gillits.

It is right at the border as you are about to enter Hillcrest.

At this nursery, they were able to show me a wider variety of Protea plants.

Let me get this out of the way... I am by no means an expert in flowers or the different species of flowers.

Yes, I would be able to recognize a Protea, but I would not be able to start giving you a description of what species it belongs to, etc...

The lady working at this nursery also didn't give me a full explanation of the species I was looking at, so I just looked at what was available and what it looked like.

I obviously took some photos...for this post, and also to start showing my wife what is available...lol.

The first one I saw was this one...

I've done some online searches to see if I can learn more about the names of the different species.

But in all honesty, I've seen some images of what looks like the same plant to me, yet different names were given on different sites. Maybe it's my lack of knowledge and experience in this particular field, so I would rather refrain from giving the names and rather focus on learning more at this stage, just sharing the photos of what I saw via my photos for now...

The second one she showed me, was this one...

Then the lady showed me this one...and looking at the label in the pot next to it, this looked as if it could be a 'Red Rocket.

The next one was beautiful in color in contrast with the green around it...

And this one right next to it...not as bright in color, but still beautiful.

Asking about prices, the lady gave me one price of R198.00.

So I suppose irrespective of what species we take, it would be R198.00.

That would be $10.96.

On my way out, this guy got my attention and I thought his dress code was quite appropriate for the weather we were having...lol.

Nursery #3: The Plant & Flower Nursery & Garden Center

The third nursery that I visited, situated in Hillcrest, didn't have any Protea plants in stock. But there were some beautiful and colorful scenes though.

By now, the rain was coming down consistently, and being wet, it created some beautiful scenes that I just had to get some photos of...

The next colorful display was indoors...

Two other (indoor) displays that I found quite nice to look at...

A Fun Way to End the Morning.

I was done, and I decided to pay a surprise visit to my wife. Her office where she is working is literally a block down from the main road on my way back.

I knew her lunch break would be between 11h00 and 12h00. So, I popped in and invited her out for a milkshake before we both carried on with the normal day's work.

Just a few blocks away from her office is a Mcdonald's outlet and I treated her to a tasty Mcdonald's milkshake just to break the normal routine...

I paid a total of R70.00 ($3.87) for two large strawberry milkshakes...

Summary.

To summarize, I got an idea of what it would cost us to grow our own Proteas in our own garden (well, to buy the plant, instead of a flower or bunch of Protea flowers which can become quite expensive)...lol.

It would cost us between R198.00 ($10.96) and R250.00 ($13.80) to get started.

We would probably visit a few more nurseries to get more prices and to see what is available.

My wife and I ended the morning together in a fun way with a nice milkshake at McDonald's for R70.00 ($3.87), and in the afternoon, my wife returned home with a slightly wider smile than normal...I wonder why...lol?

Note:

• The first two photos in this post were taken with my NIKON camera.
• The rest of the photos in today's post were taken with my HUAWEI mobile phone.

And that's it for today, folks.

Thank you for reading my post! I do appreciate it!