Weather disruptions and an orchid-growing business for sale

As last week’s polar vortex subsided east of the Rockies, the weather was predicted to warm up significantly for a few days, which it did. For most people this wouldn’t really affect their lives, but as an orchid grower who has to ship plants, it was a big deal. It meant that dozens of plant orders that had been sitting around on hold for weeks suddenly had the green light to travel. My assistant and I spent all of Friday and Saturday packing plants nonstop, assembly-line style, and my poor husband Michael had to transport them all to the post office on Saturday, where the avalanche of “live orchid plants” packages was quite the center of attention. There was another batch to pack and go out on Monday, but how quickly things can change!

Sunday afternoon it started to snow here, and it continued to snow through noon yesterday. Sunday night the temperature dropped into the 20s F and last night into the teens F! (It should be teens C this time of year). It has not been above freezing since the snow started. Fortunately I had seen the weather forecast, which as a grower I check obsessively, usually with regard to shipping, but our own forecast looked alarming. On Saturday afternoon I watered the greenhouse, turned the water off and allowed it to drain, turned the heat in the greenhouse all the way up, sealed every opening with bubble wrap, closed the door, and crossed my fingers. The greenhouse has been in lockdown mode since Saturday, and will continue to be until the weather warms up. Luckily there has not been a power outage here, although many people did experience one.

Yesterday and today classes at the university have been cancelled. I haven’t been able to go anywhere except on foot, and I have gotten an amazing amount of work done at home. This episode has once again made me realize how weather-dependent anyone who grows plants is. I knew this already, but periodically go into denial when a particularly choice orchid blooms. The thing about perfumes is that they are (mostly) not weather-dependent, so they fit my scattered lifestyle much better. 

I have definitively decided that I want to sell the orchid-growing business, for a number of reasons. First, it has grown by leaps and bounds, and is now to the point where I need a much larger greenhouse facility if I want to take it to the next level – which is where it’s going, like it or not. Second, I don’t like to be shackled by plants that need care at certain times and have to be protected from weather extremes. I’ve learned that I’m just not cut out to be a farmer, even a farmer of plants that need minimal care like orchids. In case you wondered, Michael takes care of the regular garden.

 I’ve been thinking about selling the orchid business for years, but it’s come to a critical point now, so if you know anyone who would like to become an orchid grower, please send them my way. They would need a greenhouse, but everything else is in place for someone to have a turnkey business. 

[All photos are mine except for the last one, which I grabbed from the local ski area webcam - always a good source of snow pics!]

WEDNESDAY GRAB BAG: WINNERS OF THE HOLIDAY GIVEAWAY, WHAT I LOVE ABOUT ORCHIDS, AND KUDOS FOR BALLETS ROUGES

First off, here are the winners of the Holiday Giveaway:

50 ml atomizer bottle of Red Cattleya: TAFFY

Coming to My Senses by Alyssa Harad: LINDALOO

The names were chosen by my usual method of balled-up scraps of paper mixed thoroughly and drawn from a hat. No one really seemed to want the fragrance oils, so I’ll hang onto them for the time being. If you are a winner, please e-mail me with your full shipping information. You can just click on the e-mail link on my profile page. 

It’s been a busy December. As a consequence, it’s been about a month since I set foot in the greenhouse, so I was dreading what I’d find when I finally went in there. I half expected everything to be dehydrated, with a lot of dead plants, but I should have known better. Not only had nothing died, everything seemed to have grown, and some plants were even in bloom. There was a young Neofinetia plant that had decided to become beautifully variegated on its new growth, so that made me happy! What I have come to love about epiphytic orchids is their phenomenal survival skills. They can live happily without water for months, tolerate extremes of temperature as long as they don’t freeze much, go for years without fertilizer of any kind, and still stand up and bow and say “thank you” to their grower. The best thing of all is that the orchids survive even when the little ferns and oxalis that insist on appearing as weeds in their pots have shriveled and died, making it unnecessary for me to weed.

With the December holidays come all of the musings on the past year, including “best of the year” lists. I’m ecstatic to report that Olympic Orchids Ballets Rouges made Cafleurebon’s “Best of 2012” list, where it was awarded “Best Bang for the Buck”! I’m particularly happy about this award, because superb value for the money is one of the things I strive for in my business, and it couldn’t have been more fitting. Having spent a good bit of my life as a “starving academic/starving artist”, I have a lot of sympathy for those who want to enjoy nice things on a budget. Huge thanks to Michelyn Camen for her strong support of so many indie perfumers throughout the year!

Ballets Rouges was named one of the year’s top rose perfumes on The Alembicated Genie, where all of the perfumers who contributed to the Devilscent Project also received a lot of love. Much love goes right back to Sheila Eggenberger, the only blogger (as far as I know) who regularly writes mini-novels about perfumes that manage to be both entertaining and informative.

The year 2012 has been good, and more musings from my side will come in a new year’s post next week. For now, I’ll just say that I’m looking forward to being part of the amazing local and international perfume community in a very fragrant 2013!