Out on a limb

In its September issue, Nursery Management spoke with seven growers who found success on their own terms. Read all of the "Success stories" here.

Foxborough Nursery is, quite literally, not the business it used to be. The wholesale grower has changed a lot since Brad Thompson took over as production manager in 2007. Foxborough Nursery was founded in 1978 by David Thompson and his wife Marilyn.

“My dad’s a plantsman,” Thompson says. “He always had a knack for rare, dwarf and unusual conifers.”

The elder Thompson started the business by doing a lot of custom propagation, rooting softwood and hardwood cuttings and then grafting. He contracted to produce liners for some very large nurseries. That evolved into a small container business. He started with quarts, then one gallon pots, then three gallons. Once he got the container business under his belt, Thompson had a product he could sell to retail. So he began catering more to retail garden centers. Before, he was strictly producing liners for other growers. Thompson also had a small residential landscaping business, which is now split off as Foxborough Inc., and run by Brad’s brother Andrew Thompson.

When Brad graduated from the University of Delaware, he returned to the family business. But he had some changes in mind. When he took over as production manager, Thompson made the decision to immediately stop all contract propagation and container growing. Instead of selling the nursery’s best liners, his plan was to keep them in-house and grow them in Foxborough’s own fields to eventually be sold as finished B&B product.

Was he nervous to drop a big chunk of the nursery’s existing business, cold turkey? You bet. But the resulting self sufficiency was an asset during the recession.

“If you look back at that, in 2008, the first people to suffer were the liner growers because people weren’t planting that much,” Thompson says. “I was fortunate to be out of that gig and just growing for myself. Can I tell you it’s more cost-efficient? I don’t honestly know that I can, but the long-term product it gives us well outweighs the cost of that whole facility just producing plants for the field.”

However, now that the recession is over and customers are looking for plants, Foxborough has plenty to sell.

“It allowed me to keep planting aggressively during the recession –to load up, so that right now, I’m fully stocked when a lot of other people are not,” he says.

There are a few downsides, notably the disappearance of retail business and the longer, 10-year cycle. Thompson has found that retailers don’t want to deal with a big, bulky plant.

“You have a lady pull into your garden center in her Mercedes,” he says. “How’s she going to put a 5-foot B&B hydrangea in the back of her car?”

This business model requires extra planning, which creates bigger headaches.

“It’s 2014, so now I’m forecasting numbers I need in 2024,” he says. “That’s the disadvantage of doing your own propagation. I can’t just skip to the end and buy a nice liner; I have to start from scratch with a cutting or a graft. It takes me an extra three to four years to produce, which means I have to forecast an extra three or four years.”

Click here to read more success stories from our September issue.