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VY: You talked about irrigation earlier. Could you talk a little bit about irrigation and that process?

NH: Well, first of all, we had well water. And my dad and I, mostly him, set up the piping from the area to different areas. And most of the time we hand watered each plant. Because we had different crops going into that area. There's what they call spaghetti, a small tube system, goes into the major, and it's low volume, you don't need a lot of pressure. But because our crops turned over maybe three times in one particular area, it was hard to adapt to different things. And, actually, I kind of think our hand watering allowed us to grow quality plants, because a lot of the big growers, they changed the soil composition so it's lighter and different components, so when you water it and water doesn't sit in it, and the plant is, kind of goes through fast, and you don't have overwatering. Only problem with that, when you take it to the customer, they'd better be aware of it, or the thing will dry up real fast.

VY: Doesn't retain the moisture.

NH: Yeah. So we had well water, and some things we couldn't grow because of the salinity.

VY: So what kinds of things grow better with the well water?

NH: Almost everything we grew. [Laughs] Because azaleas we could not propagate in our Union City place.

VY: Could not?

NH: Yeah. So, initially, they would take cuttings and they would, rented a small greenhouse in somebody's backyard who was a former grower. But that became a hassle, he had good water. We tried other things, we tried putting de-ionized water, way of treating the water, but it just wasn't worth the expense, so we dropped that azalea, camellia line. But it went into our fast production, one year max.

VY: What does that mean, went into fast production?

NH: Well, I would say a crop has to be finished in one year, out the door.

VY: Oh, okay. So after that time, all of your crops, you wanted to be one-year crops.

NH: Yeah. It was kind of a transition, it didn't happen (at once) exactly, we switched over, we fully switched over. I guess practically every year we tried to introduce something new, we thought we could grow that the market would accept. And sometimes there's no acceptance from the customer. But it was not in a large quantity, we would have, take a big loss. We didn't just jump in and grow a hundred thousand, something, and hope we'd sell it.

VY: Did anything ever surprise you as far as you thought one thing might sell but it didn't, or something that you didn't think would sell did?

NH: My uncle tried bonsai, kind of ahead of its time. He bought the little things and bought little cutie, the guys and the little bridge, we'd have a pine, small thing. But unless you were into bonsai, you wouldn't know how to really train it and it didn't go over well, one thing.

VY: So he thought it would do well, but it did not.

NH: There were a lot of items that it would take the, perhaps a year or something, we didn't grow a lot of, because they become what they call specimen plants, bigger plants and everything, so we just grew limited quantities. We never tried to double production because it was a good seller. It's better to have your one-year turnover rather than pass that.

VY: Did you ever see anything selling that maybe you didn't grow, but you saw it selling well that surprised you?

NH: Yeah, it was what I call perennials, outdoor color plants. Our main goal is plants with color at the time of sale, no matter what. And I tried that, and it already had the stigma of being an inexpensive plant no matter what. At the end I had to kind of drop the price, or here, take double that, I'll give you one. But then I was getting into outdoor growing again, which we stopped growing, we stopped growing things outside.

VY: Why?

NH: Cold winters. The growers from Los Angeles, because they had a fairly temperate climate, they can grow it and ship it up here cheaper than we can grow it, and it didn't make sense.

VY: Was there competition from other areas, other than Los Angeles, that affected the industry here?

NH: Later, I don't think it directly impacted us because they were, we were out of certain items already, we stopped growing, that was in the Vacaville area.

VY: Vacaville?

NH: Yeah. A lot of Southern California, I think a couple of them went into that area. But we drove by there a few months ago, and half the nursery is not in production.

VY: In Southern California?

NH: Vacaville.

VY: Vacaville.

NH: And one closed down several years ago. Came across the same problem, cold weather, erratic.

VY: So it seems like the whole area, the whole East Bay, north and south, everything has reduced as far as the nursery business goes.

NH: Zero. I don't know if there's any around. I'm not sure, I've been out of it about twenty-five years.

VY: It's been that long?

NH: '95, 1995. Even the retailers, small retail nurseries, they're not around, that won some of our customers. And unfortunately, when Gayle and I, we go to buy plants for the house, it's expensive, really expensive. It's really expensive to design and plant your houses nowadays.

VY: And there weren't a lot of options to get plants anymore.

NH: Uh-huh, yes.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.