Tom’s Blog

This is being written in the last week in April and we have had and extraordinarily cool spring, meaning that we will have good orchard crops here in this part of the world as the blooms are held back, thus not being susceptible to late frosts.   And so the other day I was out picking […]

As mentioned several times, we live out here is isolation from most of civilization, here in rural Michigan surrounded by vineyards and soybean fields and the occasional woodlot. That, and nobody tells us anything. So I have been attending every possible garden or arboretum or nursery meeting talk while doing market research on what or […]

Many years ago I used to do actual work and one of the jobs consisted of writing up the descriptions for our plant availability listing, catalog, price list, or whatever the politically correct term is that we should use these days. I decided that if our customers were smart enough to be able to make […]

Now that I am running a nursery again I am starting to think. Firstly, I am thinking that I should have spent my younger years thinking instead of just working hard. It took me many years to get past the management model I inherited from the parents. They only knew how to work hard, and […]

The restaurant business and the nursery business are similar in that we are judged every day by the product that we turn out and it is a complex product to produce and to do so with absolute consistency and quality. That is why I am considering becoming a Hindu—they get to believe in reincarnation with […]

And so now they tell me what I am supposed to be doing with these blogs—I am supposed to be selling stuff. And here I have been plumbing the depths of my psyche trying to figure out how I feel every morning, searching for material to write about. It may take a while for me […]

Recently, we got access to half an acre of Equisetum hyemale, Scouring Rush or Horsetail.  The normal well-adjusted person would not get so excited by this development although we are effervescent.  The reason for the normal person’s lack of enthusiasm is, doubtless, because the plant is not very beautiful and it is a “born colonizer” […]

It got cold this week and so my mind switched over from shipping plants to making plants.  We do a lot of plant production in the winter and for three very good reasons.  First of all, many plants only divide and grow good in the winter.  These would be all of the Carexes (sedges to normal people).  […]