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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Doors closing and opening.

It's been a whirlwind month. As it appears the property isn't going to sell anytime soon and therefore we will not be able to use the equity to move and hunker down until the economy gets better, I decided to simply suspend plant sales. The overhead of running a nursery is simply too high and too risky during these times.

What helped push me into this was a trip to Seattle to do a workshop for the HRF group up there. Sue Hopkins invited me up and arranged everything. The day of the workshop some 40 plus rose growers from novice to experienced came, and for five hours we talked about feeding, care, pruning, climbers and the rose business in general.

I loved it! And apparently so did they because all stayed past 6:00 PM. The You Tube videos played a major part in convincing them to come. Lots of nice compliments on them.

What I realized that weekend, with a little prodding by Sue and Marji, is that there are rose things I can be doing that aren't about raising and selling plants. Like teaching, writing, leading rose tours, licensing and more.

So instead of trying to keep a plant production nursery going during these times, and particularly one that's been crippled, I decided to stop producing plants and focus on producing rose growers.

Someone told me during that weekend that in order for doors to open you have to purposefully close some. So I closed the door on selling rose plants and lookee here. Lots of open doors around us.

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!

Trials, Taxes and Blue Hands

We represent a great French Nursery Firm by the name of Delbard and we've entered some of their roses in the AARS Trials. This means the variety we're entering will be tested for two years in about 30 gardens all over the country. If it wins - jackpot! and like the executives of AIG we're going to Bermuda for our annual meetings. But even if it doesn't we'll learn a lot and start to get Delbard Roses out there.

These roses have to be shipped to the trial gardens bare root, meaning with no soil or anything. And they need to be shipped when the gardens are ready to plant them. That's why I found myself in the middle of a cold damp day, packing wet roses on a Monday afternoon. I'd forgotten how miserable packing bare root roses is in the winter.

The barn was 41 degrees on the kind of cloudy day when you can smell the rain coming. Worse, you can also feel it coming right down into your bones as the cold dampness works its way through layers of your clothes, under you skin then right down through your muscles. Layer that backdrop on top of working in an unheated barn, on a concrete floor, with wet thorny bare root roses and worst of all you can't wear gloves because then you can't tag and tie them. That's why my hands turned the color of Smurf poop. And that's why I really don't mind not offering bare root roses to our customers anymore. In fact I love our potted roses even more now!

But I still rather have blue hands and bare root roses (sounds like the beginning of a country song, doesn't it?) than have to deal with taxes - particularly employee payroll taxes. This maze like thicket of rules, regulations, forms and calculations is enough to give anyone fits. I always say small businesses manage to stick around despite the Federal Government, and if any of you have ever had to deal with this stuff you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Then there' s the amount we pay. I voted for Obama and my first message to him and all those folks up on the Hill is, "if you want to spur employment, cut my employee taxes in half and I can afford to hire that extra person I really need." The US Census Bureau estimates there are some 30 million businesses in this country with less than 10 employees. And I guarantee you each one desperately needs another pair of hands but can't afford it. So cut our payroll taxes so we can afford to hire someone else and bingo - 30 million new jobs!

And I won't have to have blue hands anymore.