The Blogging Nurseryman by Trey Pitsenberger

Looking at the inside of the store I realize we have just too many different items for sale. In an attempt to please as many people as possible we bring in various products to sell. Somebody wants to know if we have “stump remover” and the next thing you know we have 12 cans sitting on the shelves all season. How many different types of fertilizers do we need to offer? Do we need five different ways to get rid of gophers? It’s just so easy to build your inventory up since you don’t want to see anyone leave without the product they came for. It’s never easy to tell someone you don’t carry Miracle-Gro and watch the look of dis- belief in their face as they leave.

What’s happened is there is so many different types of products on the shelves it confuses the new gardener. Looking at all the different types of fertilizers, where do they start? If we are not right there to answer their question they might just become so confused they don’t buy anything. Better to have a big display with lot of the fertilizer we recommend so they can’t miss it.

I got inspired to go through the store and eliminate 1/3 of our product line. If it doesn’t sell on a consistent basis it’s gone. I want to carry more of what sells for us and less of what doesn’t. It seems simple. “So sorry we don’t carry Scott’s Turf Builder, we have an organic lawn food that does a better job?” There either are interested or not. The chains sell Scotts at a very low price so why compete. Offer something better and be the store that’s different.

I believe that a lot of small garden centers are in the same boat. We try to be every ones favorite garden center by carrying a little bit of everything. The problem is we don’t know when to stop. “I don’t like this particular organic fertilizer, can you start carrying this one?” Now if enough people ask for it might be time to bring it in, but I am going to have to remove another product to make way. No more shelves with a gazillion items for sale.

Most any garden center could reduce the amount of product they carry by a third and not lose any business. We need to look at our stores from the eyes of the novice gardener. I think we get caught up in being horticulturist’s and carrying every product that might come in handy somewhere in a person’s gardening life. That’s what I get to do today. Try to figure out what products just don’t sell and which ones we need to carry more of. It’s kind of a “spring cleaning” in summer.

The Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Historical site is right next to the school my kids went to. I pass by this spot on my way to work. The Colony was the first group of Japanese to arrive and settle in the United States. The colony had come to grow mulberry trees for silk production, tea plants, and bamboo plants. The colony struggled along and eventually gave up and returned to Japan. The story of Okei, a young girl who stayed here when the rest of the colony left to go back to Japan is touching. She is buried on top of the hill she sat on when she would look forlornly east, towards Japan waiting for the colony’s return. Her grave still stands on the top of the hill just a little way up this dirt path.

When I worked at Gold Hill Nursery for Al Veerkamp some 20 years ago we would have visitors from Japan come in with post cards picturing the site, asking how to get to the grave and memorial. I believe there is even a replica in Japan.For years the grave has been fenced off but now there is a movement to purchase the property. “The Florin and Placer chapters of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the Fukushima Kenjin Kai, the California State Department of Parks and Recreation, and the American River Conservancy have formed a working partnership which seeks to acquire the historic 303 acre Veerkamp property at Gold Hill, a rural area between Placerville and Coloma in western El Dorado County” according to the web page.

This is quite exciting as I would think this would be a huge destination for people, especially from Japan or with Japanese ancestry. The historical significance is huge and it would be great to see the old house and the rest of the property preserved.

The photos are from the shrine and historical marker that was placed here in the sixties. I am not sure but I believe this was when then Governor Regan and Japanese dignitaries came here to honor the colony. The shrine was designed by my friend nurseryman Don Yamasaki’s Father.

Monica and I headed down to San Francisco Monday to check things out. I wanted to stop and visit a new garden center I had read about in Garden Design Magazine. Flora Grub Gardens is located just off 3^rd St. on Jerrold Ave. It is a new facility that just opened in May. The gardens are named after the owner who moved from Texas during the dot com era. After that fell apart she started doing landscape design and then opened Guerrero Street Gardens Nursery. Now they have opened this facility.

Located in a warehouse district you have to look for this place. Surrounded by a tall metal fence a necessity in this part of town, the nursery is shinny and new. A metal roof covers most of the nursery and there is parking inside, but only 5 or 6 spaces, so like a lot of city businesses you park on the street. As you approach the store you realize palms are king here as there are some very large specimens growing in the ground as well as in containers.

This is a store about plants with dramatic or interesting foliage. Most of them would not grow in the foothills where we are. This is a frost free area and tropicals and sub-tropicals abound. I didn’t recognize many of them. Cactus and succulents are everywhere including displayed around this old car which may or may not have been sitting on the property when they built this place. There is the requisite coffee shop, “Ritual Coffee” which is located in the store. The store is airy and filled with books to look at. The fertilizer section has maybe five types of organics and that’s it. A small high end tool selection rounds out the conventional garden supplies.

What’s interesting to me is this store is run by someone relatively new to the garden center business. Just like Surf City Nursery in Santa Cruz the owners are new to the trade and that’s important. It seems to me that some of the most interesting new garden centers are run by folks who don’t have any preconceived notions about what makes a great garden center. Who says you need every type of fertilizer and pesticide on your shelves? I saw one organic pesticide in the shop and that’s it.

This store is focused on what they do well, which is lots, and lots of containers and plants with interesting or dramatic foliage. The flower section and soil amendments almost seemed like an afterthought. Is this the future of garden center retailing? Focus on a few core products and skills and drop the rest? I would suspect that if you’re interested in this kind of look there is no other nursery in S.F. that does it this well.

Couldn’t pass this up. Coloma is half way on my 12 mile commute and these modern day iron horses were parked in front of the Coloma post office which dates from the 1850’s.

This area is hugely popular with the motorcycle crowd. Beautiful scenery and roads that are like a roller coaster. Hundreds pass by the nursery on their way up-country. Considered one of the premier runs in northern California it rises to 7000 ft. elevation through the National Forest.

There seems to be some confusion as to what the word mulch means. Over at Garden Rant that point was made clear at the post about Billy Goodnick. There was a mis-understanding about weather Billy recommended soil amendments for the ground, he doesn’t or mulch for the surface of the ground, he does. It may be regional differences that account for the mis-understanding.

Here we refer to any top dressing applied to the top of the ground to conserve moisture or help suppress weeds “mulch”. The stuff you mix in the soil is called “soil amendment”. We use shredded cedar, planting compost, micro-bark, even rock as mulch. Mulch helps hold the moisture in during our long hot summers and is quite important to plant health. It’s like sun block for the ground.

There is no other process, except watering that will help plants survive and thrive here like a good 2 to 3” layer of mulch around the root zone. It keeps the soil cool and evenly moist while preventing the sun from directly hitting the soil.

We have one of the more interesting commutes from home to work. In the 12 miles we pass through one of the most historical and beautiful regions in California. I have decided to take a photo of my trip everyday and post it here. I want to see if I can find something interesting for the 300 or so days a year we drive this way.

The red building is Graham’s Pear Shed and the white building on the top of the hill is their house. The pear shed dates back to the 1800’s when pears we the king crop around here. No pears anymore as a pear blight went through in the 1950’s and destroyed the industry. Now Graham grows mandarins, cherries, and a few walnuts which he sells by the side of the road using an honor system. The road is called Cold Springs Road and was the route Marshall took to tell Sutter in Sacramento of his gold discovery.

Grahm planted the oleander around his property about 15 years ago. This time of year the plants are in full bloom and Monica says they are slightly fragrant, although I can’t smell them. We can’t even get oleanders anymore to sell. The growers have too many problems with disease killing them in production and they are hosts to the glassy-winged sharpshooter which is a huge problem for the wine grape industry. One of the most widely planted shrubs in California is virtually impossible to find for sale anymore.

One more picture shows the ride up the hill towards the nursery from Coloma. That’s the Coloma valley below. Here is where Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill. The site is right in the center of the picture. It’s a state park and crowded with school kids from all over during the week and tourists on the weekend.

The hills have turned golden for the summer. They won’t green up until the rain returns around November.

We are always on the lookout for garden centers or nurseries that are trying different ways to do business. I am much more interested in a small nursery that chooses to create a new market or idea than a multi-million dollar face lift for some large garden center. It’s the small places where the new ideas come from that are eventually implemented in the larger concerns.

I thought it would be nice to find those places and see what it is that they are doing that’s different. Some of my favorite innovative nurseries no longer exist. They shot for the moon and missed. Oh well, at least they tried and often really new ideas don’t take off right away. So whether a nursery still exists is not important to me. It is the vision and willingness to be different that’s interesting to me, and so needed in our industry.

Surf City Growers got my attention when they were featured in Sunset Magazine. What I found interesting is they wanted to grow only non-toxic plants. I couldn’t find out if that is still the case but we did notice that they “have been certified organic by the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). This makes us one of the few organic ornamental plant growers in the State of California, and perhaps the only one on the Central Coast.”

The other interesting thing is owner’s husband and wife, Trent and Linda McNair are new to the garden center business. In their words “After a combination of 25 years in the high-tech industry, we made a decision to create a business that immerses us and our family in what we love and care about. We saw a need to make gardening simpler and more convenient for busy people, but also raise awareness about organic gardening practices. We also knew we could use our tech-savvy to do it. We don’t claim to be experts, but enthusiasts. We are passing along the wisdom we’ve learned through trial and error, and we’ll refer you to experts when we don’t have an answer.”

Sure they are new to the business and haven’t experienced all the crazy things that go on, but I like enthusiasm and they are enthusiastic now. Sometimes the best ideas for this industry come from people new to the business. They haven’t become jaded. As far as growing organic, yes they are in Santa Cruz where you would expect something like this to start, and succeed. It was a bold move to go organic, even in Santa Cruz, but I think it’s something we will see more of around the country.

For being a nursery that got our interest they will be the first listed at my other web site “The Art of Running a Small Garden Center” . As we come across other innovative garden centers we will post them there.

If you know of such innovative places let me know. I have received info before from bloggers, especially the ladies in Austin TX about cool nurseries in their area. Let me know if you have one in your area we can feature.

Michael commented on my last post about the warning at a garden center blog. He said by putting “this blog is intended to be for garden-related topics only, so please do not post any offensive, adult-content or commercial posts. Your cooperation is very much appreciated” will protect the garden center from claims of censorship.

I am not sure of the legal argument but I have had to delete objectionable content from my site before. Some was sexual in nature while most have been advertisements for some other web site. I am not worried in the least about claims of censorship. It’s my blog and I can put in and take out just about anything I want. So can the garden center in question. I am not sure how it would look for the person putting in objectionable content to be claiming censorship from a garden center blog.

We are a litigious society and I can see the concern of the garden center trying to prevent any “bad comments.” The problem is you can’t prevent this stuff. My experience is over the three years of having a blog I have had to remove maybe 10 comments that were “objectionable”. Some of the times it was fellow bloggers that made me aware there was content that shouldn’t be there.

Blogs are things of personal expression and how anyone sets up their blog is up to them. The idea that commercial site would post on this nurseries blog and then claim censorship just wouldn’t fly. Anyone posting obscene material and then having it removed is not likely to claim censorship. What are they going to do, sue?

One of the things I am trying to do at my own business is being positive in the face of the constant challenges we face in this business. We try not to put too many signs with rules on them. The only two “No” signs we have is that “we have cats and therefore would you please leave you dogs in the car” and “Handicap only”, which is dictated by state law. Other than that we don’t put a lot of “No’s” in the business. We don’t have a posted return policy since you can return what you want. We don’t have a bounced check policy posted since it happens so infrequently. We take all the major credit cards since if you want to spend money with us I am willing to pay a percent or two more on the transaction so you can use your American express.

My feeling is as soon as you start telling the consumer what they can’t do, even if they weren’t going to do it anyway it sends a negative message. If there is a law that would allow people to claim censorship if they post a comment that’s obscene or commercial in nature I am not aware. Public opinion wouldn’t support that claim either.

Having just written this post it had made me aware of areas where we could use the power of “yes”. “Yes, we take all major credit cards”, “Yes, we love dog’s, but our cats don’t so would you leave Fido in the car”, “Yes, we are happy to take special orders”, “Yes, we encourage your gardening comments on this blog”, and “Yes, we have no banana’s, we have no banana’s today.” You get the drift, in a world of negativity and “no” the power of “yes” stands out.

We are seeing more and more garden center blogs popping up. One new blog by a garden center mentions “this blog is intended to be for garden-related topics only, so please do not post any offensive, adult-content or commercial posts. Your cooperation is very much appreciated.”

I am glad they mention this as my first inclination was to post some obscene content. Who are they directing this warning to? If I am the type of person who sends adult or offensive stuff to peoples blogs why would the warning deter me? Why would I be at this blog in the first place? The only people reading a garden center blog are potential customers or people in the horticultural trade.

The fun of a blog is the unexpected! What is the post going to be about this time? Who is going to comment today? Maybe the topic won’t be about gardening today but about something fun happening in town for which our business is involved. What about the new employee that everyone is excited about. Tell us more.

The nature of blogs is to attract people who are looking for what you offer, not miscreants that post obscene material. By the way those people will find you anyway and you will have to use the delete comment button occasionally.

The garden center with the warning can be forgiven since blogging is a fairly new thing for nurseries. We have all gone through a learning curve and still are. One way to solve the unwanted comments is to turn on “comment control”. The comments can then be viewed by the blog owner before posting. Or just don’t allow comments, which is no fun. Since this is a garden center blog most likely the “garden-related topics only” warning would have been heeded anyway.

The web is a hard thing to control. If you want control use a business web page that offers little or no customer interaction. If you’re going to blog then I feel interaction is what you want. Let the consumer question you about whatever they want. Your answers will show them what kind of business you are.

I am convinced more than ever that to succeed nowadays in the garden center business you have to stand out and offer a one of a kind experience. No longer do people line up at the cash registers on Saturdays just because you have garden supplies and are open convenient hours. Just getting noticed by the consumer is harder and harder.

One of the ways to be noticed is to be the best at what you do. To be the best small garden center means that we need to focus on what has gotten us here. That’s why we don’t do any landscaping, or have a landscape maintenance service. You also cannot get a landscape plan drawn up here. I know a lot of garden centers would love to have the extra income from these side businesses. While we have tried doing these things ourselves in the past I have found it starts to detract from our core focus, to offer the best small garden center experience.

To this end we find ourselves always looking to discard products and ventures that take us from our core focus. I feel that by dropping under performing ideas we do a better job with the ideas that are taking hold and growing. Trying to please every consumer is a losing battle. We long ago stopped trying to make money selling the same things you get in box and chain stores. We don’t carry Miracle-Gro, Super Soil, Hine’s plants or Scott’s Products. The chain stores do a better job with these items any way.

The more independent and local we can get our merchandise the better. It makes us stand out. Not to the garden masses, but to a smaller group of people looking for a better nursery experience. These people tend to be less focused on the cost of the item and more on the long term value the item and shopping experience provides. They know our plants perform better in the long run. Our fertilizers offer a better, gentler feeding that increases soil fertility rather than destroying it. Even more important they enjoy a nursery experience that will relax your senses while helping to reinvigorate your gardening passion. To continue down this path we need to focus even more on creating a one of a kind experience for that special consumer.