<Begin Segment 53>

KO: Well, let's go on down here, and...

RW: Point out where your brother lives.

KO: Oh he lives in that house right over there in the corner.

RW: The green top. And then where do you live?

KO: I live right over there. Behind the trees. Everything that, all -- when we get an order, we have people go out and pick 'em out, pick the orders out on these racks. They're on carts. And they're unloaded here, and then they are put into the truck by forklift.

RW: When did you purchase the trucks?

KO: Quite awhile ago, they're older trucks now. I think the newest one we got is about (1980). We're trying to keep 'em all going until we get out of here. [Laughs]

And I'll show you quickly how we handle soil. We buy all of our soil premixed and there's, it's artificial soil, there's no soil in the mix itself. It's a mixture of sand, and pumice, and peat, and... we buy it from a company down in Sumner. We have a truck dump it here and we push it back in there. Then we take our tractor and fill that bin, right here, and it runs it through this conveyor here. It eliminates a lot of the sticks and stones that might be in there. And then it drops it down into this hopper here, and then we run the containers through the machine. And there's -- we have one person loading it on one end and another person catching it at this end. It runs about 700 flats an hour through there. That doesn't sound like a heck of a lot but when you're trying to catch 700 flats in one hour on this end, it's a real chore. It takes some strong bodies to do that.

RW: You have quite an amount of equipment now.

KO: That's, you know, that's what I mean -- before, when we first started here, we had maybe two shovels and a couple of wheelbarrows. But in time, we've accumulated all this equipment. And we probably should have more, but it's getting to the point where the costs are prohibitive. And... only if we make a lot of money can we afford to buy some of the newer equipment.

<End Segment 53> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.