Greenhouse Gas

Found a script that lets me create a floating menu that f0llows along as the viewer scrolls down the page, saving the trouble of scrolling back to the top when they want to move to a new page. I modified it to include the ‘view shopping cart’ icon, and although it still works when it’s home position is the top left corner of the page, it no longer does when the home position is the bottom left corner. In that position, the last menu entry is off the bottom of the viewing area.

Modified, but did not upload, the Dioscorea page, to include D. elephantipes. Hopefully these will survive the winter, and the page will be ready when it is.

1-1-08 Transplanted Tipularia discolor, Aplectrum hyemale, Trilium sessile. Changed Acer palmatum ‘Shuriken’ status to ’sold out’. This is one of two cultivars that are our own recent introductions, so there isn’t much wood yet.
1-2-01 re-instated Fuchsia ‘Hawkshead’

Sold out of #2 Johin

All 120 or so maple pages were found to have 3 link errors each which I thought would take me 2 days to correct, but was able, after doing one page at a time these many years to set Dreamweaver up the way it should be so I can make global changes. So the changes took me about 2 minutes.

1-5 Made new pages for Akita yatsubusa, Arakawa,
1-7 Sold out of Koshimino. Took & added photo of Thujopsis. Planted 12 Arisaema candidissima tubers and 25 Sauromatum tubers from Hudson. Planted Trillium grandiflorum.

1-8 Deleted Malvaviscus page and corresponding index entry. Jack’s new policy of relying more on wholesalers and doing less propagating of our own stuff has led to our running out of several things we’ve offered for years.
1-9 Modified Arisaema page to make A. triphyllum available again. Planted A. candissima, but tubers are very small, so we’ll let them grow a bit before offering them.

1-14 Removed Eucalyptus cinerea; 9 out of 10 Eucalyptus buyers want this one, though it’s the most common. They’ll have to buy the more interesting Silver Dollar types now. Eucalyptus are such a pain to grow; they grow so fast that you have to devote your life to transplanting them, then they get too big to mail. It’s no wonder they’re so hard to find via mail-order.
Potted up Trillums erectum, flexipes, luteum, pusillum, and vaseyi, as well as Sanguinaria canadensis. Put “Limit 3″ in red letters right next to all plants that didn’t have it already, because nobody reads “Ordering Information” or the index pages, where we say that all plants are 3-of-a-kind unless otherwise marked. Well, now they’re all marked. So that will stop folks from ordering 5 or 10, right? Dream on.

1-21 Marked Atrolineare sold out.

1-25/26 Changed a few maple pages to the new format. Added a privacy policy to order.htm, to wit: we don’t share anything with anybody, ever.

2-1 Made a page offering size #2 maples, mainly just a few of each left over. The deal is, they have to be ordered in February, and will be shipped before March 15, regardless of hardiness zone. We won’t ship #2s after that, until after the spring rush, which usually ends mid-June. The reason is that I am making every effort to streamline shipping so that we don’t fall so desperately far behind this year that we lose customers. The larger trees are a pain to ship; they don’t fit in the same boxes as everything else, and usually need to be repotted, which takes time. I want everything we ship to be in 4″ pots, for speed in handling. We’ll ship larger trees in the summer, fall, and winter, when we have much more time to deal with the packing.

2-6 The shipments from Agristarts and from India have arrived, and so there is a ton of stuff to plant and tag. Need to buy more tags. Increased prices on Ananas and Paris to reflect larger sizes now offered. Shipping has shifted gears this week. 10 boxes Monday, and there would have been 7 today, but two had bad addresses. Should be able to send those, plus two more, including one very large one, tomorrow. Starting to be lots to do already. Where did the winter go?

2-8 Modified, but did not upload, the Alocasia page to include new varieties from India and Florida. One of the Florida varieties isn’t doing so well.
2-21 Not blogging as faithfully as hoped. Lots of time spent lately on partitioning off a new room in the shop, where we can do messy things like weeding and transplanting without freezing our hands in the morning. It isn’t exactly a conventionally-constructed room. Studs are on 4′ centers for the wall, 2′ centers for the ceiling, and what they hold up is 4×8 sheets of rigid insulation, which are glued to the frame. The only reason for the enclosure is to trap heat, so I didn’t think conventional frame construction necessary. I’m getting to an age where my building projects can be viewed as eccentric, rather than incompetent. “That old guy just does things his own way, doesn’t give a rip what anybody thinks” as opposed to “This moron couldn’t build a case for motherly love.” Works for me. Also ordered a portable propane heater that doesn’t require venting. This will heat the room, possibly provide a little greenhouse heat in exceptionally cold weather, and also provide a source of backup heat for the house that doesn’t require electricity. When we had a wood stove, it was always comforting to know that we could survive a midwinter power outage, and I’ve been nervous about that since we had to convert to electric heat.
Next project: move a couple of hundred flats of plants from the nursery greenhouses, where they’re grown, to my greenhouse, where they’re held for shipping. This will save me a lot of 20-mile round trips to the nursery, but that isn’t the main point. The point is that Jack loves chaos, hates order, so there is no rhyme or reason to where plants are kept at the nursery. I’ve tried to bring order to it a few times over the years, but Jack just randomizes it again after a few weeks, so I spend half my life looking for stuff. At my place, the plants will be in alpha order, and will have signs on the flats as well as tags in the pots, so that even an unskilled employee, assuming they can read, will be able to fill orders, saving me a ton of time (provided I can find an employee).

Added a page for 2 varieties of Excoecaria, a colorful tropical shrub.

We’re about 3 weeks from resuming shipping off the west coast, and the eastern seaboard orders are starting to pile up. It’s still very cold back there, though. For my own selfish reasons, I wish all you easterners a warm and early spring.

Twice during 2007 I tried to start a blog for this site, but, because we are chronically understaffed, I just haven’t had time to keep it up. I also tried several times to keep a log of changes made to the website. For reasons I won’t bore you with (too late?) this would be very useful, but I keep forgetting to write in my notebooks and haul the notebooks back and forth between house and shop. In the midst of making a bunch of changes over the past few days, it dawned on me that I could combine the two tasks. By putting daily notes in the blog, I could keep a record without having to find and haul notebooks, plus customers might find some of those notes useful. Also, since I would be jotting things down every day anyway, I might find more opportunities to blather on about various topics. And, by putting a link to the blog right on the front page, I might put some pressure on myself to actually make the notations.

So, this is a real blog in the classic, original sense of Web Log. If you can find anything useful in it, great. If not, it should still help me to keep the site better organized. So here we go.

Dec 17, 2007

We’re now officially into the winter non-shipping season for most of the country, although we’ll still ship to the west coast, and will send maples east if asked. Good riddance to the 2007 shipping season. I’m still reeling from the disastrous March-June rush, which was the worst we’ve ever experienced. Lousy weather in the east prevented us from shipping there for several weeks, so all those orders had to be shipped with all the others still coming in. Working 14 hours/day and 7 days/week for those 3 months is par for the course, but usually we can sort of keep up by doing that. Not this year. I still get butterflies every time I check my email. And I’m working very hard this winter to streamline the order fulfillment process so that untrained help can do many of the things I’ve had to do myself.

Added the following Trilliums: T. erectum, T. grandiflorum, T. luteum, T. sessile, and T. vaseyi. T. flexipes, T. pusillum and T. vaseyi are held over as well. They’re still bare-root, and I need to get them potted up pretty soon. Restored Trillium to the T index page.
Made a page for Aloes, including A. barbadensis, A. cooperi and A. glauca, but as the latter two are still too small to ship, I’m not putting the page up yet. Still need to run my own i.d. check on them, anyway.

Jack is back home after having been stranded in China for an extra week because the king of Thailand was having his 80th birthday, and there were no seats on flights. A Thai lady we know called Jack when he arrived in Bangkok and told him the king was in the hospital, and that Jack should go visit him there. Apparently, she was serious. It seems that the king was in a special glass-walled room and pretty much the whole country passed through all day, waving to him. There were giant murals of various periods in his life posted all over town. When he left the hostpital, he wore pink, and immediately it seemed the whole couintry was wearing pink. And within a day or two, there was a giant mural depicting him taking a picture of the crowd that met him when he left the hospital. They really love their king there, and he loves his people, making sure thay have what they need. Sounds just like home, huh? Anyway, the flights were full of pilgrims coming to celebrate his birthday and visit him in the hospital, so Jack stayed in his rented house in Kunming for another week. That was pretty much fine, except that it was getting cold, and houses south of the Yangtze aren’t allowed to have heaters. Energy conservation and pollution concerns are very big in China now; all the government propaganda includes urgings about safeguarding the environment. Sounds just like home, huh?

Finished a new index.html, that is, a home page for the site, which includes a slideshow of a couple of dozen plants. A little funky, so it fits right in. Got the idea from Siskiyou Rare Plants’ website. Of course, theirs is far more professionally done, but I discovered Google’s Picasa Web Albums, a service something like Flickr, that allows me to embed a slideshow for free. I’m also considering a different approach to the catalog pages, similar to something I saw at Gardens North’s website. All the plants beginning with a given letter are briefly described on the same page, and the ordering buttons are there. The more in-depth info and photos are linked to that page. Gives the customer more of an overview of what’s available without making them plow through all the descriptions if they don’t want to. It would make adding and removing plants easier for me, too.

Added the following Abutilons: A. ‘Cannington Sonia’, A. ‘Helen’, and A. ‘Vesuvius’. Also re-added A. ‘Souvenir de Bonn’.

Revised the Orchid page to show that Habenaria blephariglottis and Tipularia discolor are back in stock, but H. ciliaris and Orchis spectabilis won’t be available in 2008.
Replaced the old botanical drawing of Typhonium trilobatum with our own picture, which shows the flower better.
Signed off at 11:49 PM

Just so you know, I have nothing whatever to do with grafting. In recent years, our trees have been grafted by Pacific Propagators (PP), a sister business Jack started years ago, but is in the process of selling to Leo, his partner in that business for several years. PP shares the nursery property for now, but will soon be looking for a new home, as I understand it. This seems completely ridiculous to me, but like I said, I have nothing whatever to do with grafting. Everything that follows is what I’m told or have observed.
There are two fundamental needs in grafting Japanese maples. The first is a stock of Acer palmatum seedlings to use as understock. To the extent possible, we grow these from seed, but PP grafts such a large number of trees that it’s also necessary to buy some in. Good understock is hard to locate; it seems to me there’s a business opportunity there for somebody who can figure out how to grow maples from seed, get them to good size fast, and keep them disease-free.

The other thing you need is scion, that is, wood from the desired cultivar, which will be grafted onto the understock. An interesting thing about this business is, I’m not sure if anybody actually sells scion. Some of ours is from our own trees which we keep for this purpose, but more comes from growers, including large wholesalers, for whom PP has grafted over the years. They just let us go in and cut it. They wouldn’t let just anybody do that, of course, just friends who are in the business. If we have an excess of something, we’ll share it, as well. This system seems to prevail throughout the nursery industry; it’s the way fruit varieties get spread around, too, even in big commercial orchards. Since scion is a valuable commodity, it seems like just a matter of time before somebody starts selling it, but then if there’s anything I have less to do with than grafting, it’s the nursery industry, so I might be wrong.

Acer palmatum seedlings for understock.
Traditionally, wood was cut in the winter, when the trees are domant, and kept in cold storage until the understock started growing in the spring. Now, many grafters do the bulk of their work in midsummer, when the maples undergo a natural growth spurt, using freshly-cut wood. We still graft in spring, but find that the percentage of successful grafts is much higher in summer.

When scion and understock are in hand, a slit is made through the bark of the understock on one side. At its perimeter the cut exposes the cambium layer, which lies just beneath the bark. It’s green, and it’s the part of the tree that grows. The base of the scion is also cut in a shape that matches, and the two are placed together in such a way that the cambium layers on both pieces meet, so they’ll grow together.
The scion is fitted into a flap cut in the understock
The two pieces are held together by wrapping a rubber strip around them several times and tying it off. This is something of a skill; it has to be done fast if you’re in a production line. If, like me, you have a tendency to “tie up”, you’re a greenhorn and need to learn to “tie down”, meaning that the free end of the strip should hang down from the wrap when you’re finished. The rubber strip will eventually deteriorate in the sun and fall off, but by that time, the two pieces should have grown together, assuming you matched up the cambium layers and everything else goes right.

Wrapped grafts, center one tied up!
Traditionally, the grafts were painted over with a sealing agent, to prevent water- and airborne diseases from getting into the graft union, and to keep the union moist. At our place, this is now accomplished by placing plastic bags over the graft union for a few weeks. Getting the bag on quickly is another of those little skills you have to develop.

Plastic bags protect the graft unions.
After several weeks, the bags are removed, and soon the scion leafs out. At this point, the understock still has leaves as well. When the graft is well-established, usually in the spring, the top growth on the rootstock is cut back, and, instead of a tree that looks like the species, you have a tree that looks like whatever cultivar the scion is taken from.

Various cultivars, newly grafted and leafed out.

Of course, the trees are going to lose their leaves for the winter, during which time they’ll be sprayed about 3 times for protection against disease, mainly the fungal diseases to which these trees are susceptible. There will still be some inevitable losses to fungus, to poor matching of the cambium layers, to freezing, and to breakage, which happens very easily when the grafts are new, and when the webmaster is reaching down among them to get the identification tags in order to make a list.
Why go to all the trouble? Why not just plant seeds of the cultivars you want? Because Japanese maples don’t come true from seed. That is, if you plant the seeds of tree that has narrow, red leaves, most of the seedlings are likely to have broad, green leaves. A few will vary from the norm, but none will be genetically identical to the parent. This is for the same reason that your kids / parents look somewhat like you, but not exactly. If you want an exact copy, you have to clone the parent, and that’s what grafting is. The scion is genetically identical to the tree it came from, so it’ll look just like it. Another way to clone is to take cuttings, however most cultivars don’t have strong roots of their own, and so don’t do as well from cuttings. Tissue culture has the same problem, but will work with some cultivars. When grafting, though, you can select vigorous rootstock, attach the scion to that, and have the best of both worlds, a desirable leaf and growing habit, and a strong root system.

There are often things I’d like to say to customers, some of them even repeatable in public, but there didn’t seem to be much of a place for that on the website. Also, customers often want to chat about the fine points of plants and growing them, but frankly, I don’t have time to chat with customers if they expect to get their orders anytime soon. In fact, since I started working at the nursery more than 20 years ago, I haven’t had time to garden. Now that blogging is all the rage, I thought this might be a way to say a few things when I can, and then let the customers comment on that and chat with each other. I’m not sure how regular or frequent posts will be, though I do know that they will probably be few and far between during the spring rush, March-June. During that time, discuss among yourselves.

Compared to spring, this is a pretty quiet time, as far as processing orders is concerned. It’s too hot to ship to the Southeast, where a surprisingly large percentage of our orders come from. That’s not to say we lack orders from there, though. In fact, I have a pretty fair backlog of them waiting for temperatures to moderate. It amazes me that folks will order plants during the dog days of summer. I wonder how they’d like travelling 3000 miles in a box when temperatures are pushing 100. And what will they do with them if they somehow get there alive? People don’t plant in this weather, do they? Why? After subjecting the plants to the stresses of hot-weather shipping, you want to add transplant shock as well? I can understand how people get the urge to plant in spring, even though fall is arguably a better time. It happens to me, too. But in August? Why not take a nap in the shade, instead? No sense getting heatstroke and killing more plants than necessary.

Of course, we have plenty to do now, without shipping. This is grafting season; scion wood is collected for the 150 or so varieties of Japanese maples we sell, and is grafted onto thousands of Acer palmatum seedlings. (By the way, I learned last night that the Google translation of the Chinese characters for Acer palmatum is “Concentration Baseball”. “Baseball” seems to be the translation of Acer. Acer leucoderme translates as “Grey-skin Baseball”.) Some of the early (July) grafts are already leafed out and growing. Summertime grafting takes advantage of these trees’ natural tendency to put on a midsummer growth spurt. Some, like Sango Kaku and Seiryu, start this earlier than others, and they’re the ones that get grafted early. Several greenhouses are already full of the new grafts, and hopefully most of them will survive dessication, slugs and Japanese beetles, freezing weather, and half a dozen fungal diseases. Of course, many grafts won’t make it until spring, and those that don’t will tend to be the smallest, rarest, and most valuable. For that reason, we don’t count our chickens until they leaf out in the spring. You can graft in late winter and early spring, too, but our experience has been that the percentage of grafts that ‘take’ is much better in summer. Your hands don’t get as cold, either.
We grow a lot of things from seed, and those are ready for transplanting now. We’ve also been taking a lot of cuttings from the woody plants in the heated greenhouses. We’ll do even more in the fall, taking a page from the book of our friends at Viva Plants, a nearby wholesaler. They now do virtually all their propagating in the fall, with great success.

Of course, there is always an abundance of weeds to be dealt with, though this year a hired gun has done a good job of keeping them under control. And, although we have automatic watering most places, you might be surprised how much time spot-watering takes, especially in this unusually hot summer. The Pacific Northwest gets lots of rain most of the year, but it sure does dry out in the summer. It seems like, as soon as you get done watering on these hot days, the place you started is dry again.

And of course, the website is always in sorry shape by this time. I noticed today that many of the Japanese maple entries still say “April Delivery”, referring, of course, to last April. In fact, the site is due for a complete overhaul. I finally got somebody to write a script that allows you to input the first 3 digits of your zip code to find out your postal zone. Many people apparently had trouble finding their zone in a table, so this should simplify matters. Unfortunately, even the computer wizard who wrote the script couldn’t figure out how to get it onto the shopping cart page, which is a cgi-generated page, so you still have to leave that page to find your zone. I hope to find somebody with a little more perl savvy so we can take the final step. I also want to get a PayPal option built into the shopping cart, since folks seem not to know how to pay with PayPal unless there’s a button to click on. And I really have to find a way to keep in better contact with customers, so they don’t forget about us. We really hate to bother people with monthly emails, which shows what kind of business people we are. Maybe this blog will help some.