Over the Hump Day

Here we are again, on the cusp of another Mother's Day.  In the lexicon of those in the flower business, Mother's Day is a combination of both Christmas and New Year's Eve: Christmas in that one can either receive all one has wished for, or not, and New Year's Eve, because all must be accounted for, the good, the bad, the surprising, the disastrous, the serendipitous and the disappointing.  There is no silver bullet, no Fairy Godmother, and no miraculous recovery after Mother's Day.  Sports analogy time:  the bullpen may earn the save, but there is no chance you'll come back from a 12-zip deficit.  Its the home stretch; finishing is the goal.  You cannot start the game over.  There's no reset.

But there is another goal if you are part of a family business like we are.  On Mother's Day eve, we have been successful if we don't look at the clock Saturday afternoon, leap into our cars, and peel out of the driveway, down the gravel road leaving a cloud of dust and a sigh of relief behind us.  We are family, as the song goes, and we've lived in our work for months, leaving the scene in body, but carrying the anxiety home to bed, sharing our dreams with our aches and pains. During harvest, we work on a single task but dispersed over multiple vehicles and many square miles of field and highway.  In the greenhouse we are compressed into 2.5 acres of plastic, one dining room table and a single grimy office with three computers.  Beginning in March, we spend our hours, seven days a week, pushing from one task to another, all time sensitive, biological deadlines looming, with the added uncertainty of the weather outdoors influencing the environment indoors. Every miscue, whether sins of omission or commission, can have lasting effect on the final bottom line....after Mother's Day.


So...it is to return to a sense of proper proportion to wait on our customers Mother's day week.  Here is the couple gently lifting their frail mother onto one of our wheeled hand carts so she can ride through the colorful aisles she has been patronizing for nigh unto twenty years.  This lovely woman used to bring her less sturdy friends out to the greenhouse, several trips during the spring, choosing a couple of pots or so each visit.  Her daughter still plants a sampling of the same flowers her mother always chose; I see these flowers daily all summer long.

Here is another husband and wife, spending a good solid forty five minutes hunting down two geraniums of the perfect shade for the older woman in the car.  'When you are ninety three,' he tells me, ' you don't change your mind.'  Perhaps not, but the mother in the car tells me, 'I've planted red for years and years! I want pink ones for a change!!'  She is wearing a pink sweater shell with just a hint of a sparkle.  I have no problem detecting the spark that keeps her going. Little daughters and sons accompany moms, pushing the hand carts and offering opinions. Often mommy or daddy allows them to choose their own flowers and they handle the pots with all the concentration accorded great grandma's heirloom teapot.   Around 4 or so, the men arrive.  Typically, men purchase tomatoes and peppers, or cucumbers or squash.  But a lost male on Mother's Day eve wants a BIG plant, basket or tub.  They may not get past the first greenhouse they enter if some BIG plant is within reach.  Sorry, guys; I am not making this up.


The gang at Hurst Greenery disperses to their own homes, yards, gardens.  We go 'shopping', examining the flowers on the benches with a gardener's eye, not professional interest.  We still have sales to make; will this flat be a leftover?  Or will some paying customer ask for it the day after it is watered into my yard?  This is an easier decision if the flower in question is slightly flawed, or in an odd sized container.  Carrying coals to Newcastle, the pickups and golf carts groan with their colorful cargo. The moms of the family cherish other garden related goodies, gleaned from deliveries of the week: ceramic pots of exotic hue, quaint metal garden ornaments, pot stickers, trellises, solar lamps....

How can I express the gratitude I feel for these loved ones I see day after day.  For their tolerance, their support, their exertions, their good nature, their sheer persistence and sense of humor whatever the situation.  There is always pain, always disappointment.  Less certain is success or triumph.  We make do with the beauty of our produce, the occasional compliment, and the satisfaction of our team work.



Happy Mother's Day to all my lovely family........rest up!

Raindrops on Roses

I'm no Julie Andrews, so this post concerning my favorite things won't include bright copper kettles, or whiskers on kittens, and certainly not snowflakes on my nose and eyelashes, though I could be tempted by crisp apple strudel.

It's a reprise of many spring evenings past.  An afternoon departure in a chilly wind under a cloudy sky.  Arrival at the destination around cocktail hour....or beer thirty in the parlance of the guys helping us unload the flowers.  Fill the truck with diesel, use the restroom, change drivers.  I pull out of the quick stop, merge onto the highway and point the truck north.  Blake unfolds the magazine he's had stuck in the back pocket of his overalls.  We tune in Bret Baier and Special Report. This is what passes for down time.  The remainder of the drive is our own.

This is one of my favorite things. Chilled and dirty, our dining options are curtailed even in St. Joe.  But the lot behind Panda Express is plenty spacious for a big black pickup and long green trailer; its a quick hike across to the Target after a salty steaming bowl of beef and fried rice.  The Panda may lack ambiance, but speaks the truth about speed.

While I pick up essentials for crunch time at Target, Blake is rousted by North Pointe security..really.  No, we aren't squatters; we are card carrying consumers, but we must look suspicious.  I bring back bags of trail mix, granola, Oreo snack packs, antacids and a cube of diet Dew.  On the run.  A grande and a tall Starbucks for the rest of the trip home. Team trucking.

Time for the ball game.  We tune in first on the station formerly known as KKJO even though we know it won't come in much north of the Nodaway river bottom.  Tonight the clouds have gathered and there is lightning to the north.  The static is thick so we hear about half of the play by play.  No mind; this is part of the ritual. We stick with the broadcast until any vestige of a human voice is obliterated by Mother Nature.  Tonight the Cards are pounding on the Brewers; good news for us, we can catch the last couple of innings when we get home.

The two of us listening to the game on the radio makes the drive less a matter of work and more like being in our living room.  The rain comes down, enough to run the wipers and clean off the accumulated insect matter but not so much to affect visibility.  Tractor lights in the field and the incense of moist earth wafting through the cab are bellwethers for the season.  This is respite; forward movement without haste.

Time enough for tomorrow's itinerary.  Too late to change today. Just rain, baseball, and Blake turning the pages of a yellowed paperback in the passenger seat.


I could almost break into song.

...'Raindrops on roses and...'

Background Noise

The prairie rim is no where as evident as on northbound route N out of Mound City and just across the Atchison county line.  If you want an evocative landscape, pick a hilltop, make sure no one is coming up behind you, stop, pull off onto what passes for a shoulder and turn off your vehicle. If you stopped today, you heard a cacophony of geese as the blues, the snows, and the Canadas passed overhead at altitudes just above treetop to stratospheric.  They veed into an infinity seemingly as distant as an MC Escher composition. Watching them pass over, the dun colored fields and the silvery washed skies made me feel I was part of an animated Andrew Wyeth painting.  Off and on through the day the geese called, at times loud enough to be heard above the ventilation fans and even the click-click of the seeder.  It was a soothingly harmonic accompaniment to the otherwise mechanical clatter than epitomizes the natural processes of growing plants in a greenhouse.

While gardening itself is a peaceful pursuit, characterized by the quietly rhythmic and repetitive motions of hoeing and the musical patter of water upon soil and leaf, growing the raw material for a garden is anything but.  One day in January only the winter wind drives the last remaining elm leaves skittering across the ground and the next the silent night has an undercurrent of blowers and ventilation fans dispersing toasty BTUs through thin skinned bubbles of six millimeter poly plastic more drafty than the walls of our 100 year old house.  During the day, electronic controllers tell the heaters to shut off and on, the aluminum louver to slowly creak open and just as reluctantly close, and the whine of a 48" or 52" ventilation fan to slowly crank up to maximum airspeed.  In the gutter connected greenhouse, interior fans start and stop in unison; their coordination and underlying hum brings nothing to mind as much as a beehive.  There are so many in the 19000 sq ft space that the cessation of their undercurrent makes the big ventilation fans relatively undetectable.  All this machinery and energy just to emulate the God given warmth of natural springtime!

The other big noisemaker is the transplanter.  There is something almost Seussian about this contraption with its telescoping metal fingers that pick up and grab the tiny green seedling so rudely pushed out of its cozy niche by yet another push rod.  All this in and out has a sound track of whooshing air, kind of a calliope/steam engine hybrid caused by the air compressor rattling off and on.  Think Billy Joel's 'Allentown'.

As cookie cutter and turn key as this all sounds, growing plants in our greenhouses is still more art than science, more touchy feely than technology.  We are as tuned to the equinox as the geese.  We start looking for bugs on our plants about the same date every year. We know the sparrows will attack the first crop of dianthus seedlings and the mice will munch the verbena.  I can guarantee rodents will attack my sweet peppers, especially the banana peppers, and never touch the fuzzy tomatoes. Before the end of the greenhouse season, we will lose one batch of the big headed African marigolds to some benighted bunny living under the pallets.  Instead of golden blossoms, we will have pruned bushes.  Last year Ryan took umbrage at sharing with the rabbits and bagged a couple; much less destructive than turning the dogs loose to chase 'em down!

Growing the flowers of summer and the transplants for your salsa and salad is a hot, dusty,  and loud business.  That is, when its not cold or sodden or muddy.  Even the most hands on of agricultural tasks requires a big boost from the machine age.  Something to think about when contemplating your prospective return to nature.

Like most farm folks I have my favorite parts of the work day.  Opening the door to number eight on a Saturday afternoon in March, turning on a pre-season baseball game, and shaking tomato seeds into the seeder has been a ritual of my life for nearly twenty years. The essence of spring is the scent of the first pansy blooms borne on the warm air exhausted from the big house. But the signature sound of our business is that of the antique Sundermann floor heaters on a early spring night: first the fan motor, then the click of  the gas valve and the reassuring roar of the blue flame inflating the plastic tube that runs the length of the houses. When I walk out to my car in the dark, the afternoon wind calmed and the silent stars above and hear that sound, I know all is right in greenhouse world.