Things are dry in Houston. So far this June we have had the least recorded rainfall since measurements were kept. I have been seeing dry lawns in my neighborhood for about 2 weeks. I just checked a dry area in my neighbors lawn and he had a heavy infestation of chinch bugs. We are never quite sure when they will show up but they almost always do. A couple of years ago we had a very cool and rainy June and July and I maybe saw one infestation that year.  If the dry weather continues every St. Augustine lawn in Houston will be a target for these true bugs. They will attack the hottest, driest parts of your yard. If in Summer or early Fall your lawn looks very dry and you water thoroughly and your lawn continues to wither and die....you probably have got chinch bugs.
        Finding them can be an art. I will go to a dry area, part the grass and look for any movement at all. Ants, spiders and chinch bugs will try to quickly crawl and hide. Chinch bugs usually try to crawl under some loose soil. You may have to check several spots to find some. The photo below is from the Texas A&M Horticulture website. You can see the different stages. All of them do damage by piercing the runners with their mouth parts, sucking sap and dehydrating your turf. Chinch bugs can and will destroy your whole lawn if allowed to multiply. Watering well is the best prevention. If you do find yourself with an infestation you have several choices for control. Any product with
.02 bifenthrin granules will kill them and prevent reinfestation for about 2 months.  For organic gardeners Organicide is a brand name of a fish and sesame oil that will kill chinch bugs on contact.

       I pulled a good one. I got a registration in the mail for one of the five vehicles the nursery owns.  I opened it last week and thought it said it was for a 2007 Ford truck. I gave it to my son and told him to put it on our newest pickup. I went to get that vehicle inspected today and the inspector said that there is a problem. He said the sticker does not match the license plate. The sticker is for a Chevy sports car.  Uh oh.  I was sure I read Ford. I went back and read the make and model on the paperwork. It said 2008 Chevy. I had to tell everyone at work the mistake that I made. Most of the rest of the day was spent fixing my mistake. Unnecessary waste of time.  I admit to temporary idiocy.
      We close at 6pm every evening.  At 5:30 my son tells me that we have a car in our parking lot that someone had left. They called at 5:20 and said they were across town and would be there in an hour to get their car and would call us at 6:00 to "check in". No one had called us by 6:15. I waited until 6:25, locked the gates and went home. There is literally 6 acres of unrestricted concrete parking about 50 feet from where he parked and there is 10 acres directly across the street. Brilliant decision to park your car here. I predict a minimum of two idiots will cross paths tomorrow at Plants For All Seasons. 

            Our employees went to a summer schedule this week. We all work 6 days a week from mid-February until the last week of May and 5 days a week the rest of the year. The way the schedule worked out this year we have quite a few sales employees on Tuesday's and Wednesdays. The opportunistic business owner that I am thought that maybe I could come in today, check on things and then visit some retail nurseries that I have never been to like Maas down in Seabrook or Warren's Southern Gardens in Kingwood. I knew we would be short a cashier because of her vacation but I thought we were still going to have adequate help. I opened the store this morning and before I could sit at my desk I had a distraught salesperson requesting the rest of the week off because of a close friends recent death.  I am now down a bedding salesman. I still have enough employees to leave for half a day though. No problem. About 5 minutes later my daughter Kelly walks in the store like she has a book balanced on her head....very carefully. Her back was out. She had to go right to the chiropractor who told her she needs to go home, rest and ice her lower back. Can anything else happen? Absolutely! I thought our back up cashier was going to be there but I found out early this morning she had school today. Ok, I am going to stay at the nursery and do whatever I need to do. With me there we have enough to get by and still service the customers. Then I find out that my daughter Sherri had to leave for an hour and a half to a school function with my grandaughter. Now I have to start moving employees around like chess pieces to fill in the gaps. I make my one and only salesperson, that I have left, a cashier. I call up my greenhouse bedding grower, Marcella, from the back forty to be a back up cashier/sales helper. I am answering questions, the phone, writing up orders, loading up customers purchases. We were very busy but we still serviced our customers and their needs in a timely and professional manner. I will say we did miss a few phone calls.
            When these not so unusual occurances happen I think "What would have happened today if I had not been here?"  I believe a distraught salesperson would have sucked it up and stayed. I think Kelly would have stayed and helped until Sherri came back from the school function. I think a cashier would have come and worked on her vacation day if called.  I know my employees would have adjusted, re-adjusted and made the right decisions for the nursery. Maybe I'll see some interesting new nurseries next week or whenever the stars line up perfectly.
    

          My opinion is Memorial Day marks the end of Spring business for garden centers in the Houston area. Sales will tail off dramatically next month. It's a combination of less customer traffic and the average sale declines quite a bit. We see a steady weekly sales drop from now until about mid September. Then sales trend up every week to Thanksgiving. 
          When I close out May's sales it gives me a key number that I use in my cash flow projections for the rest of the year. Historically, we do between 54% and 61% of our sales from January through May. It's always better for me when we end up doing 54% of our sales through May because that means my Summer and Fall sales are good relative to Spring sales.  54%-61% is the range I will fall into and the numbers I have to work with to project cash flow through the rest of the year. For example, say we end up doing 1 million dollars in sales Jan-May this year. I would then expect year end sales to be between $1,640,000 and $1,850,000. That is $210,000 difference. At my gross profit margin of about 45% (sales minus cost of goods) that is a difference in cash flow of $95,000. If I spend money expecting the higher sales amount and I am wrong I may have a $100,000 problem at the end of the year!  You might have guessed by now which number I use for making spending decisions. It helps me sleep at night.
          I read an article from a garden center consultant that had studied many garden centers and he found a key number that seemed to separate successful nurseries from those that did not fare very well in business. He found that the successful businesses had gross profit margins at least 26% above their labor costs. If their labor costs were 18% of sales and they achieved a 44% GPM then that would likely give them enough to pay their expenses and still have a decent profit for the year.

          

       I was out in the bedding area greeting customers this afternoon when I talked to a regular shopper that asked me when I was going to write another blog. I told her that I thought I had a subject I wanted to write about because of something that happened today.  A visitor to our nursery tried to shoplift a 2 gallon Monrovia plant valued at $30. He did not succeed and I suspect that we won't see him again. I called him a "visitor" and not a customer or guest because he does not meet my definition of either of those terms. A guest can be someone who is welcome on our property to peruse our store and obtain information. A customer is a valued person who purchases our merchandise. This visitor's intention was to steal our merchandise. An employee watched a man, throw a plant over our chain link fence into a circular drive still on our property. He went to his car to drive up our property line and pick it up and drive out the other side. My son, Cody, beat him to the plant and he backed up and drove off.  Our security cameras were checked and we now know the car, the bald head and that impressive waistline.

            Security has been an important issue for about the last 5 years.  We started getting visitors, after hours, that would come on the property and steal.  We realized that security cameras are a tool but they did not catch anyone. It takes a person to catch a thief.  We installed a security device that calls my cell phone when anyone enters our property after hours. Within two weeks I got a 6am call that I responded to. I drove up to the dude that I had seen on my video system stealing from me. BUSTED!  He was in his 50's and lived in a 4,000 square foot house a few miles away. i drove by his house while he spent the night in jail. His landscape was exceptional. You are welcome Mr. Arditi.           

      My daughter Kelly had managed several stores in the mall 3 miles away. When she came to work for me she recognized quite a few people in our store that she suspected of being shoplifters but with her companies policies she was almost powerless to catch them. She pointed them out in our store and I caught them, discussed their honesty and escorted them out.           

      We heartily welcome guests and customers. Visitors with bad intentions ...not so much.

  

Since October of last year my wife and I had some house guests. Jessica and Addysson Janisch. My wife's nephew, Marine Sergeant Brian C Janisch, was ordered to Iraq for his second tour. They were a young couple living in California with a 14 month old daughter and a serviceman's pay. They are saving for a house and asked if Jess and the baby could stay here while he went to Iraq.  There was no way we were going to say no.

Sergeant Janisch came back home safe and sound this month. We went to dinner this week and he presented to me the United States flag that had flown over his base at Camp Al Taqaddum, Iraq on March 16th. I know that because it came with a signed certificate from the commanding officer.

Brian and I drove back to my house in my car while Addy and our wives went back in another. He expressed how much it meant to him to have me watching over his family while he went to war. I felt it was my duty and I was honored to do it.

Now the little girl that I grew to love will be going to Okinawa, Japan with her parents. I believe life has surprised me with a beautiful little bouquet of flowers.

           I had the opportunity to attend this Wednesday's practice round at Augusta National Master's Tournament. What an unbelievable place. The grass, the flowers....the simplicity.  I did not go there to see the best golfers in the world. I saw most of them the week before in the Shell Houston Open. I wanted to see what was so special about this golf course and it's storied beauty. In it's original state it is a nice piece of real estate but nothing special. Rolling terrain, pine trees and a creek. You can find that particular combination from Northeast Texas all the way to Florida.
           What they have done is to keep it simple and create their landscape with plants that will peak when they need them to. The first week of April in North Georgia.  Azaleas, White Dogwood, Pink Dogwood. There was little else that was needed to create a visual impact. When I saw azaleas I did not see a grouping of 6 or 7 plants. One example was the 13th hole where there was approximately 250 yards long and 40 feet deep of mature mixed blooming azaleas and dogwoods. I am going to guess that there were about 800 azaleas in full bloom. Spectacular today, but  In two months all the winter rye grass will die, nothing will be blooming besides the gorgeous 150 year old Magnolia trees. The grounds will hardly be recognizable.
          The grooming was beyond adequate description. Golf courses are places that grow grass but never have I seen it so thick and lush and perfect. I walked along all 18 holes and my shoes, including the soles, were perfectly clean when I left a course that had no cart paths. No bare dirt areas and no mud. Where there was not grass there was clean, neat pine straw.
           Here is a great example of keeping your landscape simple. Plant flowering shrubs for effect but remember they peak and cycle through their beauty. Have reliable evergreen plants that will form the foundation of your landscape and above all don't neglect to prune, mulch and provide nutrition to the plants that you expect to reward you with their beauty.    
          The experience of going to the Master's at Augusta National was exceptional. I have never seen anything organized and run as well as they did on the scale they were working with. The food lines moved along and were never stagnant. I bought a great sandwich and a soda for $2.50. Security was thorough and courteous, unlike at the airport in Atlanta. We even had hosts in the restrooms that directed traffic. Everything was first class and I got an all day ticket for only $41. There were over 25,000 fans there with food and drink and I never saw a piece of trash on the ground after being there 8 hours. Amazing! Tell me where else that would happen.

          This Sunday we were slow because of 3 previous days of rain, cloudy weather and Sunday mornings are usually not busy. My daughter Sherri wanted to extend a front flowerbed that everyone sees when they pass by the nursery. She enlists the help of the weekend load up guys that were available. Two of them are high school boys that have been working with us for a couple of years. The third young man has been with us for about a month.
         They are students that excel at their studies. I fully expect to write letters that endorse all three of them for college scholarships. I have to admit to discrimination in my new hiring practices. I ask the high school kids that apply for weekend jobs what their class rank is.  If I hold out for a top 25% class rank I get a smart, serious, productive worker.  If I settle for below that I have a 1 in 3 chance that I get a good employee. My business, like others, can't afford very many below average employees.
         So these young men are asked to make a flowerbed. They have not done this work before. They have heard us tell customers how it should be done. They start the process and then it starts misting.  They continue their work. It starts raining harder. They continue. Sherri realizes they are getting soaked and tells them that they can stop and come inside to dry off. They refuse. They were actually excited to do the work that they know our customers do on a regular basis. This was their opportunity to put into practice what they had learned at the nursery. Rain was not going to be an issue for them. They completed their task soaking wet. These kids showed how smart and thorough they really are. They made Sherri promise not to tell their parents of their newly found flowerbed making skills.  I am very impressed!    

        

         

          We had lots of rain yesterday and today. The first real rain in months.  A curse and a blessing. The curse is the loss of business. The blessing is the relief the nursery staff feels when we go from 200-225 weekday transactions to 35-40. More time to breathe and more time to appreciate natures beauty that we work around all day.

          Last week was the best sales week in our history. We shattered the mark that we set last year. This week, because of the rain, could be the worst March week in about 5 years. Mother nature can quickly bring you back to reality. We responded to last weeks sales by loading up on inventory this week. That means we will start off next week with a full nursery and will be really prepared to serve our customers during their kids Spring break.

          Gary Lindarman, owner of the Enchanted Forest Nursery in Richmond Texas, and LP Kojis, his manager, dropped in yesterday.  LP is a veteran nurseryman and was the manager of the Cornelius store on Voss Rd.  Everyone in the industry knows LP and he is one of the men that made Cornelius Nursery the most successful nursery in Houston with respect to their earnings and their integrity. Sterling Cornelius had an uncanny ability to attract and keep employees that shared his sincere dedication to their customers. Gary is someone I immediately liked. No airs, no ego, he is just real.  We had a good visit and shared information on suppliers, products and we are contemplating branding our own line of vegetables.  We will proceed if we have support from some of the other independents and suppliers.
              
          I read an article today in the Nursery Retailer Magazine 2008  "Top 100 Retail Nurseries" in the US.  I used to think this was a credible list until I realized a huge chain of nurseries in Houston that should be rated 4th in the nation are not even on the list. I wrote the editor, Jeff Morey, twice, starting 3 years ago and I informed him of their omission. He did not respond to me nor did he add this nursery chain to his list in the next years article. Jeff knows about them but he does not include them. Could there be someone who wants to fly under the "how much sales I am really doing" radar?  Nurseries want to see their names on that list.  Is there a story here? Does anyone care?  I am very curious as to how they stay off that list!
     
          Green Valley Growers in Willis Texas, one of our local suppliers, filed bankruptcy this week. Wayne Massey started Green Valley about 8 years ago,  bought 850+ acres and within 5 years put 400 into nursery stock production. Wow!  He owns 3 large garden centers in Houston. Wayne always thought big in his retail endeavors and that translated into his wholesale operation. I hope he gets past this hurdle. Good luck Wayne.
     
           Rain, rain go away come again Thursday--in August!

 
               

       We have the same wonderful group of employees we had from last year to today.  I expected that we would ride out this year, and this economy, with the same employees. It is just not going to work. My employees are very stressed and concerned. Sales have soared this January and February.  We are at a breaking point where service will suffer unless I add more carry out and sales people. I made a decision this last week to add an experienced salesperson on the weekends and add load up help during the weekdays and the weekends. This is a rather odd feeling when I fully expected that we would have a flat or down year. Our sales are up 40% over last February. Whoda thunkit?

       We are committed to service and have to back that up with enough employees to get the job done. My son made me aware of the employee stress when he half-heartedly threatened to quit because of the rigors that Spring was exerting upon him. Truth be told, Spring really has not got here yet. We can ill afford to give bad service to those that make our paychecks possible.

        RateANursery is gaining traction. We have had almost 200 folks register and rate nurseries. Many more have used the website for information or are just curious. We have had visitors from Canada, Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Australia.  I think that six nurseries are in the running of being the highest rated nursery in Houston. For those nurseries that rate well this website is the best free advertising they could ever imagine.