Planting, planting, planting…. Lots of that going on at the wholesale farm. Since January 1st, we have had more than 3 million plants ship into our facilities, either as unrooted cuttings (URC) or as plugs.
For the last few weeks, we have been planting the summer annuals into 4-inch, 4.5-inch, and 6-inch pots. The 4-inch and 4.5-inch pots are planted as one plant per pot – and that means a lot of pots. Lots of pots mean lots of trays. The trays and pots arrive to us packaged separately, so before planting anything, the trays have to be stacked with empty pots. That alone keeps an entire team of staff working nonstop when planting is taking place.
Once planted, the trays need a place to be set down where they can get sunlight and be watered. The Greenstreet farm is not large enough to accommodate everything we plant in the spring, so we rent space at three additional farms. After planting the plants at our own facilities, they are loaded onto carts, rolled onto the Greenstreet trucks, and shipped to these other farms. Every tray on each cart is counted before it leaves Greenstreet – varieties & colors are tracked so we know exactly which flowers are at which farm.
These last few weeks planting has been taking place 7 days a week – including this recent Easter Sunday. During these weeks of high-volume planting, the biggest challenges are running out of pots to plant into and running out of empty carts. Some days when a truck returns from delivering to a farm, our staff is already waiting for the empty carts. When that truck pulls into the loading dock the entire team pitches in for a “quick turn” – everyone lines up to pull the empty carts off the truck to get them to the planting line and get the next batch of full carts onto the truck so there is room in the loading dock to load more full carts.
At this time we have 11,019 trays at one farm in Western Maryland, another 12,321 trays at a farm in Southern Maryland, and 19,001 trays at a farm across the Bay Bridge on the Eastern Shore. Our drivers have been putting in some long hours to get these plants wherever they need to go, and in about a week or so we will reverse the process to bring them all back.
This past week, our team also make a HUGE donation to our local schools! Over a thousand Simply Salad Mix plants were donated to Lothian Elementary, Tracey’s Elementary, and Deale Elementary – students from each school were given a plant to take home & plant for themselves. We hope this will encourage some of the children in our community to start their interest in gardening young and to grow something themselves that can be enjoyed by everyone over the summer!