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How it all happens! A week during shipping season |
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| Most folks have no idea what happens at a mail order nursery during shipping season! It will also help you understand why additions, changes, cancellations and/or rescheduling 8 days or less prior to shipment makes life VERY difficult for us! While you might not perceive 6 days prior to ship week to be 'Last Minute', for us, any requests inside the magic '8 Days Prior to Ship Week' is in fact what's last minute! :-) And this is why: | ||
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Orders are downloaded from the Internet, processed, assigned a ship date and the physical paperwork is filled by ship week. Luckily, in shipping by zones in busy Spring, the shipments manage to balance themselves out fairly evenly and we aren't overloaded in any one week. |
Monday morning, a list (generated Sunday afternoon) is handed out listing all plants to be shipped the following week, alphabetically by greenhouse (this is a greenhouse in January with plants getting ready for your garden!) |
They're pulled all week and are brought to the shipping greenhouse by golf cart, (22 trays to a cart, so it takes many trips). During spring it takes 5 days + to pull all the plants for orders for the next week. |
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In the shipping house, the plants from various houses are collated into orders. Orders are placed on tables by the day they're scheduled to ship. (There's a similar set of tables on the opposite side of the house as well!) All plants are prepped and tidied up. Orders to the West Coast are dipped in chemicals to meet West Coast's stringent requirements. |
Sometime during the week, the paperwork for that week is put in waterproof sleeves and gets matched with it's order. Once the orders leave the office, making changes to an order is really VERY difficult. Finding the order is the trick! |
Small orders with the paperwork in front of them -- these orders are arranged only by ship day, not order number, so finding a particular order by number is nearly impossible once the paperwork is up with the order. |
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| Orders scheduled to ship Monday are picked up by staff and brought from the packing greenhouse to the packing building to one of 5 workstations. | On Monday (or even Sunday in a very busy week), a week after we started pulling, we start wrapping the plants for shipment. (And the pullers at the same time start pulling plants for the following week!) | Once wrapped, orders go onto a conveyor belt to go to a 'Boxer' who packs them in a box and applies labels from rolls (that looks like toilet paper above!) |
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After being wrapped and boxed, address labels attached, boxes are weighed and postage is applied. |
Some of the boxes on nursery carts that were ready to go out to the small Postal Vehicles -- sometimes as many as 5 pick-ups a day -- by local carriers between their normal mail delivery routes.
In 2011 a Big change occurred -- USPS starting treating us like a Post Office for pickups and sends a 10 Ton postal truck directly to us and then on to the Distribution Center bypassing the small RURAL Post Office in another county that was trying to handle our massive volume. |
We now fill actual postal carts with our boxes.
Based on volume for the week, they schedule pickups from 1 day a week (in
late Fall or July) to 4 days in busy spring, which is why we only ship
certain days of the week for that season. The Big Truck won't come for a single 'late' order but comes only on prescheduled days based on historic volume for that time of year. Late orders (even when WE'RE not busy) still have to go out on scheduled pickups. |
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And then, after all of this, they're on their way to your garden!
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