Summer 2022

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I usually start my Christmas Letters with the proud announcement that we are still married—causing much head scratching as to what brought up that subject, to be followed shortly by imaginings about my recent behavioral patterns. And so I am starting this newsletter by announcing that we are still in business. In fact, we are so much in business that we have, right now, the highest plant inventory we have ever had. All winter long the canning (one gallon potting up operation) has been going full bore or tilt or whatever. Also our grasses, carexes, and vincas were propagated in the winter, which is a big trade secret as it is highly effective. Our crew is kept working year around so they are available for the big spring shipping push and this is the best time for division and propagation of some of our key plant types.

We have right now a great many Pachysandra ‘Green Carpet’ in what we call the 24 ct. Standard flat. Here is the story on that one. There is another large groundcover supplier here in the Midwest who invented this flat and got a 25 year exclusive on it with the plastic pot and tray maker people. One of my previous operations managers found out that the exclusive had run out and promptly ordered some so that we would have the same product to off er in the same Chicago market, where it had developed a big market. This other reputable groundcover supplier lists this flat in their catalog as a 24 Flat. It is nominally a 3” pot, slightly rectangular and shallower than our 2 ½” SVD plastic pot.

My motto has been for years that a person does not have to be smart, only smart enough to find a smart person and copy them. On second thought, one has to be smart to think of that ploy in the first place. And so that is what we are doing. The alert customer will note that we have chosen, deliberately, to not get into a price war with this other reputable nursery. We are playing the long game here, which so far has not played out quite as hoped, but we are still in business. And so, if anyone wants my advice on how to run their landscaping or landscaping supplier business, please purchase all of the pachysandra you want from this other supplier so that they will run out sooner and then you can come to us and we will have lots of it for you, and we will not hold any grudges about you not buying sooner as we do not care when you buy from us only that you buy from us before the year is out.

Speaking of pachysandra, we have all kinds of it and it is all over our nursery getting in the way and we are beginning to trim it for cuttings and also so that it will be shorter and in a few weeks will have many short branches and look really good. We have it in all kinds of sizes from #1 pots that used to be one gallons and then were three quarts and now something less. It is strange pachysandra this sells in this size of a pot, but we never tell our customers they have no idea what they are doing. We only ask that the check is good. We have finally figured out how to convince the roots to grow straight to the bottom of the pot, which is a real convenience when trying to sell them. Also something we call the 10 ct. which means 10 square pots to a carrier flat that used to be 4 ½” pots and before that quarts. These all got left out in the rain and shrank greatly. We then have three kinds of 32 ct. trays, all the 10-20 tray with a cell plug, a peat pot, and a plastic SVD pot and all for the same price. You have choices of how many small pots are blowing around the lawn while you are trying to install the landscaping. We are way ahead of production of these, or did I mention that already.

The 32 plug is gaining in popularity as it is easy to carry around on the job site and does not have a lot of little plastic pots blowing around. When we run low on the 32 plugs I am always trying to convince people that the peat pot in the Poly-Pak, a thin plastic handling sheet that keeps the roots and rhizomes from growing into its fellow peat pots making them difficult to transplant is a good idea. My sales manager says that trying to convince customers to change their preferences is a losing proposition, however, being a great optimist—thinking that this business was easy and fun and a good way to prosper—I am such an optimist as to try to sell the peat pots in the Poly-Pak to the 32 plug aficionados.

We are caught up on the Vinca minor ‘Bowles’ production by now. Because of the cold weather we were short for a few weeks in March and got the usual complaints which the sales people passed on to me undiluted and unadulterated. I told the sales people that we were short because they had sold, late last fall, all that we had planned on selling early this spring, and, in fact, I would like to get on the phone and tell the customers that it was all their fault for buying plants from us last year and making me, the production maestro, look bad by being short this spring. You would be amazed at how proprietary the sales personages suddenly became about their phones. You would have thought that they purchased the phones themselves. They do not let me near them, which is probably fine—I got to talk to the customers plenty back when we were starting out.

Speaking of Vinca minor, we have lots of the variegated one ‘Ralph Shugert’, invented by Dave MacKenzie from Hortech and named after a great plantsman and fine person. It does not revert and shows its ‘Bowles’ heritage in leaf form and good flowering.

This growing plants thing is more complicated than I had thought—our customers are thinking all the time and we are thinking all the time and then, to use the passive tense, wrong conclusions are reached. When we run short of a plant, the customers think that we have some congenital incompetence such that we cannot figure that out or figure out how to grow more. We, on the other hand, every time we are short, are busily establishing more stock blocks and doing more propagation until we can flood the market. Because of the hysteresis in the system we are going one way while the customers are giving up on us and going the other way. We now have plenty of Carex pensylvanica and Geranium sanguineum ‘Max Frei’. It has taken a while with many bumps in the road to success along the way. These plants are all over the place and in our way.

Another plant that we never want to be short on is Sporobolus heterolepis, in both the seeded variety and the clonal vegetatively propagated ‘Tara’ version. The latter was discovered and promoted by Roy Diblik and has a different look than the species. The seed heads and scapes are distinct and more upright. The leaves are a bit dwarfer. It is different and distinctly ornamental. I asked our high-priced sales catalogue editor why they were priced the same, when, never in the history of the world has a seed propagated plant been sold for the same price as one made from division. He gave me a long and learned explanation, one which could only be expected from a person in his pay bracket, and I promptly forgot it. Anyhow, the ‘Tara’ in deep 50’s is about ready for sale and we will have much more available next year and can flood the market if given any advance information. I have that production system wired and it is, again, a trade secret except to all who are members of the International Plant Propagators Society, motto “To Seek, and To Share.”

You will notice long lists of one gallon pots of plants complete with the catalog pricing accompanying them. After putting this list together I see that it would have been much easier, and probably just as informative, if I had said that we had over a million containers out there either growing or having grown and being trimmed and spaced. This list is not the total we will have for all of 2022 as many plants are potted and not up to size yet, but will be by the time you read this. Many varieties are available, but in fewer than one thousand quantities.

Here is a partial liner listing to give you some flavor of what we do. The general rule is that we propagate all of our own liners except for Proven Winners™ and some of the patented varieties that we do not have licenses to do. We make a few extra for sale. Our goal is to expand the liner production. To do so we need two things—to develop a good reputation in that business, and to obtain valuable information from our customers as to what they will buy. I think that liners are the wave of the future. It is more efficient to ship liners across the country than it is to ship gallon pots. The Baptisias are all the Prairieblues™ series and are Chicagoland Grows® introductions bred or selected for better bloom color and bloom time. There was not room enough for long names. We really like carexes and would like them more if they all sold. Let us know of any varieties that we do not have and that you want. They all look alike to me.

Liners are mostly in the deep 50’s, with the seed sown ones in shallow 50’s that fi t under our needle seeder. Division and cutting grown liners are in deep 50’s, 38’s, 18 count 3 ½”, and the odd 32 plastic SVD. As with the gallons, smaller quantities are not listed here but we have many varieties still in liners. The clever reader will observe that our goal of flooding the market for Geranium sang. ‘Max Frei’ and Carex pensylvanica has succeeded remarkably well. My next goal is to sell them and make some money.

As mentioned earlier, we do not foresee any price increase this calendar year, even though wage inflation is exactly what we thought it was going to be. Every small factory, landscaper, and farmer around here is looking longingly at our very good Hispanic work force. We are committed to keeping them. We notice that some of our fellow nursery people are busily advertising discounts, sales, marked down pricing, and specials. As mentioned earlier we are barely smart enough to copy smart people, and so keeping track of prices and sales and promises made is far beyond our capabilities. Do not expect special sales from us. We live too far out in the country here for that. Besides, we do not want to irritate our good customers who paid full price a couple of weeks before any sale started. We hear rumors that landscaping jobs are aplenty out there, waiting only for good enough weather and a good enough labor force to get things planted. We plan on catching up to projections before the ground freezes. We are busily prognosticating about business next year what with staying home because of high travelling costs from fuel and for hotels. If we were good at predicting the future we would be wearing clean clothes and sitting in air conditioned offices pontificating, instead of being engaged in honest toil, but we think things bode well for continued plant sales well into 2023. We are producing plants just like we know what we are doing.

One of the better deals we have is Liriope spicata in the 32 to a tray size, either in plugs or in the SVD 3” pot (at least they call it that because they are measuring diagonally, we call it a 2 ½”). These have been around a while and thus are really thick and have lots of rhizomes trying to escape. They will make up fast in the landscape as well as in a one gallon pot.

We have 1500 2 gallon pots of Lupinus Westcountry™ series, developed in the U.K. for sale. These have been trimmed back to the ground, flushed out and with many new blooms started. This time of the year and with multiple blooms, the blooms are much smaller than in the spring. They are all for sale.