Great Results (BIG Smile)

Update on the Feb. 23 post:

We have been wire service free for seven months!  We were forced to pay them more money for three of those months, but it was a fourth of what we paid before.  It has been a long, somewhat difficult journey adjusting to all our changes.  The worst thing is our Point of Sale system.  We have not been happy with the way it works or with the technical support.  After Valentine's Day next year, we may change to yet another POS system and hopefully, we will like it better.

The most important thing I just have to say is this:::::    We have saved nearly $10,000 dollars in expenses since March 1 !!!!!!.   Happy Dance!!!   And.............. our sales have increased slightly, proving that we don't need any stinking wire service to maintain or increase our sales!!

Thank you, that is all the bragging I need to do right now.
Later.

Cool in the '60's, Cooler in 2013

You could never guess what this pretty scene used to be!  Way back in the day (the 60's, I think) florists were compelled to be in FTD to increase their sales and to offer the service of sending flowers out of town for their loyal customers.  One of FTD's requirements was that each flower shop had to have a cooler in their front room that displayed fresh cut flowers.  

Fast forward to the 80's & 90's when the cooler motor died and the current owners did not want to fix or replace it.  FTD relaxed their rules about the display cooler, luckily. And small town shops don't sell enough fresh flowers to walk in customers to justify the expense of a cooler in the front room in addition to the big walk-in in the workroom.

Now jump to 2006 when I inherited that cooler.  I've been trying to figure out what to do with that white elephant for the last almost seven years.  I tore the doors off of it first and opened up the space, but that didn't satisfy me.  Later on, I painted it a happy, buttery yellow color.  That was okay for a while.

Last month I started to wage war on that poor old cooler again.  This time I pulled and tugged, and ripped every single piece off of that thing that I could.  I ended up with it as open as I could make it without tearing it and the office completely down.  The covering was stripped off the walls, revealing  black walls covered in creosote or something water resistant, that was rough painted & very textured.  With inspiration from my pal, Keith, I got out the bucket of antique white paint and a dry brush and I slapped a sparse layer of white over those rough black walls and the picture tells the rest of the story!!  A coat of black paint on the floor finished it off and I am tickled to death and have to tell everybody about it!!

I was going to put some white shelves in there, but I just got those beautiful Billy Jacobs canvasses in so I hung them in there, instead.  I think the galvanized bucket, cabinet, and pitcher look great with the shabby walls, along with a couple of other wood pieces we have painted.  I am in love with this little corner of my little flower and gift shop!

Big Changes are in store for us and I hope you don't realize what is going on!

After much angst &  hand wrenching,  I have mailed the certified letter to Teleflora telling them we are terminating our membership.  Why is this such a big deal?
First of all, we use a Point of Sale system powered by Teleflora, we have a website maintained by Teleflora, we send and receive out of town orders through Teleflora, and Teleflora processes our credit cards.
Our Point of Sale system is the equivalent of another human working in our shop.  It does a huge amount of work for us everyday.  Now we must learn to use a whole new system.  This is a big deal.
I have committed to the installation of a new POS and I hope we catch on quick as we learn how to use it.  What if I picked a terrible system and we hate it and it doesn't do everything we need it to do???  What will I do???
We have had a new website in the works for six months now.  It is almost ready to use.  Our new web address is www.ravennakyflowers.com..  Thank you, Pam.  The website is the least of my worries, thankfully!
Teleflora demands a whole lot of our money every month in membership fees, magazine subscrptions, advertising, products, floral selection guide updates?, website maintenance, and the list goes on & on & on.
That is the price we have been paying for the convenience of clicking a button to send an order to another florist in another town.  We lose money every day by paying Teleflora this extravagant amount of money.  As we say goodbye to Teleflora, we will be building an address book full of the names of the florists in a lot of different towns that we will have to call ourselves.  There are a lot of towns that do not have any florists that belong to a wire service, so we already have a list of florists to call in these town.  We will be spending a lot of time finding florists in a lot of towns so we can continue to do this service for our customers.  I am so relieved to finally get out from under this big bill from Teleflora each month!
The last issue is our credit card processing.  I have committed to a new processor.  I hope I have made the right decision in choosing the one I have.
See why I don't sleep well?  I am getting so tired just talking about this.  I need a nap before the game starts.

Guarantees on plants

Fall is the "other" planting season!  Several questions are asked repeatedly in the plant seller's world and I thought this is a good time to explain the answers again.

Are your plants guaranteed?  We do not guarantee the plants we sell.  The main reason here is that we sell the plants at the lowest price we possibly can and quite simply, we are too small a business to be able to guarantee plants.  The large garden centers and especially the big box stores buy large volumes, get better prices, and use bigger markups on the plants, so they can afford to guarantee plants.
Most Garden Centers never guarantee an annual, perennial, rose bush, water plants, house plants, plants planted in above ground containers or raised walled beds, and definitely not tropical plants.  They only guarantee trees and shrubs.

Do you guarantee plants that you plant?   I'll answer this with a series of questions that will be posed to you no matter where you bought your plants.
Did you water your plants?
If it has rained a lot, did you also water them?
Is there any sign that insects have infested your plant?   Did you take steps to alleviate that problem?
Did you or anyone else use an herbicide, such as Roundup, near the plant, possibly getting some on the plant?
Has the plant been damaged by a weedeater or lawnmower?
Is there signs of animal damage?

***Let me insert here that most customers call and tell us they have a problem & we try to diagnose what is going on and try to stop the problem before it kills the plant.

Most landscapers will guarantee trees & shrubs for a year, or  eighteen months, but they will ask all those questions first.   As in the first question above, guarantees do not apply to plants other than trees and shrubs.   Landscapers really should not replace plants that have not been cared for properly.  Also, acts of God, such as storm damage, flooding, fire, tornado, earthquake are not covered.  Many landscapers make exceptions because of the particular details in each situation.

***Another point is that a plant really should be 75% to 100% dead before you get a replacement.  A plant with a few brown leaves is not a dead plant!

One more point to mention is how the guarantee works:  Most landscapers will state in their guarantee that they will replace a plant once, but the guarantee does not apply to that replacement plant.  You can imagine that if he guaranteed that plant and it too died, replaced and guaranteed it's replacement, and it died, this could go on for eternity.  A landscaping business could not survive that scenario!!

Over my thirty something years in and around the plant business,  I have been asked a lot of strange questions.  One I'll never forget is the lady who bought two hanging baskets and called back a week or two later and told me her hanging basket plants had all died- did we guarantee them?  I proceeded to ask the burning question:  Did you water them?  How often and how much did you water them? (Some people over water everything, some people underwater)  The lady replied: "Water them? NOBODY told me I had to water them!!!!  If I had known I had to water them, I never would have bought them!!!!!"

The same thing happened in the fall with mums.

If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment here.

I hope you plant something this fall!! It really is a good time to plant.  Trees and shrubs, if properly cared for, will grow roots in the winter months so you have an established plant in the spring and summer that will survive the torturous hot months in Kentucky.  Happy planting!

I just reread my post from a year ago and I am happy to report that Columbia Gas DID NOT get $3000 from Ravenna Florist & Greenhouse last winter!!!!  And we are tickled to death with our Fort Knox roof.  However, we are still waiting to get siding on our wall outside & drywall on the inside!

Beware of Fake Florists!!!

I met an irate young man on Monday when he walked in the front door of the flower shop asking for the arrangement he was supposed to pick up.  He said the arrangement was supposed to have been delivered on Saturday and he was promised it would be ready for him to pick up in twenty minutes when he talked to the person he had placed the order with.  I was completely confused, since I had not received an order on Saturday for anyone-it was so horribly slow on Saturday, we had closed at noon instead of three p.m..  Nor had I spoken to anyone concerning an order to be picked up on Monday.  I told the man I had no idea what he was talking about and began to quiz him and try to get to the bottom of this conflict.

The real story was that he had placed an order on Saturday, either on line or by phone, with From You Flowers.  He had paid an extra twenty dollars to get"Speedy Delivery", but the flowers were never delivered to his friend.  He had complained on Monday and was assured that he could go to the florist and pick up the arrangement so he could deliver it himself within twenty minutes.  And that is what brought him to me by mistake.  I don't know what flower shop he was supposed to be in, but I was not the florist the order was placed with.

My whole reason for telling this tale is to once more tell anyone who will listen to me to NEVER use an on line flower order gatherer like From You Flowers or Just Flowers.  All you have to do is search on line for florists in the town you want flowers delivered in.  Then you must make sure that the florist has a physical address in that town or a nearby town.  If the "florist" does not have a physical address, they are people who have never set a foot in a flower shop, they don't know the difference between a rose or a carnation, and they could very well be in India or the Philippines.

Back to the real life story of the man from Michigan wandering around a small town in KY trying to find his missing flower arrangement.  I expressed my sympathies to him for calling From You Flowers and scolded him to never do such a foolish thing again.  I handed him my business card and told him how he could order flowers 24 hours a day from our website and it would cost him a lot less money to do it.  I wished him luck and asked him to not let this experience with a fake florist turn him against real florists.

Tulips-The Straight Dope

For the last 30 years I have tried to answer questions about tulips, particularly about why you have beautiful tulips the first spring after you plant them, then the next year they don't look too great.  I have experienced this frustration myself when I planted 200 tulips on either side of my front sidewalk.  They were fabulous that first spring, and then the second year about 100 of them bloomed.  I was so mad because it was  a lot of work planting 200 tulips!!  The third or fourth year I attempted to dig them all up.  Now I have a dozen or so sporadic red tulips that still pop up in the spring.  Grrrrr.
So, today, I ran across the most concise explanation of why the tulip thing just doesn't work out too well.  This explains why the big landscapers plant hundreds of tulips in the fall and then they dig them all back up after they are through blooming in the spring and they plant annuals in their places.  They throw away the tulip bulbs!!!  You just have to look at this whole thing like you look at planting annuals in the spring.  You get to do the work and spend the money in the fall and enjoy the fruits of your labors in the spring.  Then you have some more work in the spring, replacing the bulbs with annuals.
Why don't tulips come back?
The tulip bulbs that you buy have been raised in sandy Dutch soil and fertilized to perfection.
When they bloomed in the spring, the flowers were cut off as soon as they opened so they didn't steal much energy from the bulb.
The leaves were allowed to grow for six weeks in the cool Dutch weather.
After the bulbs went dormant in early summer, they were dug and stored in a climate controlled warehouse that mimics a long, hot, bone dry summer in the mountains of Central Asia, which is where most tulips are native.
All this TLC produces the perfect flowering size bulb to sell.
As you can guess, conditions are not that favorable in our soil and our weather!
The bulbs that we plant will split into smaller bulbs and it takes years for those to grow into big enough bulbs to bloom.  Many of our bulbs will rot in our heavy wet soils.  This why our tulip display dwindles down to nothing impressive.

Tulips that will bloom the best for us are Darwin Hybrids, Fosterianas, and wild, or, specie tulips, but none are guaranteed to be perennial.

My suggestion to gardeners is to create a bed in your landscaping that is reserved for tulip planting in the fall, blooms in the spring.  Don't plant your tulips in beds with perennials or shrubs that you have to dig around, possibly injuring them.  After you dig the bulbs in late spring, replace them with your favorite annual, such as petunias, marigolds, or vincas.  Then enjoy the color until frost, then dig up the annuals and plant new bulbs.
A few hours on a Saturday, twice a year, and you've got blooms your neighbors will be jealous of!!

So, with all this information, you have to ask yourself, "Why would I go to all the trouble to plant tulips bulbs, just to have to dig them up in the spring????  And, do it all over again next year???
You could spend $50 to $100 on one hundred or two hundred bulbs.  Do you spend that much on a Reds baseball game, or a concert, or UK football tickets?  That's money spent on something that lasts a few hours.  Spend that amount on tulip bulbs and you will get a week or two, depending on the weather at the time, of pure enjoyment.  A riot of colorful flowers is proven to lift your spirits and the spirits of everyone who sees your flowers.  I like the sound of that after a long, gloomy winter, and a wet, cool spring!  Nothing says Happy Spring! like a bed of tulips in full bloom!!



For a lot of fantastic information about tulips and other bulbs, go to www.colorblends.com.   This information I have shared comes from their current catalog.