Planning and production schedules
Although it’s only mid-June and we still have the rest of the 2020 season to think about, it is already time to start planning for 2021. For us, that means that it’s time to start organizing our production schedules for next year (even though we are still making changes to the current year’s schedules). There is no tool that I find more important than the perennial production schedule, and I can’t remember a single day from this season that I haven’t had it open on my computer to use as a constant reference.
We typically do ten perennial plantings in a season: one in February in the heated greenhouse, one in March in the covered Quonset houses, one in April (our largest single planting), two in May, two in June, two in July, and one in early August. This breaks down to a planting every two to three weeks during the summer. Nurseries that focus only on perennial production usually plant continuously throughout the year, but since our Garden Prairie nursery produces shrubs and perennials, and our crews are split between the two areas, ten plantings in a season is a lot for us.
That’s why I rely so much on my production schedule; I can quickly and easily reference it to see when we are planting the next crop of any given item. I have my production schedule broken down by planting week, and it also includes the number of overwintered units, the quantity sold the previous season, and an average of the quantities sold from the past five seasons, for every line item. This way, I can easily look to see how many units we are planting for this year’s sales and how that compares to previous years. As a general rule of thumb, we figure that any perennials planted through June will be sold the same year, and anything planted in or after July will be sold the following spring. We use this to estimate how many units we will have on the ground for a current year’s sales, and how many we will have to overwinter for the following spring. Of course, there are a lot of variations from this. Some crops, like Hostas or Polygonatum (when we can find it), take longer to root and fill out, so we are usually only able to make a portion of these available for the same year even if they are planted in April. On the other hand, if we don’t plant enough of a crop from February through June to supply the demand for the current year, we will probably end up selling through much of what we plant in July the same fall, and then we need to try and make up for it the following spring.
Of course, we can’t rely solely on previous years’ sales numbers as a reference for what to grow. For example, Allium ‘Millenium’ has increased exponentially in popularity for us over the past few years. So we may have sold 3,000 units in one season a few years ago, but we could have sold more if we had the inventory. Or we may have seen a spike in sales of Hosta ‘Elegans’ one season, but it just so happens that we had low numbers of other hostas in inventory that year, and ‘Elegans’ was all that was available for an extended period of time. (Ahem, I’m talking about this spring.) So, we can’t use the production schedule as our only tool when we decide what to grow – communication with the sales staff and understanding the feedback they get from our customers is equally important in understanding the whole picture.
I could go on and on about how important my production schedule is for me. I have it linked to the label inventory, so that I easily determine how many more labels we will need to order for the next plantings. I also have it linked to our production costs, so I can easily see the average cost and profit margins for any given plant. I can compare it to last year’s schedule to see how I can change something that didn’t work then, or to duplicate what has worked. I know that everyone has their own system for organizing their inventory production, and I am sure that I could learn a lot from the different ways that other people manage their production schedules. It’s absolutely crucial to understand the trends in the industry and to understand what our customers are asking for, but a production schedule is also invaluable when it comes to planning out next year’s planting strategy.
