Stupid snow

So over the last 2 days, it's snowed almost 18 inches here at Sunnyside. I now hate snow. The snow is now my enemy. It's starting to make me want to cry. I am sick of shoveling out the greenhouses and then going home to shovel out my driveway. I am tired of constantly slipping off the ladder when we're trying to keep the greenhouse garage from collapsing.

I am fed up with Carlos, Sunnyside's "Mouser". So far, he has yet to catch a mouse and instead spends his day sleeping on a bench and then pooping underneath the benches. Greenhouse 2 now smells like poop. We are seriously considering changing his name to certain bad words. 

Sir Stinks-a-lot, aka Carlos: Silent but Deadly

The snow needs to go.

So in rebellion against this "Snowpacalypse" and looking forward to Spring, I am starting 2 new categories of posts. In the first we'll be looking at our favorite plants from last year (Faves of 2010), to let you know which worked well for us. And in the second, we'll share with you some great vacation spots (Flower Vacations) we've been where the flowers have caught our eye. (It's one of the hazards of working at Sunnyside-whenever you go on vacation, you drive around looking for flowers, garden centers, pretty yards, etc.) If you have your own plant or vacation suggestions, let us know and we'll try to feature a post on these too.

Playing in Dirt

Each year when Sunnyside re-opens their doors for Easter, we begin to hear the same question from many of our customers: What do you do all winter? The answer to this question is simple: we plant. We have 18 greenhouses that will eventually be filled door-to-door with plants.

And to start off planting, we need to fill pots with potting soil. Thankfully the days where we had to do it all by hand are gone. We've had what I call a "dirt machine" for over a decade now. It dumps potting soil into pots on a conveyor belt. It's pretty cool. The only downside is with all the dirt flying around, you get dirty. Really really dirty.

But it doesn't compare to our new toy: the Rapid Transplanter. We've only had the transplater for a few days but it's so awesome. I don't know how we ever did without it. Transplanting is a long and (sometimes) tedious process. When doing it by hand, you have to poke the little plants out of the plug trays and then stick them into the flats.

On a good day, one person can transplant up to 200 flats (that's about 7200 plants). Our new machine can do 200 flats in about 2 hours. It's amazing! Here's what it looks like:
The plugs are on the left and the flats they are going to be planted into are on the right. It can plant four flats at once.

The little white things have poked a hole and now the plugs are being dropped into them.

And then you send the transplanted flats through the automatic watering machine.

It's really an amazing machine. Just don't get your hand caught in it!