Dear Friends, 

We pushed the refresh button on our catalog, aiming to keep it simple, offer you ideas to keep your product line innovative, and help you invest in liners to maximize your profits. 

Highlights:

• more detail about some of our most notable tree & shrub liners 

• specifics on how these essential nursery/GC items can work for you 

• how you can use these plants to bump your profit margins 

We revise our online availability list monthly, and mail/email it 6 times per year. To be certain about availability, give us a call for current information on remaining sizes and pricing of the plants you're hoping to get. Whether you’re a first time buyer or long-established, we take the same care and attention to detail that we’re known for in this business. Let us show you what superior liners look like, careful attention to customer service feels like, and integrity means. Best wishes for a prosperous ’18-’19 season…. 

Kind regards,

Mark & Jolly 

Growers pay close attention to water and fertilizer. And we know that woody ornamental roots require a well-aerated growing mix - at least 20% free air space - to get enough oxygen to promote healthy growthand prevent disease. Yet, how often do growers neglect to seasonally monitor their mix for its porosity –its free air space after irrigation?

If you need to verify the porosity of your own mix, try this easy method. Keep detailed records for various crops, start to finish:

1. Choose several potted plants from a block to test. Tape over the pot drainage holes.

2. Carefully add water to each pot until you just begin to see it at the top of the container mix.

3. Without tilting the pot, remove the tape to catch the draining water for a minute or so.

4. Accurately determine the cc or ml volume of water using a small measuring cup.

5. Using the cm scale on your tape measure, determine your pot dimensions to calculate soil mix cc volume. Formula: πr 2 h (3.14 x average radius squared x mix height) for roughly cylindrical pots like a #1 or #3. For conical pots, the formula is the same, but divide result by 3.

6. Divide the collected cc’s of water by total soil cc volume. Multiply decimal result by 100 to get your percentage of unfilled pore space in the mix. (Air replaces all the water you collect.)

Consider how important AIR is to your potted woody profit experience…

What’s your test result? Most woodies grow best in a potting mix of 20-30% porosity. Root expansion and mix decomposition diminish free air space throughout the growing season, so a mix may test 27% to start, but by season’s end it may decline to 12-15%. If your mix tests below 22-24% from the get-go, consider using a more coarse mix, even if you just cautiously set up a significant side-by-side contrast trial. You’ll be glad you did.

Untrained crews may press down a mix too tightly at potting time. Stacking on a pallet after filling flats – it’s a poor handling practice if your potting mix gets compressed. Summer heat tends to subside after mid-late August. But unless trained otherwise, irrigation staff may complacently rely on irrigation timers instead of lifting pots and flats – using experienced judgment before cranking on the water.

How often do supervisors get riled up if a crew person lets a block of plants dry out too much, but if that same person over-irrigates, hardly anyone notices? In so doing, do supervisors effectively train irrigation crews to drown plants?

Watering crews have your checkbook in their hands. Over-watering containers - not

allowing them to dry down during the irrigation cycle - means a mix has less time with the minimum air needed to support vigorous, healthy roots. Phytopthora and other root infections may develop, getting progressively worse before they’re apparent.

These practices all foster inadequate soil mix porosity - conditions ripe for root disease and failure - literally at the finish line. What changes might you make in your operation if this provokes your concern? How may we help you with more information?

An excellent mix in our propagation experience is 75% coarse bark, no more than 10% coarse peat, and 15% perlite or pumice. You may wish to evaluate 90% coarse bark + 10% coarse peat. Baled bedding plant mixes, used for vegetable starts and plugs, are too expensive to use in large pots. But with thoughtful irrigation practice, as long as you incorporate slow-release fertilizer and include calcium, magnesium and micro-nutrients, even a pure bark container medium can grow healthy woody plants you’d be proud to offer.

At Heritage, we regularly evaluate our growing media for porosity, EC (soluble fertilizer level) and moisture. Simple methods - using a salt meter, lifting plug trays or pots to judge their moisture level – are easy but critical staff training elements. We closely monitor root development so we send you nothing but the most healthy, white-rooted woody liners at the end of the season.

We offer these ideas to help you profit with our plants, so they will grow up like healthy kids and make us all proud. It’s just a tangible, specific example of how Heritage is distinctively different. We aren’t just your supplier; we’re your growing partner.

Dear Friends,

Shipping is in full swing now. It’s time to get our product out, verify our production plans and especially now with labor costs so high, to ID spots where major efficiency opportunities lie.

We’d all do well to quit looking at labor as a budget hemorrhage. In fact, until we consider labor in light of what it really is, our biggest asset, we’ll continue to prejudice our production strategies by considering labor only in light of what it “costs” instead of what it pays. The real question before us is: “How do we use limited labor to maximize profit, consistent with what we do best?” Or, “How do we organize trained staff to focus on what we do well and eliminate all labor on inefficient production - basically quit growing those items?”

The essential task before nursery and GC owners now is to astutely determine what items to continue to grow within the whole mix, and what items to drop. At the same time, one has to continue to innovatively offer new, superior varieties and promote them for their improved landscape value. Leadership in a market requires reasonable risk-taking on new items to keep production up with market trends and buyer interests. Market leaders shape those trends, after all.

As you consider this availability list, realize that we’re at the beginning in the production cycle and have a significant role in deciding what’s offered in the woody liner market. Your purchase decisions are guided by what’s tried and true, but also by what new plants are out there that you can charge a premium for if they offer superior landscape qualities and aren’t available at a box store or at your competitor’s company.

We feel humbled by the trust you place in us to always “do the right thing” and to offer you our best professional wisdom in choices, based on 37 years of experience at this. We say we’re your partner in the business, and we feel that every day - with every box or truck van door we close.

Call us if you have some spare space, and we can help you ID profitable items to make 2018 your most prosperous year ever.

Respectfully,

Mark, Jolly and Staff

February 2018 Availability List

Hello friends,

Which 20% of liners you purchase generate 80% of your profit per acre or square foot? Follow the money. Then refresh your plant menu to grow more of the profitable stuff while you dump the losers.

Effective production management requires growing new, higher profit items to replace outdated ones. Know your key strengths, those that distinguish you from your competition, because that top 20% of items you grow likely pays most of your bills. Conversely the bottom 20% may create more than their share of trouble and are a money pit you could profitably do without.

Does your sales staff have skin in the profit game? If not, your production goals may be oriented for sales, but not necessarily for profit. One could rea­sonably conclude that sales staff who are commission-paid have an incentive to sell more volume by selling at a loss!

Staff who are paid a sales commission without consideration for profit margin will resist efforts to drop popular items they sell in big volume, but at an unacceptably low margin. This problem has to be fixed before

This hard work is not a hobby enterprise. Cash is our goal, so we must all grow fewer losers while we annually restock the pipeline to update our product mix. Like produce at the grocery, the line-up has to be fresh in order catch customers' imagination.

In looking at your production mix, consider the Pareto Principle, or “The 80/20 Rule” It’s named for an astute Italian economist who observed a basic, widespread phenomenon: 80% of a result is often caused by only 20% of input factors. Check out this link for more detail than the brief points below: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Pareto-pr...

The Pareto principle … can be interpreted to say that a minority of inputs results in the majority of outputs. Here are a few examples of the Pareto principle in ac­tion:

• 20 percent of employees produce 80 percent of a company’s results.

• 20 percent of a given employee’s time yields 80 percent of his/her output.

• 20 percent of a company’s investments produce 80 percent of its investment profits.

ASK us for help to keep your production list fresh and interesting. Give us a call for help with items to rebalance your plant portfolio.