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” with “strong proclivities to spread and form a monoculture”. Also it is immune to herbicides. There is a story here somewhere.
The reason we are effervescent is because last summer we had one of our best customers in the Greater Detroit area (everywhere the other side of Ann Arbor) desperately needing a bunch of these plants in full living color to set in some water feature for one of his best customers and so we had espied some growing on a swamp along the road. We sent our most diplomatic and least threatening person to negotiate with the nearest house—more precisely, with the people living in the closest house. Money exchanged hands and everyone was happy with the exception of Serbando and his crew who had to make multiple trips out to the swamp trying to dig these in clumps and then hauling them to the truck. It took a while to get enough to satisfy the customer.
After the dust had settled we did a post-mortem here at the nursery where we balanced chiropractor bills for sore backs and the happiness of the customer and how much money we lost during the process. One lesson from the experience, useful to our customers, is that we here at Twixwood will do a lot to keep a customer happy. Our customer base is mostly landscapers and so they have a full-time job of keeping their crews busy working efficiently on the job site all the while schmoozing the customer enough, explaining how beautiful things will be in two years once the plants establish, and then trying to collect for their work. Our customer base does not have a lot of time to search the world for the plant material they need.
We have given some thought to how our business is defined. We concluded that our job is to make up for deficiencies in planning, organizing, predicting the future, and predicting the weather, on the part of landscapers. We have to perform a useful function for them and if it was easy they would do it themselves and not put up with us. We have also concluded that it takes us years to develop a good relationship with any given customer; that it is hard to acquire a good customer base and amazingly easy to lose it. Therefore, once we acquire a loyal customer we will do about anything to keep them. Making them happy is the best way to keep them.
Now that we have decided to custom grow some plants we might as well advertise that fact to all of our customers. Custom growing makes sense because we are already delivering to that customer, and collecting successfully from them, and chatting with them on the phone. We might as well sell them more. This, afore stated, efficiency of distribution and selling, is to be contrasted with the efficiencies of production that happen only when one is growing one kind of plant at one stage in that plant’s life cycle. This is a philosophical question that keeps us awake all night long in the winter and then we cannot figure out the answer and so the rest of the year we are working too hard to stay awake at night so we just go off and do what we have always done and if we are solvent at the end of the year we must have done something right.
We grow two broad categories of product here, and in roughly equal parts. We take over ten million cuttings a year and stick them in small pots or plugs where they root under intermittent mist and then get sold in whichever pot they were stuck. Pachysandra ‘Green Carpet’ is the prime example—we stick it in July and sell it in April. It is over-wintered and we hold it for nine months. It vernalizes and develops stolons and in the spring breaks with the new terminal growth as well as some side shoots. Besides pachysandra we are busily establishing large cutting beds of all of the perennials and if we have lots of a plant and the timing is about right we can produce thousands in plugs. We sold hundreds of flats of plugs of Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’ last summer and we expect that good fortune to repeat itself often and many times. We also have lots of vines. Ideally, we can take a cutting in early summer to deliver in later summer and everyone is happy. The perennial liner business is quite well developed and the really good growers, such as Stonehouse, vernalize their plugs so that they can be shipped in February or March, potted up into a gallon with minimal heat, and sold in May. Right now, before we develop our perennial liner production capability, the only over-wintered vernalized plugs available would be some mistake made either by the production scheduling person or by the over-enthusiastic owner who likes to cut and stick and put roots on plants, regardless.
The other product that we produce and sell is the gallon perennial, of which we sell over one million units a year. If we can purchase a good plug then we can custom grow these. Or, more precisely, if we can obtain a good plug and have enough time to grow a good container plant. I am reminded of some great disasters that involved Mertensia virginica when our then plug purchaser person who is now working at a job for which, I am sure, she are better suited and for another business, tried to buy in a small plug in the middle of winter for early spring delivery. And then I remember when someone ordered dwarf fleeceflower—the Latin names of which change so often that I cannot keep up. This plant can only be propagated from fresh tender shoots in the spring. The order came in October for spring delivery and we were chastised because we had six months’ time to grow the plant and did not have it ready on time.
We are learning from these experiences. These days we are doing a better job of predicting the future. One thing that we can always predict, which is that the landscaper never takes the plants on time, unless it is really early in the spring when they usually want them a little earlier than predicted. Thus, we usually hold the plants for months, trimming and spacing and worrying and mumbling. I will not say what we are mumbling.
There is a whole another discussion that can go on about Master Orders. Some of our sales people go around in the winter browbeating the customers into placing large Master Orders thinking that we will be impressed here in the office, and we are until come Fall and we find out that we are holding lots of plants that no one is going to take and ones that we could have sold three times over during the summer and then produced more that would have been ready in time. The Master Order problem starts with our very expensive computer program. It takes Master Orders out of the inventory and so we cannot sell these plants because we cannot even see them on the screen. On the other hand, we need to reserve some plants for our good customer’s big jobs. We will be doing something about that.
I do not know why I got lost discussing the vagaries of the nursery business when all that I really wanted to do was to custom grow and sell more mud and water-loving plants besides the Equisetum such as Glyceria aquatic variegata, ‘green and white sweet grass’ which is ‘boldly variegated with yellow and white stripes’. Several other comments have been made about this grass, but I will let you have the pleasure—psychic gratification if you will—of doing the research on that subject.
And so we are out here, in the middle of rural Americana in Southwestern Michigan, isolated from the troubles of the real world, and trying to make a living. The struggle continues.