Ottawa: soon to be nation's palm tree capital?

One of the things I miss most about California is being surrounded by palm trees. I just love them. Now that I've returned to the Ottawa area, you'd think that I would just accept the fact that Ottawa is a 5a zone (i.e. -29°C to -23°C average annual minimum temperature), according to Agriculture Canada's most recent Plant Hardiness Zone Map, and that having a tropical paradise in my backyard is an impossibility. Well, I didn't want to accept this so I started looking around the web for information on cold-hardy palms. Turns out that a number of palms are actually quite cold-hardy and routinely endure sub-freezing temperatures. With some additional protection, even the less hardy palms can pull through a cold winter. Now I'm not stupid enough to try and replicate our landscape in Salinas by attempting to grow a Queen palm or something like that but it would be fun to experiment with some of the nicer palms that could possibly survive an Ottawa winter with some protection. I also wouldn't mind having some nice indoor palms. No chance of finding a place around here that even has a variety of palms suitable for indoors. Ikea has a few but nothing too interesting. I did however find a great online company in Germany called rarepalmseeds.com that has a HUGE selection of palm seeds. I decided to give them a try and ordered a few varieties of palm seeds for both indoor and outdoor use.

My seeds arrived after a few weeks all the way from Germany. They were very well packaged and included instructions for starting the seeds. I'll likely start germinating the seeds this weekend.