Is it Too Late to Order for Spring?
Is it too late to order for spring?
No, not really…
In most cases.
Questions To Ask
To figure out if it’s too late for you to order plants for the spring, here are the questions you need to ask yourself:
- What is your season begin and end date?
- What crops are you wanting to sell?
- What size containers are you trying to fill?
And the big one…
- How picky are you on varieties?
Flexibility is Key
If the answers to some of these questions are somewhat flexible, then it’s certainly not too late to order. You just have to work backward at this point to do your planning.
Let’s say your first sale date is May 1. That gives you 8 weeks from the first of March. There is a lot we can do in that time period!
First, identify plants that fit both of these criteria:
- You have a market for the plants.
- You can finish them in 8 weeks or less.
Next, watch our availability for those specific plants to come up. It may be that you settle for a different Coleus that you want, or plant a couple of extra Purslane in the basket to help it finish on time. But you can still pull it off.
Finishing Factors
Once you have a good idea of what types of plants you might still be able to order, check the website for crop times. If some of the plants you chose seem to be at the longer end of your timeline, there are some tricks you can use to get them finished off in time.
- Some plants can be planted with more per pot to help speed up filling out the basket.
- Some are just too late to get up to size for Mother’s Day- but maybe you can sell them as an after-holiday special.
- You do not necessarily have to have everything at its peak on day one. It is okay to have a few things finishing off a week or two after you first open.
Having a few late finishers gives you a little insurance on a late spring. You don’t want to have everything past its peak once the weather finally breaks, if we have a late start to the season.
Shipping and Availability
Our busiest shipping weeks are in February through early March. If we can ship in the next couple of weeks, then your order would be right in line with most of our other customers.
The problem will not be that we don’t have any plants; it just might be that we don’t have the exact plants you want. So the most important thing for you to do is go through the online availability and work from there.
But don’t just take a peek one Monday morning and give up. Check our availability weekly, as it gets updated with a fresh count at the end of the week. Typically this count comes out on Thursday evening or Friday, so the best numbers are showing at that time.
We also send an email alerting people when this happens so watch for that. Not on our email list? You can sign up here.
