WINTER STORM-SPRING

As I look outside my windows, there is an absolute Blizzard going on and here I am, thinking and doing “Spring-Things.” I started the day working on pricing bags of potting soil and peat moss then the “big load” of pots came. These are thousands of pots that need to be filled with potting soil for the tens of thousands of seedlings due to arrive on March the first. Still the snow keeps falling and blowing, starting to pile up in some areas.

The next project on my mind is filling the six-inch pots that need to be ready for 1,300 geranium cuttings that should be arriving on Tuesday or Wednesday, just before Valentine’s Day. The soil is here as well as the pots, so on Saturday we will fill them up and place them on the benches in the greenhouse. This is a family project that the grandkids love to help do. As I type this story the news people on television are talking about all of the traffic accidents that are happening around town. The roads are getting very slippery.

After Christmas and during the following two months, the greenhouses are basically closed down, meaning that the heat is turned off. Water lines have been blown out so that the pipes don’t freeze and temporary walls of plastic film have been erected to separate the one warm house from all of the cold ones. That brings me to the next spring project…putting up another plastic barrier so that we can heat just the area that the 6” potted geraniums will be placed for growing on. I believe I just heard the second snow plow going down my street. Visibility is now less than one mile and I can barely see across the street…and the wind blows even harder.

Besides the geranium project there is Valentines Day preparations to be made…setting up delivery tables, processing the cut flowers as they arrive daily, lining up extra drivers, extra designers, etc. Also Easter is in our thoughts as the churches are faxing in orders which helps us to have on stock, enough plant material. Tulips, hyacinths and daffodils are growing inside our bulb cooler and we must decide on exactly when to start bringing these potted plants out into the light so that they will finish (bloom) right on schedule for Easter. But first I must plow the snow away from the driveway as it has piled up to over four inches in some areas. Let’s just hope it doesn’t warm up too fast and rain, as this combination could bring on yet another dreaded flood!

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