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Garden Center Plants Nursery
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The potting medium used in an automated potting system is mostly coarse
Irish peat to which slow-release fertilizer is added.
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The nursery produces both hardy and tender plants, such a tree ferns. |
Susan and Jim
continue: Garden Centre Plants, Ltd. was the second stop of our English
Nurseries field trip. This nurery is under the holding company called
Barton Grange Group. The nusery was started in 1974 on a 7-acre site near
Barton, Preston. Now they raise 800 varieties of stock plants on 28 acres.
This is a large-scale nursery, essentially a plant factory. Over 90% of
their sales go to garden centres. There are 34 full-time employees that
grow about 850,000 plants per year, mostly in 2- and 5-L (half gallon
and gallon) pots. Though they are comprehensive, climbers are probably
the largest group of plants they grow, especially cultivars of Clematis
and Lonicera. The entire stock is inventoried on computers which provides
management with up to date information on stock quantities, location,
and the production history. The nursery has a website: www.gcp.uk.com
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Garden Centre Plants, Ltd.
initiated an interesting marketing program where individual pots were
labelled with little gnomes (above right) with cute names like 'Rocky'
and with a brief description of the best environemtns for growing the
plants (in the case of Rocky, these would be alpines and rock garden plants).
The idea was to provide instant guidance to the impulse buyer that says
'I like that plant! Where should I put it?' by indicating on the pot whether
the plant needed acid soils, shade, etc. Unfortunately, the program has
been discontinued because at garden centers, the pots were not usually
visible to the customers. An interesting concept, perhaps one that needs
some refinement.
See our 1999 colleague's comments
on GCP.
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Garden Center Plants Nursery
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