Supplying Our Trees and Shrubs
There’s a lot to get the trees and the shrubs to our store. The logistics with shipping, all of the stuff that is behind the scenes, that way shipping is also starting to get a little bit better. There was a while where shipping was just out of control.
I think there was one order we put out in Oregon and we ordered the plants and then they sent me the shipping and the shipping was more than what the plants cost, but it took seven years for the growers to produce those plants.
There were some things like that, that you just got to figure out and you start to get competitive rates on shipping and you do shop that stuff back and forth. And it’s just all the logistics to get it there, but I want to get it there at the best price and I want the highest quality plants in the store.
And again, that’s why we buy from more than one place. We buy as much as we can locally here. We’re very blessed that just up by Lake Erie, there is a cluster of growers. It’s one of the largest clusters in the United States. So there’s more growers there than almost anywhere else in the United States, but we do buy a little bit out of the mountains of Tennessee. There’s some things down there that are still very hardy grown out in the fields.
They get as cold as we do, but for a shorter window. But those plants during the growing process, the weak ones have been weeded out. They’ve died. And that’s what you want. I don’t want to bring in plants from Georgia or Florida. Those plants haven’t seen 20, let alone negative 20. And we’re going to see it. They’ve been babied. They would not like it.
It’s hard when you explain to customers that not all plants are created equal. Like if you have an endless summer hydrangea that was produced in Florida and one that was grown in Northeast Ohio, that one in Northeast Ohio is significantly hardier. Because up here, it’s not uncommon to see a 7 to 10 percent death rate in the growing. So if you start with a thousand hydrangeas, you’re going to see possibly a hundred of those not make actual sellable size because in the growing process, they lost them. Well, that makes those plants significantly better for us and for our customers.
Yes, we have to pay a little bit more for them, but they’re not the same thing. You’re not comparing apples to apples unless you know where those plants came from and your success rate is going to be higher with the northern grown plants.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
