Project: Green - Plan now for water shortages

The challenge. Gardening is perceived by both the public and local governments as a major source of water waste. When naturally occurring droughts or water shortages due to poor community planning occur, garden centers are often the first to feel scrutiny. How can garden retailers educate customers on smart watering practices? And what is the best way to survive drought and watering bans that often ensue?

Several years ago, when Colorado went through a severe drought, the garden industry became the boogeyman. Camera crews would film garden centers watering their stock and run gotcha stories about wasteful retail practices. Aurora, Colo., went so far as to ban any new plantings. The Colorado green industry fought back with a publicity campaign, but it was an uphill battle.

This year, in Raleigh, N.C., Homewood Nursery was able to finesse the media, resulting in coverage depicting the garden center as a good business helping residents survive the drought. This public relations strategy succeeded because Homewood did prep work well before the ban hit, drawing on lessons learned from a drought five years ago.

If your region goes through a dry season, you need to know that your local government and media will not attack gardening or resort too quickly to full watering bans.

Start building relationships with local decision makers. Before a crisis develops, learn who runs the water district and how decisions are made. If you don’t bother doing this until you’re in the midst of a drought, you will be seen as a self-interested party who doesn’t care about the problem, just about not going out of business. But if you approach decision makers now and offer help with the local water-wise campaign, you will be seen as a partner who’s truly concerned about the issue. That will give you much more leverage when the inevitable dry spell hits.

Send water-wise gardening tips to local media. Do what you can to establish yourself as the go-to source on sustainable gardening. Like the water boards, if you begin talking about the issue now instead of during a crisis, local media will more likely see you as a trusted source.

Coordinate efforts with other garden centers. Don’t be shy about cooperating with competitors when you approach the local water boards or the media. If these groups see that competing stores are willing to work together, they will know that the issue is an important one.

Promote water conservation methods. Help customers be water stewards by training them in water-wise gardening techniques. Not only does it establish you as an authority on the topic before a drought, but it’s where the future of gardening lies. Far too many communities have inadequate water supplies for their burgeoning populations, and water issues will only become more prominent over the next few years.

Plant the right plant in the right place. You hear this phrase often when the topic of sustainable gardening comes up. Offer plants that are best-suited for your climate, then help customers understand where to plant them. Many consumers still equate water-conserving plants with succulents. Even thirsty willow trees can be an ideal if the customer has a pond or a slow-draining area in the yard where more drought-tolerant plants will drown.

Group thirstier plants together. Gardeners can still experiment with plants that might not be ideal to their yard’s conditions if they group those plants into one watering area. That way the rest of the garden can still use the reduced-water programs.

Sell water-saving devices, like rotator sprinkler heads, soaker hoses, rain barrels and moisture meters. Since sustainable gardening is an emerging trend, garden centers have the opportunity to establish themselves as the go-to source for gadgets. Highlight products used in your own store landscaping, and make sure you have displays that demonstrating how products are best used.

Create checklists for home owners. Customers have been trained to think in terms of checklists when it comes to energy-saving techniques. Doors and windows sealed properly? Check. Water heater insulated? Check. Provide a similar list for water-saving techniques that includes indoor and outdoor conservation tips.

Use signage to promote the concept. For generations, gardeners have watered one way -- place a sprinkler in the desired spot for a set amount of time. Pretty much the only major update has been automated sprinkler systems. Gardeners are just now learning about soaker hoses, drip irrigation for containers, new sprinkler heads and concepts like zero-runoff.

{sidebar id=3}

Many of these methods are foreign to your customers, even the fairly well-established soaker hoses. (Do you bury them, or just leave them above ground? Do you leave the water running constantly, or only for a set amount of time?) Customers have to be educated on new techniques through handouts, in-store signs and more. Create additional signs reinforcing new concepts and repeat them throughout the store.

- Carol Miller

July 2008

{tab=Suggestions}

What can you do?

Be willing to plan ahead. You buy insurance just in case something catastrophic happens. Why not invest time in another type of insurance? Create a crisis business plan that can work not only during droughts, but also during any other unexpected event. Look at ways to cut your budget to bare bones without jeopardizing your future. Establish a media plan that includes contact information so that you’re prepared beforehand when more urgent matters arise.

Pick up the phone. No reason to reinvent the wheel when others have figured out how to respond. Name the crisis, and someone in our industry has gone through it and has a lot of advice on what and what not to do.

Become less dependent on public water systems. There are many things you can do to become less vulnerable to major bans. Rainwater-capture systems can be quite extensive, saving up thousands of gallons as backup water. Train your staff to not waste water when irrigating plants. Build a retention pond.

Get organized. Work with local green businesses to create a water-wise plan. Because it had gone through a drought five years earlier, the North Carolina green industry had a plan in place when the more recent severe drought occurred. Representatives attended water board meetings early on and coordinated their media efforts.

“We need a group that represents everybody, divided by different parts of the state,” said Joe Stoffregen, owner of Homewood Nursery in Raleigh. “You want to have people known locally. If it was a meeting in Raleigh, then I would definitely go, even though the president [of the organization] lived in Greensboro.”

Talk to lesser-known, but powerful people. Political figures are obviously in the spotlight since they make the policies that affect your store. But Stoffregen found that the director of utilities is the one who provided the data upon which the politicians based their decisions.

{tab=Reality check}

Joe Stoffregen’s county implemented a total watering ban in February in response to a drought that plagued the southeastern U.S. It wasn’t lifted until April, well into the gardening season.

A drought situation doesn’t come on you like a normal catastrophe. You’re like the frog in boiling water. It comes up on you slowly. We’re not in a part of the country that has prolonged droughts, typically. We kept thinking, “It’s got to change.”

We did several things to survive.

Cut back on production. We have a growing division, and we reduced production by 30 percent. We knew there would be less demand, but we didn’t want to be caught without inventory.

Keep permanent employees, cut seasonal labor. I was getting a lot of calls from people in the industry asking how many people have lost their jobs because of the drought. Other owners were telling me that they would slash payroll.

But when you slash payroll, you cut people. For me, these are the people on the front line and the customers are seeing them. The worst thing is to see staff on edge. There are ways we can cut expenses to save.

Where we did cut was the staff we usually hire as extra labor in production. We didn’t do that this year. Retail staff filled in for growing staff. No one is going to say, “That’s not my job.” When the owner says you get to keep your job, the other employees would kill them if they had that attitude. It’s the pack mentality.

We were also very slow to hire in spring. We went into spring with our permanent staff and permanent part-timers. We held off as long as we could, until April.

Training was off. You’re not going to run all systems normal. But all key positions were staffed by experienced people.

It benefited me not laying off folks. Once we were up and going, we were up fast. We weren’t training on how to treat a landscape tree. But cashiers, they learn that so fast, it’s scary.

Launch a media-friendly marketing campaign. We implemented a “Got Water?” campaign the day after the total watering ban went into effect. And we got a lot of media attention because of it.

I remember at [ANLA Management] Clinic, talking to Frank Benzing [CEO of Summerwinds Garden Centers] and Amanda Flynn [director of member services at ANLA]. They asked “Why don’t you give away water?”

We’re on our own well, which was full. There was no sign of groundwater running out.

We bought new milk jugs, put in a sink -- just a Formica countertop and a little tap with a tube that can fill up a jug. We limited it to 5 gallons per person. We told them that will help you water your container gardens, houseplants and entry plants.

We tried to make it as lighthearted as we could. “If you don’t have water, we’ll give you water.” It was almost no cost, and we got free publicity. It reminded everyone that we’re still here.

Keep credit clean. Early spring was a very tough time for us. March was down $100,000. I wouldn’t have made it without lines of credit. We’ve been in business 40 years, and the banks were willing to increase our line of credit.

On my end, I went to major suppliers, asked for extended terms, pushing out when bills were due. Companies like Ball Seed Co. -- where we normally paid on net 30 days. We needed whatever they could give us. They told us, “Hey, we’ll give you what you need to not have that pressure.”

Advice I’d give anybody is to pay your bills on time, to keep a good credit history. They wouldn’t have been as generous with us otherwise. It’s tempting to think that a day or two behind doesn’t matter. But it does. Don’t do it.

Of course, most of the suppliers who were most generous were national, who weren’t going through the same thing we were. When you’re paying gas, electric, phones, labor, 401(k) and the insurance, you should never default on something like that. It keeps the doors open and lights on.

Examine all expenses, no matter how small. There are so many things you can save money on, down to counting paper clips. We changed grades of toilet paper. Nothing that was gargantuan, but it really does add up.

You start going through things, start looking at what you are paying for things, then ask yourself “Can we get a better price?” You do a lot more negotiating. Anytime you have to go through all your expenses, you eliminate waste.

{tab=Product feature}

Organic lawn fertilizer

Although many homeowners are opting for bigger gardens and smaller lawns, the great American lawn is not disappearing anytime soon. What are the methods that organically minded consumers can use to have a healthy lawn?

Organic lawn-care technique	What you need to know	What customers need to know
Organic fertilizer	The nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N-P-K) combination for organic fertilizer is much lower than synthetics, typically under 10 percent for any given mineral. One reason the percentages are lower is because many other minerals that the soil needs are also present.	When it comes to NPK formulas in fertilizer, less is more. Excessive nitrogen content in fertilizer is often cited as the culprit for water contamination, including the infamous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Mulching electric mower	Electric mowers are a big hit with consumers. Not only are they quieter, they are much easier to start, literally a flip of a switch. Mulching mowers have been promoted for a long time as a way to enrich the lawn with its own waste and keep clippings out of the landfill.	Clippings are most effective when they haven’t been treated with chemicals that will kill beneficial organisms in the soil.
Mower set to a high setting	Turf grasses tend to be most vulnerable at ground level, so they need longer stalks as insulation. The shorter the grass, the bigger the advantage weeds have.	Longer grass is healthier grass.
Water less frequently and more deeply	Turf typically has longer roots than most (although not all) weeds. When the homeowner waters more deeply and less often, it encourages root growth to access available water, tipping the advantage to the lawn. As for the remaining weeds, they will be fewer and more easily rooted out.	This watering method reduces water use.
Earth-friendly automated sprinklers	New technologies improve water use tremendously. Computerized sensors that tie in to local weather stations stop sprinklers from running during rainstorms. Rotator sprinkler heads deliver water more slowly and more evenly, drastically reducing water runoff.	Many local and state governments offer rebates on these devices, reducing the cost by up to 75 percent.

{tab=Solutions}

Potting soil

Roots Organics Natural & Organic Potting Soil is an organic blend of coco fiber, perlite, pumice, compost and peat moss amended with bat guano, mycorrhizae, earthworm castings, fishbone meal, kelp meal, feather meal, prilled rock phosphate, green sand, soybean meal, humic acid, K-meg, glacial rock dust, alfalfa meal and oyster shell flour.

National Garden Wholesale

Organic fertilizer

TOP Organic Fertilizer contains a minimum N-P-K formula of 4-2-2. The nitrogen component is 89.5 percent insoluble and 10.5 percent soluble. This is a complete fertilizer with all of the micronutrients needed by a plant.

Organic Growing Systems

Shopping bags

Reusable shopping bags made from recyclable materials help eliminate plastic and paper sacks. The bags come in two styles, both in cool, sleek black. Each comes with a hang tag that explains some of the issues facing the environment.

Lyla Blu

Decorative items

New stone and metal products for the home and garden are made by artisans in small mountain villages. The metal is recycled and the stone is collected from riverbeds by the townspeople, while retaining sensitivity to the preservation of the ecosystem of the waterways. Each piece is individually crafted and eco-friendly.

Ancient Graffiti

Natural composter

GET Growing’s benefical microbes recycle grass clippings and other plant materials, helping lawns, gardens and flower beds feed themselves. GET Growing works in all geographies, all soil types and with all plant species. The product builds soil structure, leaves virtually no carbon footprint and does not harm wildlife or contribute to nitrate pollution of groundwater, rivers and lakes.

GET Microsolutions

Natural lawn care

All-natural Ultra LawnPatch and Ultra TurfStarter are new this year. Ultra Lawn Patch has biodegradable elements that help retain moisture; a granulated mulch helps hold seed in place. Ultra TurfStarter, designed for new lawns, incorporates the same type of moisture-absorbing enzymes and extracts that promote new growth. Both products help create microorganisms that break up the soil, making it easier for grass roots to extend more deeply into the ground.

Amturf Enterprises LLC

{/tabs}