#10 COMMENTS* (revised 6/10) "the big boys were not all bad"

The big boys were not all bad



“What the K-marts, the Home Depots, and the Wal-marts did for the small independent garden stores was not all bad. They still are all lowlife scoundrels!

When they jumped in during the late seventy’s, gardening was starting to boom. Lots of homeowners got their first taste of gardening because of the big ads and the glitz of these store presentations.

For the small garden store owners, life got better for a while because of them. Gone were the days when the owner had to jump in a truck every couple of days, drive to a greenhouse and hand pick all the plants for his store. The big boys insisted that the plants be delivered to them.

The big boys made the growers bring their plants on portable racks for easy movement. Heck, before the big stores, We, often, had to drive to the guy's greenhouse, gather, move, and bring the stuff back. A van full of eighty flats of plants took six hours. After the greenhouses and growers were forced to modernize, buy trucks and moving racks, Thanks to the big boys, It now takes 20 minutes to get those eighty flats!

They would not accept plants that were not color tagged with information. Before these changes, you sometimes were lucky to get one hand written plant tag in each flat. These stores also required that the pots, paks and flats be bar coded for quick checkout.

And no more just shoving trees and shrubs into any old rusty can. All the pots had to be good looking for their customers. And another thing, since these big store employees knew jack nothing about the garden bug sprays, they forced the manufacturers to produce “ready to use” stuff that any idiot could sell.

The big stores were bright and clean and well stocked and that cleaned up the little garden stores that had to compete. These standards raised the bar for all garden stores in the United States. I don't know. If I had my choice of a Home Depot or a rusty can, you know what I would pick!"

Mel Anthony
Bismarck, North Dakota




The cold frames


“The weathered white panel van rumbled along the twenty miles of highway each day toward the cold frames.

They loomed in front of me, as the mist lifted high into the hills above, wooden coffins casing morning shadows across the valley floor. They were ninety-eight in two rows, one hundred feet long, ten feet wide and three feet deep, with a gravel road between the two blocks of frames.

Tiny figures in the distance were lifting off the battered wooden tops, letting the morning sun warm the plants beneath. When they finished opening the frames, after the lunch bell, they started all over again, putting the tops back on before the night frost settled on the tiny seedlings. It was all day every day until all the plants were gone from the frames.

Inside the frames were rusted warm pipes that snaked back to an old boiler in the shed nearby. Resting above the pipes, kept warm and ready, were twelve million flowers ready to complete the gardeners journey for their perfect colored spring palette.

Each morning, I would park the old dented van on the road exactly half way into the blocks of frames. Opening the back rear doors wide, I dropped all the worn plywood pieces and two-by four supports to the gravel and built the first platform deep in the van for the plants. With all the boards and supports in place, the old girl would hold eighty flats of flowers. It was silent out there with the stillness broken only with the crack of the cold frame tops slapping down against rocks and gravel.

I walked down the frames looking for special plants for my garden store. They were nested in neat rows in the frames. I swung my leg over the frame wall and lifted my other leg over. I grabbed two flats of flowers with each hand, hopped back over the frame wall and carried the plants back down the cold frame row to the road way.

Two by two, I gathered the flats walking each time back and forth along the length of the hundred foot frames until I had the eighty flats for the van. With all the flowers lining the roadway, I drove along the gravel, picking each flat up again, sliding the plants onto my shelves of plywood and two by fours. Five hours will have passed looking, lifting, carrying and loading.

As the afternoon faded, the van moved out of the valley, away for the frames and onto the highway, returning again and again each morning for my gardeners.”