Published Articles

Spring at a field production nursery can yield hair on fire anxiety. Every year we go like hell to get the deciduous plants dug before they come into full leaf, and every year the deadline looms at a different date. Managing the anxiety starts with a deep data dive into degree days.

Boxwood blight is here and not going away anytime soon. We can either learn to adapt and manage it, or stop planting boxwood--which is unthinkable. We choose to adapt and manage. Fungicides are proving an effective treatment if blight is found in planted boxwood, and resistant plants are being developed in Europe.

If you find yourself being audited by the Federal Department of Labor, understand this: The investigation is not a process to teach you how to do a better job, to educate, and everyone feels good. The process is to find errors and mistakes. If your ducks are in a row, it will be less excruciating

Even with the best precautions, field workers are liable to get bitten by spiders and other critters with which we share the outdoors. Sometimes these can lead to infections and even become life-threatening if not taken seriously. Beware that, aside from the locals, uncommon insects and arachnids can always hitch a ride from other regions and wind up on your land.

It’s a nightmare scenario - your entire business burning down. Our loss was well over a million dollars in equipment, infrastructure, and supplies. We could have been better covered for not much more in premium. We won’t make that mistake again. No small business owner wants to take the time to prepare a disaster plan. Do it anyway.

Dusting off an old Towson’s Nursery catalog and doing a little sleuthing, I discovered that the inflation adjusted price we sell our plants at today has remained fairly steady. The shocking part comes when you see that the cost of doing business has gone way up. Way up. So the question is: are you slowly going broke from under charging?

What is the best way for growers to replace soil that gets shipped out with each root ball? Replacement cost for high quality soil is prohibitively expensive. So, many of us turn a blind eye to the problem. But you can only ignore soil loss for so long. A reliable soil replacement system will cost you, but it sure beats the alternative.

Waverly Farms signed a Boxwood Blight Compliance Agreement this year and we encourage as many growers as possible to join this program. Pest free production for a plant included in nearly every landscape design plan in the region, just makes good business sense. Implementing the agreement has had a ripple effect into how we think about managing pest transmission as a way of life.

Loss of beauty, biodiversity, and for so many of us, our livelihood due to herbicide damage is enough to keep you up at night. Off-target herbicide can occur because of spray drift and -this may surprise you- through temperature inversion. The problem is becoming more serious in Maryland, but so far has not been getting nearly enough attention.

Is your nursery business slowly, imperceptibly losing money with each plant you sell? Having a comprehensive cost based system for setting plant prices at a profit is a crucial subject in our business. Yet all too often it is a subject we avoid or dread, like talking about the “birds and the bees” with our children.

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in growing plants from cuttings to supply your field production business. With cuttings from your own production land, there is no risk of importing pests into your business. That is a big plus. It also gives you flexibility to respond to unanticipated demand and a way to increase inventory without a lot of outside help.

Imagine these outcomes: Produce better plants with approximately one year less in the growing cycle. Reduce water consumption and labor costs. That’s what we gained after we installed automatic control of our irrigation with a wired system. Our new wireless system has the same benefits plus allows for remote control of irrigation even when electricity is down.