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VY: Well, okay, can you maybe just walk through... what's it like from beginning to end from a plant, like from the beginning of the plant to the end of the plant? What does that look like? How do you start it and take care of it?

NH: There's a seed process, of course, it's put in a certain type of soil under bottom heat, bottom heat is like little tubes of warm water or electrical heat. And the top would be the irrigation, mist type, very fine water, and that usually goes about three weeks to a month. They root out either the seed or cuttings, put in there, they have roots, and then it's transplanted to the next size, maybe two-inch pot. It grows a little bit, and then from there, it goes into the finished container, one plant or two plants. And as that's growing, like Gayle's section, they would trim it at certain stages for the market. Poinsettia are an example, they had too much bright days, it wouldn't bloom on time for Christmas. And Easter lily, you know what that is? If you miss that, you really miss, because that blooms in four days, three days, short period. If you miss, because cloudy days and lack of heat, you miss the mark and you have to dump everything.

VY: Did that happen very often?

NH: Not to us. We did lose 300, 350 thousand dollars, cold weather (freeze). Four days of not going over a certain, not going over freezing, (temperature) under freezing, our water pipes, it froze in the water, we couldn't irrigate. At that time, some of these plants were in a non-cool house, no heating apparatus to keep it warm. It just froze and we lost the plants.

VY: And so what happened? You just had to throw them all way?

NH: Throw them away. There's a farm bureau here, and they were set up to help farmers, and we're considered a farmer. You have to submit a proposal, and I submitted, I thought if I underbid I would get at least a couple hundred thousand. A guy told me, "You missed it by twenty-five thousand," so I can't claim any. I said, "Well, can I change it?" He says, "No." So we lost the whole crop. And that revenue is carrying off, transition to cover our spring crops. I really don't know how we got through that.

VY: It seems like that would create a chain reaction when something like that happens.

NH: Yeah. But most of the time we didn't have to finance, so maybe my uncle secured a loan to carry us through. And one thing about nursery industry, all you have to pay is your employees and your basic taxes. And our houses are not, greenhouses or anything were not rentals, we built everything, so everything was paid for.

VY: So when you say "we built things," who built those? Was it mostly you and your family?

NH: My dad.

VY: You and your dad?

NH: Yeah. He designed a lot of the things, and like I say, I'd come back... actually he would wait for me, sometimes we'd need two guys. And I'd come back from my route and help him. It's amazing, though, things fit. And I remember you had to dig a lot of holes, you know, for the posts. But I liked that work. It's amazing. My dad didn't say, "Do this," and all that, he taught me the basics and I picked things up. And my dad, like I say, was engineering, he understood the basic principles. And he went to night school for welding, I don't know what else kind of things he went through. I did the same after a while, I took welding and a couple other items I thought would help.

VY: It sounds like all the things that you learned all through school came into play as you took over the nursery and had to do all these different things, it seems like you used all those things over the years.

NH: Yeah, that's kind of the exciting part. That's the way, I realized later, too late, that that's the way I like things. I like things thrown at me and then and then let me wallow out of it some way or other, solve my own problems, get my own tools. And at that time, we didn't have a waiting period for the house to finish in order to move in, it's just whenever we had time. So sometimes it took a long time to finish something, we were so busy. In the meantime, we were maintaining other equipment or repairing other equipment. It's the way we ran it, we just... like big companies, they'll have specific guys doing specific chores, but my uncle and myself and my dad, we had to multitask.

VY: Can you describe what it's like to build a greenhouse? What's that process?

NH: First you lay it out with a surveyor thing. I already had surveying because of my... and my dad understood all that. We had our own transit and everything, we'd survey it out and mark the spots, dig the holes, hand dig it.

VY: Sounds like a lot of work.

NH: Yeah. I would look down and isn't that deep enough of a hole, three feet down. And then we had two reference posts, beginning and end, on a string and then set our posts on. These are four by four posts, quite heavy. But my dad was careful, took little things like, in a hole, you put a little bit of concrete that much at the bottom, so it wouldn't sink. And lay these posts out with a string and with a level. And then my dad designed a truss, this part truss. We'd premake that in a jig, jig is where you put the pieces in and you just block them together.

VY: What were they made out of?

NH: Redwood. Redwood is, does not deteriorate, it was also painted white to reflect the light and preserve the wood. And actually, when we closed the nursery forty, fifty years later, they were still standing, so that's amazing. We would put the top up, string boards, precut that, put it up. When I do things now, it's really, I admire my dad because these were 220 feet, 230 feet long and, like I say, things fit. [Laughs]

VY: He was good at measuring.

NH: Yeah.

VY: Do you think that your experience in the nursery business is the same was other people's?

VY: No. There were some nurseries that didn't make their equipment, they always brought it out or somebody else to come in and repair it. Other places didn't need our demand for our type of crop. Actually, you'd call it a fast turnover crop for a greenhouse, less than a year. Some people just didn't want to put in certain things.

VY: So you did fast turnover crops, that was the main thing you did?

NH: I think the criteria was about a year, max. But azalea was a three-year crop, and they stopped that.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.