Closing A Chapter

This is the final post I will write for this particular blog. You see just as we are moving our blog is moving too. After all, without a full time nursery it seems a little silly to keep blogging about running a full time nursery.

But before I go I’d like to say I’ve had a great time these past 9 years running Ashdown Roses. The roses, the people I’ve met, our customers and most of all the folks I worked with. We are a family and that extends to everyone who came up and spent hours volunteering doing all kinds of things. So a big thank you to all of them.

Ashdown also gave me my “name” in the rose business and I know the opportunities presented now would not be there without it. But quite honestly the events of the past few years that prompted this blog have sometimes made it difficult to go to the old property one more day, knowing I have yet another battle to fight. I would have liked The War Of Roses to remain a past historical event.

More changes are coming and we’ll be announcing them soon. But we will still be in the rose business and so for now instead of focusing on producing rose plants we are going to focus on…

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Size Does Matter

The ongoing move to our new retail site is letting me know I've been living in a rose bubble these past few years. We are so used to dealing with rose people and passionate gardeners who are familiar with mail order plants being smaller, that I forgot what the general public wants when they drive up to a garden center.

They want a large one.

As large as possible.

And they want it NOW!

And even in this economy they are willing to pay a higher price.

Case in point.

We had just transplanted some Mons. Tillier roses from their smaller liner pots that we ship in, into two gallon pots for the retail area. Some good potting soil, nice organic fertilizer, patience and Mother Nature means in about 4-6 weeks that rose will be much bigger and indeed a more attractive plant to sell.

A customer walked in just a few days after we did this and wanted those larger pots. Trish told the person they had just been transplanted and were in fact the same size as the smaller ones, which were less money. Nope, the person insisted, I want the larger ones. Trish said that would be fine just leave them in the pots for a few months. Our motto is give them honest information and then give them the rose they want.

The customer went off happily with three great, newly transplanted, roses and we learned something.

Better to sell the same plant for $22.95 in a larger pot than $15.95 in a smaller pot.

You see, size does matter. To our bottom line!

Go or Stay?

This is the time of year when we decide which of the older plants should be held over one more season and which ones should go. Not to the compost heap but into the big 50% off sale we sometimes hold at the nursery at the end of the season. The hope is to find them a good home.

Trish and I go through each variety checking to see how many we have left in stock. Then we decide if we have more than we might need for fall shipping. The logic behind these large, important business decisions is convoluted to say the least.

“Well, I’ll begin, “I think we should hang to Bermuda’s Kathleen because it does great in warm climates and they’ll start ordering in October for winter planting so they shouldn’t go into the sale.”

That one gets by Trish. Most of the time she’ll agree with me but every now and then;

“We have a fair amount of Himmelsauge left and since it’s a plant more for up north and folks up there generally plant in early spring I don’t see them ordering them this fall. Plus it’s a spring bloomer and they really don’t sell well all over the country so we probably have enough for folks up north when they do order in spring”

Trish will counter with, “I seem to be shipping at least a few every week.”

That trumps all my arguments. You see I know what I like but since Trish does all the order processing and talks to the customers, I am not as up to speed on what’s actually selling in what numbers.

Oh sure, Quick Books can give me all kinds of nifty sales figures, trends and pie charts galore in a million colors, but it is never the same as talking and emailing with the customers on a daily basis and feeling what is in demand.

So luckily for the roses the last word at our nursery on if they stay or go is not in the hands of a computer. It’s in the hands of a rose lover with her ear tuned to other rose lovers – and that is as it should be.

As Goes Ohio!

So goes the nursery. Well, as goes Ohio Belle that is. This lovely sport of New Dawn is a rose we have not offered in probably four years. You see, we simply never got around to taking cuttings of it, and hundreds of other roses in our collection. I was chasing my own tail so much I simply forgot to make sure these gems were in our catalogue year in and year out.

Michael and I were taking cuttings from the old Mother Block today when Michael mentioned he had one more piece of burlap left to wrap the cuttings in. I peered under a giant Rose Marie Viaud and lo and behold, Ohio Belle. Two nice canes - holding on for dear life. We took cuttings and as I write they are now in the mister.

Not a big thing but a good harbinger of things to come.

Last year at this time we had barely started taking cuttings. The overworked staff of one, Trish, plus me were too busy with shipping to get to them. Michael came on board around this time last year and we really didn’t get started on cuttings until the end of June.

As I write we have already taken close to 20,000 cuttings closing in on 500 different varieties of roses. Some gems we have not offered in quite a while from old garden to brand new.

You see, a nursery hits a point where you get on a kind of cruise control when it comes to propagating. I really feel after almost three years we’re back to that point. Michael is settled in beautifully, Trish is back to her beloved lists of Mother Plants and me? I’m riding this cruise control all the way to Ohio and beyond baby!

Sittin in Limbo

We are waiting for the property to sell. And waiting and waiting and waiting. We are at the point where we can’t move forward with our future until it does. You see, I will be using the equity from the sale to prep and set up the new property where our greenhouses, Rosarium and production facilities will go. This is a separate area from the new retail site. We are already over there.

The bank situation left us with little in reserve so we pretty much live and pay our bills off sales of the roses; something the tanking economy has made a bit more difficult to weather. It’s also making the property harder to sell. The equity from the property sale will not only be our means of setting up the new place but also our cash cushion.

Welcome to being a small business in the first part of 2009!

I’ve been told a few times to possibly find an investor – not an idea I’m against. But finding an investor for a rose nursery is harder than the old needle in a haystack cliché. A nursery like ours is a labor of love. While I’m sure investors want to be loved, I doubt a portion of the love that goes into a place like ours is considered a good return. Then again in this day and age it’s probably a better one than most!

I’m not complaining mind you. I’d still rather do what this than anything else in the world. As I always say, “it could be worse. I could have a job”.

So we are going to continue to move forward and spread some serious love into our customer’s gardens. We have it in spades.

Want some?

Know anyone who wants to buy twenty great acres in the upstate with lots of love in it?

Phone lines are open!

A Fresh Wind In The Rose Garden

"I don't want to try growing roses because they are fussy and need a lot of spraying"

Boy, if I had a dime for every time I heard that at a garden show I'd be independently wealthy. For years and years I felt we were swimming against the tide by trying to tell people that Garden Roses were different from Exhibition/Florist Roses and in fact are quite easy to care for.

Fast forward to last weekend. I was at the North Carolina Arboretum speaking at a rose event organized by the Asheville Blue Ridge Rose Society. They do a rose exhibition for the general public every year there. Members bring roses and they are set out in vases on tables, but it is not a rose show with judging etc. Instead the idea is to showcase the diversity of The Rose with blooms cut straight from their garden. They do a great job also with talks and a question and answer table. I did my talk "Roses Are Plants Too" and then stuck around for a few hours to answer questions.

For the first time I can remember, everyone from the general public I spoke to was open to trying Garden Roses and actually knew what they were. Personally I think the rose Knockout has a lot to do with this changing of minds. I suspect the Garden Forums, articles on easier care roses and even TV programs are also driving that effort.

Whatever the cause it was great to spend a beautiful sunny day in the mountains of North Carolina, talking roses and not feeling like the odd man out.

"I'd love to try some other garden roses because they are among the best plants in my garden" is what I hear now. And I love it! And then sell them a rose of course!

A rose "comes-a-calling"

One of the joys of my job is bringing new roses to our customers. Usually this involves travels to Europe, a few dinners, touring endless acres of rose gardens, a few more dinners and then decisions over nice glasses of wine. Tough work but someone has to do it! Sometimes however a great rose finds me right in my own backyard; in my case the nursery. Such was the case with a Kordes rose.

The nursery firm of Wilhelm Kordes & Sonne has been breeding roses a long time and are very good at hardy disease resistant varieties like Brother's Grimm (at left).

Quite a few years ago Germany (Where Kordes resides) began limiting and even banning the use of chemicals by the Ornamental Horticultural Industry. Wilhelm Kordes then banned them from his test fields - a move considered very risky by many but it makes him a hero to me. Keep in mind we are going back fifteen - twenty years, which was the the heyday of the fussy, spray a lot, cut flower Hybrid Tea.

I knew about Kordes Roses for years of course. Great classics like Dortmund that were as easy to grow as any roses I'd ever seen.

It was during a stint in The Netherlands judging the rose trials, that I finally had a chance to see so many of the new ones we didn't seem to have over here. Aprikola, Sterntaler (lower left -called Golden Fairy Tale in the U.S.) and Sangerhausen Jubilaumsrose (upper right -Floral Fairy Tale here) were just a few of the great roses I saw.

After the celebration dinner I approached Wilhelm Kordes, introduced myself as a fan of his roses and a nursery owner and asked if we could carry his roses in the United States. He took my card and much to my delight about a month later I got a letter saying yes, they were interested in licensing us to carry their roses including many of the new ones. They even agreed to send Mother Plants from Germany!

We've slowly been introducing them over the past few years and this season is our big push. One of my new favs is Cubana (lower right). I came upon this little gem last summer when I was wandering through the gardens. Or rather, it came upon me.

Unfortunately due to our financial situation I had not been able to hire the normal summer help to keep the beds weeded so they were pretty overgrown. Trish's sons would periodically go through with a weed-eater to cut the worst down but this particular bed was overdue.

Popping up above the Bermuda grass saying "here I am, pick me, pick me" was the bloom spray of Cubana that you see in the picture. I pulled back the weeds and saw the foliage was lush and dark green all the way to the base of the plant. I grabbed my secaturs, took some propagation material and we introduced it this past spring.

I love finding, testing and introducing new roses to our customers. And it's also a lot of fun when a great rose like Cubana finds me.

I might let the weeds grow up a bit this year as well to see what else comes-a-calling.

Ready, Set, Propagate

Man, I love this time of year. Propagation season is about to really get rocking. We've already done some from the existing plants we have in inventory but in another week we move outdoors to roses we have not had in stock this past season

Or, sadly several seasons for that matter. We had so many roses we wanted to propagate and offer to our customers but we just couldn't get to them these past few years. And quite honestly I couldn't focus enough to get us organized to get to them anyway.

Now however, we know where we want to go, Michael starts full time next week and since he is our main propagator I know I'll have a solid person out there running the show.

We have a very ambitious goal this year. 1000 varieties on the website by September 1st. I think we can do it and I've put the word out to the Red Clay Day Gang for help and I know they'll respond.

I certainly measure Ashdown's year by the business stuff like profit and loss, website stats, attrition rate of transplanted roses etc etc. But our identity and to me one of our yardsticks are the roses we offer our customers on the website.

We are privileged to care-take some lovely and special roses. And a responsibility of that privilege is to make them available to customers to keep them in commerce and in as many gardens as possible.

And for purely selfish reason I love seeing all those new babies blooming the in greenhouse. It's like seeing old friends over and over again. Talk about stopping to smell the roses!

A simple little thing.

Turn on the news these days and it seems all you see are stories about people like Bernie Madoff, R. Allen Stanford and all kinds of other people whose only goal in life seems to be taking what they can from whomever they can. It's enough to make your faith in people disappear like so many billions of dollars investors trusted those thieves with.

Then along comes a small gesture that makes you realize those people splashed on the nightly news are the exception and not the rule.

We had one of those gestures last week. I was working in the office with the door closed because it was cold so I obviously didn't hear the customer drive up. I may have been on the phone when they knocked or simply distracted by something. Trish was out so I was holding the fort on my own.


Towards the end of the day I went outside into the barn and found the note in the picture sitting on the table we use as a desk out there. Just a few simple words:

"Please call me: I took one potted sombreuil and need to pay for it. Thanks"

When Trish came back she called the customer who cheerfully gave her their credit card and paid for the Sombreuil.

A simple, little gesture but how immensely uplifting - particularly in these times.

Our First "Red Clay Day"

Last Saturday morning in a slight rain I found myself surrounded by 7 of some of the greatest people I've ever had the pleasure to know. Here's how it happened.

We have close to 3600 rose bushes in the ground. Some have been there for close to seven years now and they are quite happy and firmly rooted where they are thank you very much. They don't want to move but since I have no plans to leave them behind they haven't much say in the matter. There comes a point where you have stop talking to your plants and start barking orders.

There is actually plan in place to move them. We'll accomplish this by cutting them back very short and "dig" them out of the ground with a bare-root rose lifter. This is a simple device pulled by Jethro with a blade going about 12 inches into the ground that severs the deep roots and then a short ramp on the back that heaves the rose out of the ground accomplishing two things. Getting the rose out of the ground with your back intact and further dispelling that "roses are delicate plants" crap.

This works for mature plants but not for small ones. They just get sucked into the rose wake as Jethro and the digger work their way up and down the rows. So this means first the small roses need to be dug up and planted in pots - by hand - one by one by backbreaking one.

And that's how I found myself surrounded by 7 eager volunteers who also happen to be dear members of our rose family this past Saturday. They brought shovels, gloves, clippers and most of all an energy and spirit that cleared the rain from the skies. Did I also mention they also brought a great pot-luck lunch? Including vegetarian chili for yours truly.

We hit the fields and 7 hours, countless bags of soil and pots and a great lunch later some 500 roses had been lifted from the ground and now rested in their pots in one of the cold frames.

I was perhaps more exhausted than any of them but not because I worked harder. But because each passing hour of laughter and rose camaraderie further put the past behind and reminded me why I do this for a living. So while they lifted some 500 roses those Magnificent 7 also lifted two years of weight from my shoulders. I suspect Trish felt the same.

Whew!

I'm a meet the deadline kind of guy.

I was really getting worried about meeting the deadline for all the good folks who are coming in a few weeks to help us move roses. Worried because the place was not going to be ready for the roses to be moved and also ready for them. And "them" were in some cases driving hours and taking time off from work.

I spent the day up there Monday with John, a great guy who is working with me to get the property ready. We got a lot done but ran into some snags moving a huge pile of old brush that had been stacked when the place was logged a few years ago. This put us back in getting to the other areas where the new planting would go. I know what you are saying right now. Why not start with the planting areas first - and you'd be right.

Except I'm a meet the deadline, visual kind of guy.

I need to see the space before I can really see what goes where and when. And that big pile of brush was in the way of my mind's eye. So it had to go. John worked his tail off and moved mountains of brush in short order until we got to the backside of the pile.

There we encountered piles of rotted branches turning to soil bogged down by the rains that finally broke the drought. It was not going to be moved quickly even with Jethro hustling in after John to smooth areas down so he could come in without losing his kidneys on a Norman Bates roller coast ride.

The next day I went back with Ray who is the clear set of eyes at Ashdown. He's the kind of guy who can see the rose nursery for the trees and pointed out that if we started planting where I wanted we'd lose a lot of property we were renting and also would most likely end up not have buildings and greenhouses where they would best serve the overall picture. So why not wait until we can get in a big ol bulldozer and push the big stuff out of the way. This was not easy for me to admit and took far too much of Ray's time for me to come around.

You see I'm also a meet the deadline, visual kind of, do it now kind of guy.

After Ray talked me down from the trees I knew we had to postpone moving day. So the next morning I timidly emailed the dear Rose Family members organizing it and let them know. Their response?

"And your point is what? We're coming anyway to do what we can and we'll schedule another day for all of us to move the roses."

You see I'm a meet the deadline, visual kind of, do it now and very, very blessed kind of guy.

The Sun Is Out!

I admit it. I am a much happier person when the sun is out. I like the heat. Paul and I packed up some roses yesterday and by the time we were done his hands were turning colors again. Mine were actually warm for the first time ever... I think he got some frost-bite from playing with those bareroots.

Another piece of weed cloth found a new home in the dumpster today. I watched as Paul and Jethro made quick work of it. Very odd to look out my window and not see it any more. I don't miss it. It was ugly and the snakes would hide in it.

I have been having great fun today reading all the new rose reviews on our website. If you happen to grow a rose that we sell go and review it- what a great resource for other growers!

Our Facebook group is really taking off. I have been busy adding new and old friends. I can honestly say that I get paid to be online! I will be glad when winter is over and we can get back to the gardens. As a dear friend of mine posted this morning, he will eat 100 goldfish to have spring arrive a month early!