Planting the Moss Baskets

Hello Everyone!

 We have been so busy here working on the moss baskets it has been some time since our last blog post. Things are moving along quickly and the majority of our moss baskets have been planted but we won't be completely finished until the end of February.

The moss basket process is a long one and we all become attached to our moss 'babies'. We had a meeting in July to talk about improvements we could make for 2011. In the fall all the plants were ordered from other growers or reserved in our greenhouse. Then in November we began taking orders!

January 15 we started planting more than 1500 moss baskets. Each basket will be trimmed at least three times and monitored from January to end of May!!! At which time they leave the nest to go home with you :)

We thought we would share some photos of this long but fun process with you!

While the store is closed all the ladies work hard to make the moss cages. It gets really dusty with the moss and soil which is why we wear masks.

Adding moss to the cage

Finishing touches.

After making the moss cages everyone is happy to get planting!

The staff are each assigned 'menus' to work on. They are responsible for the baskets they plant throughout the process. They make sure that the plants are thriving and everything is trimmed and looking good!

They pick all the plants they need for the 'menu'. The 14'' menus have over 30 plants per basket.

The plants are just small plugs at this stage!

We are fortunate to have all our moss baskets sell out every year! We appreciate our customers who return year to year and look forward to gaining new fans! We have already sold 75% of our moss baskets for 2011. All those white tags are sold signs!

We write 1500 or so of these tags every year. Its a great way to go through the orders and make sure everyone gets what they asked for! Here is my basket :) Memory Lane is a new introduction this year and we are all very excited to see how it turns out!

Most everything is green right now....

but every once in a while you see a flower and get excited for SPRING TIME!

You may recognize Pauline. She has been with us almost ten years and is our moss basket specialist. Here she is filling some holes in the 18'' baskets and making sure they look perfect!

And it continues...

We will have another blog soon with other preparations for our grand opening on February 28th!

Thanks for stopping by :)