Nurseries take steps to protect plants and reduce shipment risks

Getting plants to market safely without any mishaps requires a variety of techniques to meet the needs of customers and plants. One must also consider the limitations of packing live products into motorized inert steel boxes, which bounce, for long trips.

Here we explore approaches to prepping plants, from growing to loading and delivery, to ensure they arrive at their destination at their best. Experts provide insights and recommendations on the various ways that standard materials and custom-made tools are used to reduce damage and ensure the protection of the plants to arrive in pristine form.

Racking and palletizing

Compared with even just six years ago, the use of racks and pallets to ship plants has steadily increased among growers.

Kraemer’s Nursery (Mount Angel, Oregon), an 850-acre nursery that grows woody and ornamental flowering shrubs, broadleaf evergreens, grasses, perennials, conifers, roses and other products, ships only container plants and, in addition to using a floor stack method, employs three types of racks as well as pallets.

Bailey Nurseries, a grower of shrubs, trees, liners, seedlings and rootstocks based in St. Paul, Minnesota, with additional nurseries in Illinois, Washington state and Oregon — uses pallets and racks almost exclusively, with hardly any floor stacking.

Kraemer’s sells 80% of its material to big box stores, and juggles the needs of its customers when choosing which racks to use. All shipments to Kroger-owned Fred Meyer stores, for instance, use racks from Container Centralen, Inc. (Winter Garden, Florida), otherwise known as a “CC rack.” Kraemer’s is a depot for the rolling CC racks.

“We work with them to pick up all their racks, and then store their inventory at the nursery,” said Tristan Wampole, continuous improvement manager at Kraemer’s Nursery.

The nursery also rents racks from E-Z Shipper Racks LLC (El Segundo, California), which offers a retrieval service. Any location in the Pacific Northwest region, Kraemer’s drivers will pick up the third type of rack the nursery uses: custom-made racks it builds in-house from wood. Farther out, the racks are left with the customer. Alaska-bound material, for instance, all requires racks, which Kraemer’s leaves with customers, who are charged for the wood and labor for that service.

Bailey has a local supplier of wood racks that custom-makes them to specs that fit the nursery’s shelf spacing and its forklifts. The nursery also rents from E-Z Shipper Racks and provides its own racks, which Bailey paints a different color, yellow, to easily identify them during pickups.

Basically, anything that can be racked among trees and shrubs is, said Alex Pond, Yamhill container shipping foreman for Bailey. “Material too tall to rack is palletized, which reduces strain on the crew. Palletizing is easier.”

All the 5-gallon trees are palletized, with very few hand-stacked, Pond said. The 7-gallon trees vary; depending on how tall the trees, the software decides. “If it ‘sees’ something short enough to sit on a pallet, and not have it too tight, then it is palletized,” Pond said.

Even with hand-stacked trees, however, Bailey assigns the pallet space, or “footprint,” that it would take up. This helps figure the necessary footage beforehand, allowing the nursery to identify a mix of items for any load.

“When we went to palletizing, we weren’t going to be do trees and shrubs, but then customers could only order one or the other, and that didn’t work,”
Pond said.

By having the software think of everything as fitting on a pallet, it can figure how much space is needed. A tall tree might need more space, for instance, even if it is in a five-gallon container. For the crew organizing a load, they can run the program, figure the number of spots in a truck, pack up a smaller quantity on a pallet if necessary, and know overall more accurately how much (more) can fit; “more,” without damage, always being the goal.

“It’s amazing how close it comes. It’s not perfect, but the worst thing in the world is shipping air,” Pond said. “Sometimes we outsmart the computer; there are cases you just got to make more fit. Our crew is good at that (without jeopardizing the plants).”

Racking has been the biggest boost to quality, he said. “(It’s different from) five to six years ago, when we hand-stacked everything, and the plants needed days to freshen up,” Pond said. “With shelves, you can pack tight, and the plants come off, and they are ready to go in minutes after they come off the truck, with no broken branches.”

Pruning 

For better shipping conditions, Bailey is pruning plants shorter than in the past to keep them slightly more compact on a rack. Whereas a plant might have been grown to 26 inches in the past, trimming today to even two inches shorter, at 24 inches, produces a good-looking plant that fits the current racking system far better.

“So instead of a plant only fitting on a two-level rack, we can get it on a three- to four-shelf rack, fitting more plants to a rack,” Pond said.

Rachel Ralstin, sales manager & owner at R&M Plant Procurement LLC (Silverton, Oregon), a wholesale plant broker servicing the Pacific Northwest, is also a proponent of selective trimming and pruning to prevent breakage. She has encountered 5-gallon hydrangeas that flop with too much top growth, but then break during shipping. With select pruning, the plants can be trimmed to standards that do not sacrifice good retail presentation but limit breakage, Ralstin said.

There are added benefits. “If you trim, you develop a stronger base, a lateral base, which creates a strong plant,” Ralstin said. “If you are shipping material that is not well-rooted, you are taking a risk” of loose soil dislodging and spilling out.

Trunk and plant wraps

Trunk wraps, or guards, are common tools for protection of trees as well as for marketing purposes when they can be printed for specific store needs.

Roses get special treatment at Kraemer’s, with a sleeve, basically a brown bag, that is put over the pot to prevent them from becoming tangled and to protect any roses already blooming, which is what the customers want to see when they get to the store, Wampole said.

The nursery made the decision to do this for almost all rose bushes for quality control. Only the smallest of bushes do not get a sleeve.

“When we are shoving 30 plants on one rack, the branches get tangled, and when they get to the store they were breaking,” Wampole said. “The sleeves mean fewer credits to write and more units we are able to push to those stores.”

Ball and burlap 

Ralstin uses star wires to keep the ball intact. The wires are spread out like a concentric circle and pulled up around and secured with rope to tie the burlap around the tree.

B&B material is inspected beforehand, and old burlap replaced before it is set to ship, to avoid compromising the root ball. Wire, rope, blocks, shade cloth, these are the tools Ralstin uses most to keep the plants protected. It’s imperative to harden leafed-out materials in one part of the season while employing shade cloth in others to prevent the material from scorching.

Watering 

At Kraemer’s, before the plants ever get to the truck, racks are set directly into watering tunnels, starting with the most sensitive crops. A spray from all sides means no matter the shelf, the plants should get their moisture. From there, they go right into the truck.

Bailey pulls everything through a shower before putting on the dock. It installed sprinklers on all sides of the rectangular dock, and then one in center to be sure racked material watered through. Plants are soaked as they are pulled up to the dock, where they are processed, tagged and racked the day before loading. Watering is done late afternoon and again in the early morning if the weather is really hot, making them “nice and fresh” for loading in refrigerated trucks, which the majority of the trucks are, Pond said, unless the shipment is local.

Ralstin approaches watering a few ways. Wood wedges are used to prop B&B material upright on a pallet the morning prior to shipping so that all sides of the tree and root ball are irrigated.

“All areas are watered twice daily with four-foot riser sprinklers from above to allow for all materials to receive adequate water as they await shipment,” she said. “Plants are watered before sunrise and after sunset to prevent sun burn. Plants are also inspected seven days a week in the staging area to ensure that all materials are being saturated and that all pots are upright and can access proper irrigation.”

Getting the configuration

Kraemer’s employs a full-time configuration team to evaluate the racking. Their primary focus is to make sure the current size of the plant matches the database; review the trucks and racks; and then override the system if a change is necessary; for instance, if a four-shelf rack is better than a five-shelf rack.

“At any one time, we have 600 acres of production ground, and it’s hard for the team to get to every work order situation to update the plants as they are growing,” Wampole said. The configuration team reviews what the system thinks the racking should be, and then the actual plants to make sure that the rack load actually will work.

Kraemer’s developed this new system by hiring a developer to enhance the functioning of the Sage X3 software, over a year ago, and is now able to get within one to two racks accuracy for the packing of trucks and to also dramatically reduce the time it takes to do so.

Moving on to staging

In addition to building a new system for configuring racks, Kraemer’s has been focused on timing of preparation to build overall quality. The crew used to take material from the field, and it would sit for 48 hours before making it to the rack. But by pulling smaller quantities and taking them directly to the rack, Wampole said the plants stay closer to the field up until the time they are racked, which has cut down on the lead time between field and truck.

With a similar intention, Ralstin heals in all trees in the staging area to prevent them from being blown over and to keep the B&B material moist and block absorption of heat by the container material. If in the staging area for longer than a day, tree canopies are untied to avoid leaf damage in summer and retied the morning of shipment prior to loading.

Overall, though, racking and palletizing has allowed some prep to be done ahead of time, although on hot days, nurseries hold off as long as possible before shrink-wrapping pallets.

“The number one goal is the protection of the plant, that it arrives the way the customer expects it,” Pond said.

At Bailey, in most cases, the crew can plan in advance, and if warm weather is a concern, a fine mesh netting that breathes is used instead. “We use the mesh netting more than anything now,” Pond said. “It is another step to get it done ahead of time.” The plants can even sit wrapped in the mesh a day or two.

Loading and floor stacking

Kraemer’s has transitioned to using more racks than floor stacks, but stacking is still in use. A shift in the way the plants are stacked has helped with less breaking of branches, Wampole said.

The nursery uses pieces of wood to set the plants on an angle to the nose of the trailer, making the containers less likely to move or fall back. The plants are stacked row by row, and then strapped to make them extra secure. The floor stack straps are attached to the racks in front of them, “so they have nowhere to go,” Wampole said. That means, as a bonus, the floor stacks work as a natural dividing line, alerting the driver that one drop is done, and they can close up and move onto their next stop.

For larger 25-gallon trees, Bailey uses a process that requires less handling and more protection for the tree. Branches are tied with twine and foam, or even only twine, to make the tree skinnier to get in the trucks. An attachment with two large pincers goes on a customized forklift to clamp on the tree, allowing the operator to drive in and set the tree down in the truck with two crew members on the ground guiding the branches and setting the tree in the right spot.

“It’s not way faster, and it’s not slower, but it’s way safer and easier wear and tear on the people,” Pond said. “There’s less handling of the tree,” which protects the plant more, is better for the tree.

For a hands-off approach as well, Ralstin has employees use a hay hook to position trees for loading and unload. “In shipping, it is very common to see untrained employees grabbing a tree by the trunk or a limb or even the tip, and dragging the actual plant,” she said. “This can cause damage by way of breakage, and it can loosen the root ball or break the root ball.”

Forklift training is also important to root ball integrity. “The forks must be positioned in a manner that they can grab the root ball midway without letting the root ball slip through the forks and break, and without the forks being too tight and puncturing the root ball.”

For deliveries, Ralstin uses a customized 24-foot flat bed with removable side panels and permanent attached retractable shade cloth awning (which is also used to cover the staging area in summer). “The removable side panels allow for varied access to safely load and offload large trees,” she said.

Like Kraemer’s, R&M lays the trees at an angle with tops pointed toward the nose of the truck. Cinder blocks stabilize larger container trees, and a rope line weaving in between the layers prevents the trees from lifting and shifting.

“Every season has its challenges,” Ralstin said. The different approaches for prepping and packaging plants for shipment evolve for better efficiency while maintaining the health and beauty of the plants on their arrival.