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.

Take a look around

January is an odd time for landscaping, even though the weather so far this winter has been unusually mild, and we have just finished the wettest year on record.  The last time I looked, the daffodils in the yard were about two inches tall- they are so confused by our mild temps.  January is the time for planning and daydreaming.  The seed catalogs start arriving in the mail, so if it ever snows this month and you are forced to stay in the house for a day or two, you can pour over the beautiful selections in flowers and plants available to you in 2012.
A very worthwhile project this time of year is to go outside, take a long, hard look at your landscaping and assess how it looks in the dead of winter.   When landscaping in warm weather, all the plants have their leaves and it can be difficult to visualize what those plants will look like in winter when the leaves are gone.  Basic design principles are balance, repetition, unity, and variety.  Good landscapes have a balance of evergreen plants and deciduous plants.  Varieties of evergreens, such as boxwoods, should be planted in multiples, as should deciduous shrubs, like spireas or barberries.  No large quantities of any one type of plant should be planted.  And all this advice adds up to variety!
Look at your plantings now and see if there are too many bare plants clustered together or too many green leaved or needled plants in a spot.  Would it look better if you traded in some winter bare plants for some that keep their leaves all winter?

More Improvements

Last week we got a new wall with 2 doors and 3 windows.  Then we got an addition to our roof that makes it so our roof sits over the top of the wall and extends out about 24".  It rained a lot last Thursday and we did not have one bucket inside the building to catch water!!!!!!  I think it has been over 20 years since the inside of the shop stayed dry in the rain!  I am so happy!  If you never really looked at the problems we had before, you probably can't understand why this is all a big deal to us.  It is so exciting to upgrade things- change is good!

Change is scary!

Two and a half weeks ago we started the project I've looked forward to since 2008.  After taking over the florist and greenhouse in Nov. 2006, I soon began to realize what a white elephant the greenhouse structure itself was.  Because the greenhouse was attached to the flower shop building, there was a "ditch" where the two structures were conjoined, which trapped water when it rained.  For years, buckets had been kept in place to catch all the water than leaked into the building with each shower. This really bothered me!! 
By 2008 , I had had enough time to figure out that the price we had to pay to keep the water pipes from freezing was outrageous!  This was all because the water came from the meter in the back yard and came to the greenhouse, entering in an unheated section of the greenhouse.  Then the water traveled through pipes in the air, eight feet overhead through the length of the greenhouse.  The water finally entered the building and then supplied the restrooms and the workroom.  Heat tape had to be used to keep the pipes from freezing where they came up from the ground into the unheated section of greenhouse.  The two heated sections of the greenhouse had to be kept above freezing all winter to keep the pipes from freezing.  The only logical explanation I can come up with for all this is that the greenhouse must have had running water before the flower shop had bathrooms!
I hope you can imagine how expensive it is to keep a greenhouse heated all winter!  This was a greenhouse that had rain coming down inside of it, as well as snow falling in it!  So, if those forms of precip can get in, that means a lot of warmth can escape.  $$$$$ down the drain!!!
I asked for advice from plumbers, builders, and electricians.  No one wanted to tackle all these problems.  The only answer I could imagine was tearing the whole thing down!!
Side Note:  I always wondered how the old greenhouse kept from falling down when the wind blew.  I was always scared it would  fall and hurt someone.  Today I learned why it never fell!  The frame of the greenhouse was galvanized steel. Dave dug up four feet deep concrete pilings that secured the steel posts in the ground, with his tractor today.   The wood in the place was very old and fragile, and there were some pieces of the steel structure that were no longer attached to each other, but those steel poles in four feet of concrete were not going anywhere very easily!
So, 2 1/2 weeks ago, we started swinging the sledge hammer!  Today the last major part of the whole structure came!  When you drive along Main St, you can now see the backs of houses on Elm St. past where the greenhouse used to be.  When I walked into the shop this morning, I couldn't believe how sunny it was inside the building because the greenhouse is no longer blocking the morning sun on the east side of the shop.
I just can't wait until winter and Columbia Gas sends me little bitty bills!!!