Twixwood Nursery is always recruiting and interviewing. We have open positions. Twixwood is a large nursery, growing groundcovers in flats and perennials in pots. We have 80 full time year-around employees and 80 others who usually work from March through November. We offer paid vacations and have a health insurance plan. Winter propagation is splits of field grown clumps of grasses, container grown carexes, and cuttings of vinca minor and pachysandra.
We used to look for workers with specific skills and experience. After a few recent experiences we are now looking for people who are easy to get along with. While it would be nice to have someone with an agricultural background and some native intelligence, we are really looking for someone who is pleasant to work with and who will fit into the team that we are putting together and who is comfortable working with people from different cultures.
We will train for specific skills. For a grower position it helps to have an interest in plants and a basic understanding of their cultural needs such as watering, trimming, and spacing. Mostly we are looking for people who like to work outside with the understanding that there are four seasons in the year. Therefore, we need to keep the plants alive while optimally growing and then when it is time to sell, we prefer compact, well-branched, and blooming.
Besides the growing position, there is always work for those interested in production—in making things either in setting up production tasks or in supervising and training the workers. We start by taking cuttings, sticking them, and rooting under intermittent mist. If it is a perennial, the plugs are transplanted into a larger pot and set down in the growing area. We do our own field growing and our own plug production—from cuttings, field divisions, and seedlings—which keeps production going all winter long. Many plants propagate best when they are dormant and during cold weather. The work is done in heated buildings. Perennial stock plants are forced for late winter production. We have a small seeding operation, with a needle seeder, for perennials.
Along the way we are always setting up irrigation or mist systems, putting up signage, taking inventory, entering data into the computer, and then picking up plants for sale. We do tagging, cleaning, loading and shipping. As with any business of our size we have people working in accounting, with computers, doing cost analysis, repairing plumbing, electrical, or heating systems, doing construction work, doing mechanical work, fabricating and repairing.
We do most of our marketing with inside customer service representatives. It is substantially done over the phone, internet and through social media. We send real-time plant photos to our customers. It is a business, made all the more complex because we are dealing with a living product, always growing and changing, and then there is the seasonality of the business. Most of our customers are landscapers; thus restricted to planting when the ground is not frozen.
Most of the jobs involve working with small crews. It helps if the supervisors are comfortable with diverse cultures; bilingual is not necessary, but politeness and sensitivity are critical. Some of the jobs are solitary, such as propagation and scouting for plant health issues, inventory and data entry. We use a lot of labor for making plants—taking and sticking 15,000,000 cuttings a year, transplanting into 2,000,000 containers. About half of our sales are trays of groundcovers or of perennial liners. The other half is one or three gallon containers.
There is field growing row crop type of work. We have over 50 acres in a rotation of cover crops, freshly fumigated and planted, and growing for several years before digging. Depending on the plant we will plant up to 50,000 plants to the acre, and so this is very intensive agriculture with considerable hand work involved. Because of our intensive watering, necessary because the plants are grown in plastic containers above the ground in a well-drained peat/bark mix, we are always scouting for water borne fungus diseases: Pythium, phytophthora, rhizoctonia, and insects common to a mono-culture: aphids, mites, and scale insects. These are dealt with by a regular spray program. We are sensitive to the environment and the safety of our workers and thus use the mildest chemicals possible.
Given the extensive acreage the nursery covers, we have a continuous landscaping and landscape maintenance program of road grading, lawn mowing, and the planting of display gardens.
And so while we have on our staff everyone from phone answering sales people to welder-fabricators and computer maintaining people, we can use all of the time those who want to work directly with the plants. Come see us at any time and we will show you around. Each business has its own personality, so you will want to visit us to see if there is a fit. Feel free to tell your friends and acquaintances about our company and its career opportunities.
Current Openings
- Plant Health Care/Pest Management
- Section Grower
- Propagation Assistant
- Field Production Manager
- Truck Driver/Customer Delivery Specialist
Send Resumes to [email protected] attention Nxumalo