10/08/2021
Agave ovatifolia, the whale’s tongue agave, was only discovered by botanists in the last bit of the 20th century and officially named for the records in the early bits of the 21st.
It’s from the high, windswept and cold mountaintops of Nuevo León and is a ghostly pale blue color with solitary rosettes five feet across and almost as tall and is perfectly symmetrical and lush and is widely considered to be perfectly beautiful.
This species doesn’t produce offsets so the only way to propagate it - other than in a tissue culture lab - is to grow it from seed. Imagine growing a whale from seed.
This spring I sowed seed of about 40 species of agave.
They germinate quickly and by June we were potting little grassy babies into small nursery cells. At this stage of life they slow way down and barely show any top growth but they spend that time making roots and finally, by the end of September, they all got potted into 4” pots.
Before Christmas they will get moved into cold greenhouses and if they survive the winter then sometime next year they’ll go into gallons and then some will be potted on to two gallons for sale the following year. 2023.
And then it’s time to actually sell them. That’s the hard part.
No one will ever want to spend the money to appropriately compensate for the years of effort it took to grow these exceptional plants.
How do you put a price on expensive imported seed, heating mats for the germination table, a mist irrigation system timed to seconds, pots and flats and perlite and vermiculite and lime and peat and expanded shale and time release fertilizer, the time spent potting up, potting on and moving the plants dozens of times, watering and weeding and weeding and watering and reading and research and weeding and watering and deer breaking into the nursery and too much rain and too much cold and too much heat and too much else to do?
You don’t.
You spend easily, as my accountant tells me, ten thousand dollars a year over what you’ve made trying to sell amazing plants to gardeners who rarely give a rat’s ass that they are buying something far better than what they can get at Lowe’s for three bucks.
I remember, when I was an owner at Gardenhood, having a lady stand in front of me holding a plant in her hand that my business partner had literally discovered while rappelling off a sheer cliff in China (and then spent years getting it permitted for import and trialing and then producing enough to sell) saying that our prices were too high. I gave her directions to Lowes.
No one has a nursery because it’s lucrative or easy or always fun.
People tell me that they wish they could quit their high paying, high pressure jobs and just come putter away the day with me in the potting shed. I secretly hate these people.
Every job is work. If you’re lucky it’s good work, but my back hurts more than it used to and I can’t open my phone with my thumbprints any more because they are worn away from the gritty sand I have to use in the agave’s potting mix and I keep having to have things burned off my face from being in the sun all day.
It’s impossible to find help I can afford for a business that loses money and it’s gotten so much harder lately to source the materials we need.
And then there’s the marketing. In decades I have yet to unlock the secret to selling plants. I’ve tried it all.
It’s not uncommon for me to grow a completely amazing and rare plant that should be in everyone’s garden only to fail to sell even one and eventually have to throw them in the dumpster. I did a lot of that last week. Hundreds of plants in the garbage.
So why do I do this?
The plants.
And who else would do it?
We have almost no nurseries left that grow actually good plants.
I design gardens for a living and I’m good at what I do but I can’t be good at it without good plants and so I grow my own. And I sell to the public because these plants should be seen and admired. It makes our lives better to be surrounded by fascinating and beautiful things. Living things.
But today I’m in bed before dawn feeling tired and sluggish and I have to spend my day getting my soggy nursery ready for a plant sale tomorrow.
I’ve posted about the sale a few times but have only had a few likes from friends and family so I don’t expect a big day even though I have about ten thousand plants to sell.
But the day will be bright and cheerful and the conversations will inspire me and the hand full of dedicated customers who are completely tickled by what they are loading in their trunks will make me think that I need to order more agave seed for 2024.
Very Good Plants will be open tomorrow 10 til 4. 7011 south Goddard, Lithonia.
Arabia mountain.
