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How We Pack and Ship Our Plants
All plants are shipped by UPS. Please
provide your full street address. UPS will deliver to rural route box
holders but not to post office boxes.
As with most things we do, the information
below represents our goals and are not promises. We never promise to
ship or have plants delivered on a certain day.
Shipments to the States shown in yellow
below are sent by UPS ground service. We try to
schedule shipments so that all plants are delivered by Friday. If you
live close by, you may or may not receive your plants before Friday.
Shipments to more distant states are shipped earliest in the week. For
instance, shipments to Nebraska must be shipped on Monday to arrive by
Friday. If we receive that order on Tuesday, we will not ship it until
the next week. We may make exceptions early or late in the season when
temperatures are moderate and the longer trip will not affect the plants.
If you live in the western half of the two States shown in orange, we
will ship your plants by ground service, but you may not receive them
until the week following shipment. Shipments to the eastern half of
these states should arrive on Friday, Monday in the western half.
Shipments to Western States, shown in pink
below, must be sent bare-root because of State quarantine requirements.
Since ground shipments would take 8 days for delivery, we ship these orders
by UPS 3-day service, which is, unfortunately, more expensive than ground
shipment. See our page on
shipping charges for details.
Packing
In the spring, most plants are shipped in their pots.
We try to insure that the plants spend no more than five days in the box,
even less when it's hot. We have been doing this for a long time, and
don't get many complaints about the condition of the plants when they
arrive.
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We
try our best to make sure the plants arrive in good condition. As you
can see from the picture, we secure the plant and soil in its pot. The
stakes that go from the bottom of the pot to the top of the box keep the
plant from moving around during transit. The box can be turned upside-down
and tossed around a bit without any damage to the plants. Our friends
at UPS and the Post Office are very inventive, so they sometimes find ways
to defeat our system, but the plants usually arrive looking just as they did
when they left the nursery.
Left to right, 'Mildred
Seaver', 'Stiletto', and 'Allegan Fog', illustrating that big hostas will be
larger than small hostas, and medium size hostas are somewhere in between,
just like we were saying.
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It's
that same poor plant of 'Mildred Seaver'. It really got workout
the day we were taking pictures and it still looks good as new.
f you live
too far from us for the plants to reach you in a reasonable time by surface
shipping, we will send them by Priority Mail or 3-day UPS. This is
obviously more expensive and we can't afford to ship dirt by air, so we
remove most of the soil from the plants and wrap them in damp paper to keep
the roots moist. All plants shipped to the West Coast are shipped bare-root
because of state regulations. Beyond that, we can't tell you which
areas will be shipped to this way because it varies with the
season.
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Sometimes, especially late in the season, even plants shipped to
nearby locations are sent bare-root because they are too large to ship in
pots. Once again, we have been doing this for years and the plants arrive in
fine condition. The only significant difference is that plants shipped
without soil have to be planted soon after arrival, while those in pots can
be held for weeks or even months with proper care.
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