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VY: Okay, so let's talk about how different nurseries interacted with each other.

NH: To my viewpoint, there was very little interaction. One of the things that, I know there was a California flower market, they would have an annual dinner, that's where we would meet a lot of the other cut flower growers and things like that.

VY: The flower market?

NH: Yeah. Sometimes I would meet 'em in like a seminar type of place, looking for more information. They would often have open air nurseries for somebody, a field trip type of thing, and I would go and, cut flower grower, and see what they're doing. One of the, for example, was reclaiming the water, the irrigation water, they had the system set up to reclaim it and then purify the water and reuse it, but it had really nothing to do with the nursery, cut their growing part. That would be the only reason why I would go over there, little things like that. If they were building things, my dad and I often went, just to get ideas. Not to copy, just get a... we did have a couple of large nurseries, I won't mention their names, they'd come over and see what we're growing periodically. One of the nurseries bought one of these specimen plants that we were known for, he bought maybe a hundred items. Then he split the delivery, and in the second delivery, I asked him, "Are you going to take it?" and he said, "Yeah, we're going to take it." Well, I couldn't hang onto it because it's two or three weeks, blew him out. And he took it, and then the following year, he put an order in again, and I'm sorry, I can't fill it, you reneged on your order, more or less. Well, it ended up he used it, tried to duplicate the growing, and I don't think he was successful. And we had other items like, I remember we had this little conical pot with some kind of fir, looks like a Christmas tree, and that's for the garden -- my uncle was innovative in a way, he tried things. He'd knock it out of a can and put it in a clay pot and sold the flowers, and they would decorate it. Well, about five, six years later, this big nursery grew hundreds of 'em. He'd bring in a special, like a Vietnamese at that time, I believe, came over and all they would do is decorate those plants, they'd predecorate it and sell it, so that ruined the market for our little hundred plants or so.

VY: They would decorate them and sell them?

NH: Yeah. Less work for retail. But I think they had a lot of chains and stuff. So we didn't interact much.

VY: So the different nurseries didn't really interact a whole lot with each other?

NH: For example, I think cut flower would see a cut flower grower more. They knew each other, what was growing, and same thing, kind of look and see what your competition's doing.

VY: So do you feel like it was more competitive and less friendly?

NH: No. I think everybody had their own markets one way or other, we didn't feel that we would steal from each other. And like I say, we had a lot of items and we serviced very few customers compared to other people, and that's the way we existed. And it cut down on our traveling time, we didn't have to go all over for one little item, and most of the time we sold out, or we sold ninety percent. Ten percent's nothing to sell.

VY: So people would place large orders and you would fulfill them.

NH: A lot of the orders were prebooked before the season. We were known as contract growers, which that kind of backfired sometimes because they overestimated, or very optimistic, they would sell it and it would rain and they can't sell their product.

VY: So what would happen then if they ordered it from you but they couldn't sell it?

NH: Sometimes we didn't have to eat it and... for example, tomato plants grew too big for a small one, we'd have to dump the crop. Because he was a good customer throughout other years, we'd have to take the loss. They would try to help us out, take half of that thing to try to sell. It has its ups and downs, positive and negative about contract growing.

VY: Seems like you really have to think about the future when you're planning, for financial planning and what you're growing, seems like that you really have to have a lot of different financial systems in place and strategies to make sure that you can keep going and that you fulfill all the different kinds of orders.

NH: Well, we were limited by the space itself, and a time constraint in order to grow that particular crop. Safeway, for example, wanted to promote bedding plants, small starter plants, but it meant we'd have to hire twelve more people just for that production. We'd have to give twenty-five percent of our plant space for that area, so we refused it. Safeway was a good customer, they would pay in two weeks. Send them an invoice, two weeks they'd pay.

VY: But sometimes you couldn't take the contract.

NH: Yeah. And they understood it, we still got other contracts for other things, but we had a good relationship with a Northern Cal buyer.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.