There's a lot going on at Cottage Farms right now, so we thought we'd share a bit of it. As plants are being gathered from across the nursery and transported to our shipping buildings to be prepared, boxed and sent on their way to our customers—and as crews ready plants and bring them onto the sets at QVC where they'll be used during live broadcasts to televisions across the country—work is already being done to prepare for our next Spring season (and of course our Summer and Fall On-Line seasons). Although many people are involved in many different aspects of getting things ready, for this article we'll focus on just one group at Cottage Farms—Customer Service. And, even though I'm sure you're aware that our Customer Service answers e-mails and phone calls, doing their best to help customers with questions and comments about plants purchased from Cottage Farms, we're going to take a look at something you probably didn't know about our Customer Service. Around the Customer Service Building are several small gardens. The Customer Service representatives set up, plant and maintain these gardens. The gardens are filled with some of the most popular items we sell to give the representatives hands-on experience in providing assistance to our customers (and I understand it can be a bit of fun, too). The gardens are also test gardens. If we wish to see what needs a plant has or how effective a fertilizer is, this is one of the places we do our testing. For more elaborate testing where scientific observation, separation and data are needed, we sometimes setup controlled test gardens. But we'll save test gardens for another article. The pictures here show work being done for the 2014 gardens. New flowerbeds were created and older plants were either removed, cleaned up and/or transplanted. Because SunPatiens® and Sedum are currently very popular with Cottage Farms' customers, the flowerbeds were filled with SunPatiens® while stones were placed around the flowerbeds and Sedum was planted around the stones. A good selection of plants was planted in the other gardens to provide a variety of plants for the representatives to work with. When the plants are at their prime, we will use them to create new pictures and video to be used on-air. Take a good look at the flowerbeds and stone walkways around them and be watching to see if they show up next year during one of our broadcasts or on our site. Our Customer Service department is an important part of operations here at Cottage Farms and we wanted to give you a little look at some of what they do. We hope you enjoyed the visit.