Shady Oaks Plant Order

The EMHS Membership wholesale plant order from Shady Oaks Nursery in MN has been finalized.  The order was placed with Shady Oaks on Friday March 25th.  At that time I utilized my own personal credit card to pay for the order to confirm availability and the shipping date. 

This order was offered to the entire membership at cost and absolutely no profits were made by myself for coorinating the order.  All plants, shipping, and tags were billed to the people that were involved in the order at the actual cost. 

A number of the plants requested by the membership were not available at the time the order was placed.  This is a common occurrence when ordering wholesale as the availability changes daily if not hourly.  The reason behind availability changes is that retailers are buying from wholesalers during their business hours and are buying plants in full trays of 96 plants per tray.  So even if the day starts with an availability of 486 of a certain plant (let's say Hosta "Blue Ivory"), it only takes a few retailers to call and place an order for those 5 flats of plants to be gone and we areen't able to get the number one plant requested for our order. 

Another issue that made the group order a hassle was that we had to order 12 plants of any one variety.  The membership was informed that they could request as few as 8-10 plants of any one variety and I would pick up the rest of the request to come to our minimum number of 12 plants, but many people were requesting one plant.  This was not a problem for those that got into groups and did a group order so that all requested varieties added up to close to the minimum of 12 plants per variety, but for those that requested a single plant it mandated that I try to find others to pick up the remaining 11 plants of that variety.  I do want to thank those that helped by saying they would take the remaining 2-4 plants of a variety to be able to make the order minimum. 

The order will be shipped from Shady Oaks on April 4, 2011 and should be in my hands by the following weekend.  Since I am not available on the weekends I will deliver all plants to their respective owners on April 14th at the regularly scheduled meeting.  Those people that have plants in the order and will not be at the meeting are requested to contact me at their earliest convenience to schedule a time to pick up thier order. 

Thank you to all those involved with this order for their patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
Glen Pace
EMHS President