Thank You!
First, we wanted to thank you for your continued support of our local, small business. By purchasing from Beautiful Land Products, you not only support a local small business, but you also keep money in the local community, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that arise from shipping. Thank you! We will continue to do our best for you and are committed to your success!
Field Days, Site Visits
We’d love to come check out your operations! We will be attending a few Field Days this year with Practical Farmers of Iowa, and we plan to do some site visits throughout the summer. If you’d like to schedule a site visit with us, contact us at this email address and we’ll try to arrange a good time to come see you! Even if your greenhouse closes for the months of June and July, we are keen to check out the set-up you’ve got going!
While we like to think we know a little bit about what we’re doing, we recognize that there will always be a great deal more to learn, and we are committed to learning as much as we can about growing in a healthy, sustainable, and regenerative way. By seeing what people are doing at their operations, we can continue to improve our knowledge base, which in turn improves our product line to better serve you.
That said, there will be times this summer when we will be out of the office. We will do our best to notify you on Facebook (by the way, have you liked our page?), via email auto-responses, in our answering machine greetings, and any other means of communication we have available. But if you need to order something, it is never a bad idea to give us a call first to make sure (a) we have it and (b) someone will be there to greet you when you arrive. While we do our best to avoid being away during our busy season, this time of year for us is a time of reflection, research, fieldwork, learning, and staff development.
Pots, Trays, and More
As you know, our season at BLP starts early so that your pots and soil can be ready when you need them. Since we order so many pots and trays, we need to get our order in extremely early so that the manufacturers can have enough time to produce everything we ask of them. To that end, it’s a good idea to start thinking about your pots and trays for next year. We do as much as we can to make only one very large order every year. Think of it as cooperative purchasing: The more we order at once collectively, the more we save, and we pass those savings on to you, our customers. Here are some of the benefits of ordering early:
- Less Freight: If we don’t know you’re going to need something (particularly specialty items), we may not have it on hand when you need it. We can still order it, but assuming we can still get it during our busy season, such items tend to be shipped UPS or FedEx Ground. If this has happened to you, you know that freight on these items is considerably more expensive than if we know you need it in advance, have it on hand, and ship it with our typical parcel carrier, Spee Dee Delivery. Their rates are routinely 1/3 of what other carriers are. With drop-shipping, sometimes the freight charges can exceed the price of the pots, which is nuts! This can all be avoided by placing your order early.
- More Likely to Get What You Need, When You Need It: If we don’t know you’re going to need something (particularly specialty items), we may not have it on hand when you need it. We can still order it, but there is no guarantee that it will be ready soon enough for you to be able to grow something in it to sell.
- Lower Prices: When we order early and by the truckload, we get a discount, which we pass on to you. The more and earlier we can order, the more we can all save, so why not order early and reduce input costs?
- Faster Service: If you communicate your needs early, then when it comes time to receive your pots and trays, they can be ready for pickup or shipped from our facility the day you order.
We know it’s hard in the middle of this summer to start thinking about what you’ll need for next spring/summer, but if you’ve held on to your invoices, and kept track of anything we didn’t have for you this year, we can simplify the process considerably. If you’re thinking of expanding/changing your typical order, we especially want to hear from you.
To lock in your order, be sure to have contacted us no later than July 19. I will probably remind you in the next monthly newsletter, but the sooner we hear from you the better. Right now is actually a good time to think about it because the needs of the season are probably fresh in your mind. As always, we are happy to provide you estimates, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re looking to budget for the upcoming year.
Plant and Overstock Sale
As you no doubt know by now, we started growing a few native species in the last year or so. Most of that was grown on contract, and now we have some overstock to sell. This means we are having a Plant Sale Saturday June 15th from 12:00pm-3:00pm here at Beautiful Land Products. This sale is open to the public.
In the way of wildflowers, we have several tall bellflowers, echinacea, coneflower, rattlesnake master, butterfly weed (aka milkweed), and a few other species. In the way of trees, we have 2-3 year old shagbark hickories (excellent bat habitat!), a few red cedars, and some white oak. Next year we will grow a much wider variety of native species (especially bee attractants), so be on the lookout for that!
We will also be selling individual pots from “cracked cases,” i.e., cases where some items were damaged and we cannot sell the whole case, but we can sell you the remaining intact individuals!
Contact for details. We hope to see you there!
Check out the Facebook event here. That’s all we have for this month! We look forward to hearing from you!
