Holly and I just got back from Baltimore on Friday and I am feeling pleasantly positive about the show. The attitudes seemed much better than last year and we even wrote a few orders! The show was very busy as usual but for us the traffic is wrong, the problem is that mostly landscapers walk the show. It is for this reason we walk the show ourselves to see our customers since most have booths at the show, otherwise we would never see them! It is ok though, we left Stacy in charge when we left, and she is quite the attention getter! This show we stuck with our 80s theme, fluorescent colors oh yes! We didn't want anyone to miss us now! We originally thought to change it up and build Stacy a feather boa made of Carex 'Frosty Curls'. On set up day we started putting it together and the grass was so long it started looking like a tu tu so anyway we went with the idea.
The only bad thing was all the guys checking Stacy out, come on she's a manequin! If that weren't bad enough I had four comments to the effect that I should be wearing the skirt and we could get a whole lot more business, jeeezz, one does not have to speak exactly what ones thinks, especially at a tradeshow! I digress. Wednesday night we went to dinner with Flowerwood Nursery and Peter from Plantip. Da Mimmos, need I say more, yummmmmm!
During the tradeshow we also had several inquires through email on orders, so we were feeling good. Now we just have to hire more people to plant all these orders! Also we heard many people mentioning plant shortages, even on the elevator at the hotel several people mentioning selling out,that is when I promptly mentioned we had liners! I guess on one negative note we did not sell our liners that we brought to the show. We thought we had it pre sold but I think he did not like the mix, probably wanted more Nandinas, I can't bring a whole booth of Nandinas anymore because that is not all we sell! We turned a negative into a positive and gave half to our neighbors, who had been in love with them the whole show. We would have given him the whole thing but he flew and he had a friend that could fit one box that drove. So Holly walked the show and found a lady from Riverbend that wanted the other half. We hope they end up liking them and come back for more! Once the show was over it only took us about 45 minutes to completely break down, amazing how fast it can all come down! Then off to the hotel to get our luggage then to the airport to catch our flight back, I was looking forward for some of that 70 degree weather. I also needed to get some sleep, I signed up for an 80 mile mountain bike race the next day that was a three hour drive from the house and it started at 7:30, eekk! I did make my race, finished it and yes it hurt a lot! But wow what a great way to work off all that good food I ate in Baltimore! So my final words are "Time to PLANT".
The liner grower has traveled alot this year but one of the place that sticks out is Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, NC. This place is a plant nerd's dreamland! If you want ordinary run of the mill plants, this is not the place for you. If you like unusual never before heard of crazy outstandingly beautiful plants, you have arrived at the proper destination. I visited the nursery during a recent trip in August to the Raleigh area for an IPPS Southern Region board meeting. I had some extra time and a car so of course I had to go see some plants! I have heard of PDN many times, see their website often on my google searches and get the catalog which I love, love, love! If you don't have a clue what I am talking about, just visit the website here: plantdelights.com to get a little taste. You can signup for their newsletter as well as request a catalog, highly suggested! Not only are they informative, they are entertaining as well!
To top of the great visit to PDN I got to tour the Botanical Gardens and my tour guide was none other than Tony Avent, what a wealth of knowledge! Here are some of the pictures I took along the way. Now, time to get online and order a few plants!
Two business trips down, I was now on my third in a span of a week! I headed to Georgia to meet with the Athens Select group for the annual board meeting. I was excited about this trip because this would be my first visit to Athens and the UGA Trial Gardens. I got there later in the afternoon so I didn’t have anytime for any visits that day. We did get to stay at Dr. Armitage’s awesome lake house overnight, making for a relaxing evening! The next day I was up early to visit the trial gardens on campus, as the meeting was at the field trial site. I went to the gardens early just in case I would not have time after the meeting for a visit. It was a great site to see, so many plants packed into a small area, Unfortunately, it was dreary and had rained the nigh before so I could not get any good pictures and boy did I try! Well, maybe I got a few but I hate pictures of wet plants so most were trashed. Luckily, the meeting got out in time for another visit before I had to leave to catch my flight. The sun had come out by then and dried the plants. The sun also provided better lighting for some fantastic shots, which are in the slide show at the bottom of my post!
The Athens Select Board meeting went well. We saw the field trials, many plants will still need more testing. We did decide on a new Gaillardia for the collection. I know what you are thinking, “Another Gaillardia on the market, plus you already have two in the collection now!” Personally, I feel the same way, hmm, maybe these were my thoughts. This is why I voted to only include the one that we eventually chose, as there were 3 in the running. This one is much different than other Gaillardias on the market and in the collection, which is a must! It has a nice full bi-color flower, lemon yellow outer ring with a rosey red inner ring. The things that stands out the most though is the habit. This one is very full, high branching, short, all with NO pinch and NO growth regulators. This is great for growers who are wanting to grow smaller sized perennials, it looks good in quarts as well as one gallons. Also it is not high maintenance like other perennials and will not get floppy like other Gaillardias.
From the meeting I learned a lot and met a lot of great people in our industry. You will see a lot of what I learned reflected on our availability. We have added many of the Athens Select plants as well as tweaked pricing to reflect patent fees and tags. With all Athens Select plants tags are automatically included, the price of the tag is included in the price of the liner as we are trying to keep things simple. I have changed this on all items that automatically ship with a tags, so hopefully our availability will be simple and easy to read, sometimes all of the fees involved just make things crowded and confusing! To help support the program we will carry most all of the collection, we will have some on open stock availability but my goal is to get customers to pre book orders as well cannot hold these items for very long before they get overgrown. Also the Southern Living collections of perennials that are part of the Athens Select program will now be listed on our availability. For these, there is a tag/pot requirement. Currently we do not have the tags in stock but I will get with PDSI to get tags to a customer if they should order some of the collection and not have the tags. Unlike the Southern Living shrub collection, customers do not have to be in the grower group to grow this selection of perennials, they just need to meet the tag/pot requirement. Pots are only required for one gallon and higher, so 4” and quarts will not need a special pot, just a Southern Living tag. Well this is all I have to report from the meeting. I am always learning new information! Enjoy the pictures!
The day was June 23rd, 2010, the place, Dallas, Texas. If you know Texas then you should not be surprised that it was boiling hot that day. While I do love the heat, I hate being soaked sweaty in front of everybody at a conference! I think I won the award for most sweaty shirt that day! I arrived about 12:30pm, yes, just in time for the heat to really start kickin’! This was the first time that Magnolia Gardens Nursery or I had attended, so I was pretty excited. We got a table to display some of the many new items we are carrying, all of which we donated to the Arboretum so they can continue to have cool new things on display! There were plenty of annuals on trial which I tend to tone out a bit since we do not grow these. All was good because Jimmy also has plenty of grasses and perennials on trial. My favorites were the UGA Pennisetums, as Jimmy would say “Purple Corn!!!!” and the Rudbeckia ‘Denver Daisy’. Both of which we carry, wink wink!! There are a ton of new products out there so I look forward to sending Jimmy plenty of samples to play with. This way we can see how these puppies actually perform! I don’t want to ramble and bore you any further so I will now let the pictures speak for themselves.
Ahhhh yes, it is hot now! I love the heat though, I would much rather be sweating than freezing to death! As spring winds down it allows me more office time, wait, I know I said I love the heat and now I go off hiding in the office, hehe! I start my day off in the office and usually finish up outside, so I still get my heat! Recently I started working on a database project...maybe not recently....hmmmm wondering when this began? Maybe I started in April, it is all starting to come together now so I have come out of my database bubble. Last night this reminded me of a scene in the Sopranos where one of the guys is quoting The Godfather.
"Right when I think I'm out you pull me right back in."
HA! This is exactly what the database is, I add new things, only to find more new things that it can do! Oh it is so smart and hopefully it is making everybody's life easier. So why did I even start this whole thing? Another quote comes to mind.
"The belief in a thing makes it happen" Frank Lloyd Wright
I definitely had a belief, it just took me awhile to figure out how to make it happen. I had a vision of making our booking system much more user friendly. The old system was very simplistic in an Excel file. This worked for us in the past as we only had a few offerings as products. As our product line increased, this file started giving me nightmares! Ok, maybe not that bad. It was hard to update with new orders and hard to keep up to date as items shipped, not really hard I guess, more time consuming. Also the file was on one computer so it had to be emailed out to others if anyone needed updates.
In college I worked with Dr. Dan Lineberger who designed and maintained Aggie Horticulture. One of the programs he used was a database, Filemaker Pro. I used this for my thesis so I had experience with this program and I knew how powerful it could be. First I started with the invoice solution that came with the program. From here I just start making modification to suite our needs. I added in all of our products and customers first. Next I started learning about reports, these took me awhile to get right, but I finally got them to do what I wanted! Of course there is still plenty of room for improvement but we are getting somewhere now. It is light years ahead of what we had, plus there is so much more it can do in the future....hence the first quote! The interesting thing is how a booking solution has become so much more. Now I can run ship sheet for the week, pick tickets for the week (this was added after I noticed about 4 people were all summarizing the flats needed per week, oh no, the database can do that!) I also added a report that we can send to our inspector for orders that need inspection for the week so it does not need to be typed out each week. Just today I came up with a new report for our breeders, now we can run it and show how many of a particular plant was shipped and to whom it was shipped to.
The future: I have already figured out how to update the inventory from my iPhone. there are some glitches but it works! So I can update while in the greenhouse! This reminds me, I did find a company to host the database so now we can all access it anytime and the copy we work on keeps up to date. This is how I can update from the iPhone. So I have hopes of fixing the glitches and expanding on the iPhone working with the database as we all have iPhone in the office, well except Stephen, sorry Stephen, maybe we will get you one! I can update pages with the online version of the database, Filemaker Pro will write pages that can be viewed online, while not perfect, they do work. This is nice because I can make simple updates at home without needing another copy of Filemaker. I will mainly update product pages at home, to try and keep up with all of the new ones we have! This has lead me to the need for an iPad, oh yes, this is where quote #2 come into play again, hehehehe! But seriously, we can use this powerful system to add orders to our system while on the road with the iPad, also I will use it to make updates to the system while in the greenhouse, too cool! Currently I am starting to work on getting the information for our products in the database to display on our web site. This is the reason I have not updated the web site in awhile! I want to only update something once, not here, then there...wastes my time! So if I can keep our products up to date in the database and have them display on the web site....well that's just brilliant!! This is a work in progress, I hope to have it complete before the summer shows pending I don't hit any major road blocks.
Well I sure if you are reading this you might be tired of reading my ramblings of how I became a database nerd, hehe! So enjoy the video where you don't have to read about it, you can watch it too!
and now for the May Grower's report...now that it is June, haha! Don't worry I will start working on June tomorrow. Now that shipping is slowing I will have more office time. Got to get some inside project completed ASAP! The May Grower's report I show some of our new Nandinas, you would think I might be a little bias, seems like I keep showing these! I also show everyone how to plant an easy succulent bowl, so fun. Enjoy and stay tuned for the June grower's report where I will show you my database masterpiece, well a masterpiece in progress but it is another reason you have not heard from me in awhile, I have been in a database bubble!
I just realized how far behind I am on my posts. So much has been happening at the nursery it gets hard to keep up at times! Here is my April Grower's Report Video. I show some of our new palletized boxing. I must say this new system has been working like a charm this system. Also the addition of a staple gun was brilliant, no more tape that does not stick in the first place! Thanks to Bennett at Victory Packaging for all the help in getting this implemented. Also of interest is my scary forklift driving, I got Mad SkillZ, haha!
