Many of us here at Park Seed (especially here in the E-commerce department) don’t spend much time dealing with the actual plants that we sell on a day-to-day basis. Sure, most of us are gardeners, and all but a very few of us have plants on our desks (they ward off the crazy), but we don’t get as much excuse to go out back to the greenhouses as we would like. We certainly spend much of our days reading about these plants, but that can never really give you the best idea of the plant itself. The written descriptions are more like the platonic ideal of the plant, and it’s the real plant on this realm that we’re really concerned with.
There are a few things that we do to try to balance this out, though. During the relevant seasons, most of us go to the Garden Center about once a week (mostly to fill our own gardens). We also have some of the most amazing trial gardens you’re likely to find anywhere right here on site, and many of us visit these regularly (especially during our monthly E-Com team picnic out there in the warm months). We try to get our friendly resident master gardeners to show us around out there some whenever we can, too. On Flower Day each year we get to spend a whole day out there getting to know not only the plants, but our customers, too.
The absolute best chance we get for more experience with the actual plants, though, is physical inventory. We do this twice a year, and pretty much the entire company chips in and goes out there to count, well, everything. Most of us spend two or three days each inventory out in the plant, greenhouses, or in the open growing areas, and it’s great fun. I had the good luck to be on the live plant team this summer, and got to spend three and a half days out back playing with more plants than you could imagine. I learn more about plants in a single day of inventory than I do in a week of my regular job, and I’m sure that it’s that way for many of us. These are, of course, just a few of the ways that we try to stay as connected to our product as we can.