Getting the Japanese Maple Itch
What's going on around here? Well, we just finished grafting several dozen trees. At this stage in the age of our business, we are simultaneously purchasing trees wholesale from a supplier as well as, producing our own. It can take as much as 3 years from graft to saleable tree, and you can add two more years if you count the time it takes to grow the rootstock/understock from seed to a size large enough to be grafted on. So, up to 5-6 years from seed to the time you receive a tree in the mail! In the future the vast majority of our trees will be produced in-house. This will give us more control over what we can have available.
The website inventory has also been updated. There will be some minor additions over the coming weeks but those will most likely be only local purchase opportunities. There are many new trees available this year that we didn't have last year, and we also have restocked many of the trees we did have last year. Due to some supplier issues over the last year or so we have limited quantities of each variety of tree. We welcome any inquiries on certain varieties you want but don't see on the website however, we won't be restocking again during the growing season but it's good to know what people are asking for so we can try to obtain those trees in the future. Sales will commence soon, possibly as early as later this month, or early March.
Something we are working on is the ability to ship larger sized container trees. Initially, when we started sales in 2022, we offered 3 gallon sizes. We quickly realized this was going to be a challenge; sometimes our 2 gallon sizes are too large to ship in our custom built boxes! And of course, there's the cost. Simply Japanese Maples is just a small business, so we don't have the kind of power that a big player in the USA like Mr. Maple would have to get larger plants shipped. In fact, Mr. Maple has a FedEx trailer that gets dropped off at their nursery. They fill it, and the driver comes to retrieve the trailer and away go the trees! This is not the scale we're working on here, I assure you! Hopefully, we will be able to figure something out.
2023 is going to be another great year thanks to all you wonderful people who love your Japanese maples as much as we do! We will continue to bring out educational, garden tour and other videos on our YouTube channel, keep our FaceBook page updated and for more casual fair, we'll also post pretty pictures on Instagram. Look for Simply Japanese Maples on all of these platforms.
Til next time.