A Grower Perspective

Every August we have a booth at the Oregon Association of Nurseries’ Farwest Show in Portland, Oregon. It is the way that we touch base in person with many of our customers and hopefully each year we meet new ones as well. We spend three long days standing in our booth, greeting visitors, handing out our marketing materials and trying to get a read on the year ahead.

At these shows, we get a variety of inquiries and questions. Sometimes it is someone wanting to know where they can buy a particular variety of plant. Sometimes they just want to

compare notes on being in the nursery business. Other times they want to discuss advice on particular growing issues they are facing in their nurseries.

Every year we can count on getting several passers by to ask the million dollar question. It goes something like this. They walk up to our booth, lean their arms on our reception counter and proceed to tell us that they have five or ten acres and are wondering if we could tell them what they could plant that will sell.

Oh, if only I had a crystal ball . . .

Unfortunately, there is simply gut instinct, trial and error, years of learning all thrown together with a lot of guesswork and, I suppose, a little dumb luck. Believe me, if we had a crystal ball all these years, we surely would have exhausted its predicting powers by finding out what the “sure things” were in our own business. We’d be filthy rich.

On second thought, if I did have such a crystal ball, I would have sold it to the highest bidder years ago, saved myself years of stress and I’d be writing this blog entry from a tropical island somewhere.