<Begin Segment 51>

RW: So tell me, at your high season... you said that you're seeing a lot of empty benches right now. Do you fill up the entire space?

KO: For -- with poinsettias?

RW: With whatever season you're in.

KO: Oh, yes, we fill it all up. In fact when Christmas comes, this whole range will be nothing but poinsettias. This is how we put the flats on the bench, ready for the ladies to plant. They have automatic transplanters now, which we can't afford. So they're trying to take a lot of the hand labor out of this business.

RW: How many people do you employ?

KO: All told, about twenty five.

RW: Is that spread out between the three sites?

KO: Yeah, between the three sites. We've been lucky, in that we've had a good stable crew where we haven't had to scrounge around for help too much. But this is the tail end, as I mentioned before, of our crop. Certainly not much to see here, so we'll go on.

This is an example of what a seed flat looks like after the seeds have been put in and they've grown to the point that they can be transplanted. And we have a, as I mentioned, a dislodger that knocks these things right out; you just pick 'em up and put 'em into the flats as quickly as you can. Kinda' rather tedious work, and we're fortunate that the women are able to do it, although [Laughs] there're probably some men who could do it too.

We'll go over here, and, we'll glance in this greenhouse just a moment. This is where we plant our baskets and our hanging baskets. Those are made from moss. And we only make a limited number of those baskets, but we could sell any amount that we could grow, of these moss baskets; but they're too much trouble. So we just grow a limited amount.

RW: Are they difficult to grow?

KO: They're difficult to plant. Because you gotta put the moss in, then you put the dirt in, and then you have to punch holes in the moss and put the plants into the holes. In fact, one of our girls got bursitis in her arm from punching the holes into the moss to put the plants in.

RW: But there's a high demand?

KO: Oh, big demand for it. They're hard to deliver too, which is another reason we don't grow too much.

RW: Must go for a pretty penny then.

KO: Oh yeah, we have to get a good price for them, no question. And you see a lot of this material on racks here. And most of that material that you see on racks around here, are grown in one of our two other locations, and they're brought up here and sold. We sell only out of this location here, so that we can avoid a lot of confusion.

<End Segment 51> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.