By Jesse Eastman
We have a small note hanging on the wall in our office. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s been here longer than I have. It’s one of those things that’s funny but also incredibly true, the kind of thing that makes you smile to yourself as you knowingly shake your head. It reads:
If folks only knew how many –
Hours of thinking
Days of digging
Weeks of sunshine
Months of coaxing
Years of experience
Oodles of headaches
Bushels of rich soil
Gallons of water
Hundreds of backaches
Thousands of heartaches
– It takes to produce a pretty plant – they would gladly pay the price.
All humor aside, it pretty much sums up the process of growing plants. We take a lot of pride in the process, and it allows us to grow the best plants available. But it ain’t easy.
Thinking: Each plant we grow and sell starts with thinking. What plants do our customers want? Will they survive in this climate? How many should we grow? Once we’ve thought ourselves into convulsions, we move on to step two.
Digging: We don’t actually do much true digging anymore – most of our plants are grown in containers, so our equivalent is the potting process. Still, it’s pretty rigorous. In 2015 we put a staggering number of plants on our benches that were grown right here onsite. This includes over 50,000 1-gallon perennials, over 5,000 trees and shrubs, and almost 6,000 vegetables and strawberries.
Sunshine: Colorado is a very sunny state, yet somehow rarely sunny when we really need it. For example, if we get a long stretch of cloudy cool days in May like we did in 2015, tomatoes quickly develop edema, where they get water-filled blisters along the stem. We like the sun. We need the sun.
Coaxing: It takes a lot of coaxing to grow plants. You hope for conditions to be perfect. You talk to them, encouraging them to be vigorous. You tinker with fertilizer, hoping to give them that extra little boost.
Experience: Thankfully, we have some very experienced people behind the wheel, and that experience is key to producing a plant that not only looks good, but is healthy and strong. We learn from past mistakes and amplify past success.
Headaches: Our experts gets the lion’s share of the headaches. The saying “ignorance is bliss” exists for a reason. The more we know about potential problems, the more sleep we lose worrying about them.
Soil: Good soil is a key component to our process. The potting soil we grow our plants in is mixed locally by Organix Supply, and it is formulated specifically to create the best possible growing conditions for our plants in conjunction with the fertilizers we use and the specific mineral contents of our well water. In one year, we use 240 cubic yards of soil. That’s 5207 bushels, in case you’re counting.
Water: To go along with all that soil is a lot of water. Plant in pots get thirsty – a lot thirstier than they’d be if they were growing in the ground. One of my worst dreams is for our water systems to fail and us not to notice. On a hot day in August, that could be the quick death of thousands and thousands of innocent plants!
Backaches: Caring for all of the plants is a physical job. We have to move them from here to there. We have to haul hoses all over the place. Our nursery is an 11-acre property, and we go darn near everywhere on foot.
Heartaches: The backaches are abundant, and when things don’t go right, they are accompanied by equally painful heartaches. When the floods of September 2013 struck, thousands of plants washed away. All of that time, that thought, that backache just swirled away in
a torrential mess.
And yet we continue. It doesn’t make us rich. It’s never easy. But it is a joyful work, and an important one. And if we keep our focus on the pleasure plants bring, it will always be worth it.
Originally published on January 4th, 2016.