Quality over quantity

Joseph (Joe) Napoli was a music teacher for 14 years in Tampa, Florida. At that time, he had a large backyard, so he bought some plants and started planting. Eventually, he started to make cuttings, all while acquiring more and more plants. Pretty soon his yard was full of plants, and his job was getting in the way of his hobby.

“So, I did what any sensible person would do,” Joe says. “I quit my job and made my hobby my job. Then I bought some acreage across the street and started a nursery.”

After four years of running the nursery in Tampa, Florida, Joe and his wife, Maggie Napoli, decided to move to Georgia. In 1984, Joe founded Athens Wholesale Nursery.

It is a family owned and quality driven container nursery located in Athens, Georgia. The nursery grows a wide variety of shrubs and perennials on 5 1/2 acres with four employees.

“This is a beautiful piece of property, and we are blessed to be the stewards of it, not just the owner,” Joe says.

Joe loves being outside. He’s been working at the nursery for 39 years, and every morning he wakes up excited to go outside another day. He is at the nursery 30 minutes before his employees arrive and leaves 30 minutes after they leave. Joe believes in leading by example and works alongside them.

“I don’t think you can lead very well while sitting in the house in the air conditioning, when your guys are outside working in 95 degrees,” Joe says.

Joe’s wife, Maggie, enjoys walking through the nursery in the evenings, and a few years ago she noticed some pink flowers in the camellia ‘Yuletide’ crop.

“And I said, ‘What? No, it can’t be, must be the wrong plant.’ So, I came up and sure enough, they were pink,” Joe says.

They isolated the eight plants and began propagating them the following spring. It took them about five years to get to around 1,200 plants, and in September of 2022 they introduced camellia ‘Maggie’s Pink’.

Photo courtesy of AWN

“The bloom is pink with a nice yellow middle to it,” Joe says. “It’s an attractive plant, holds its color and people like it because it has a little story with it.”

Joe built a new greenhouse for the camellia a year and a half ago, and the entire house was filled with ‘Maggie’s Pink’.

Athens Wholesale Nursery mainly sells to IGCs, landscapers and other nurseries; most of the nurseries buy 1-gallon containers and step them up to 3-gallon containers.

“Selling step-ups is big business for us,” Joe says.

The nursery sells several thousand step-ups every year. He grows abelias, azaleas, camellias, Carolina sapphires, hydrangeas, Thuja ‘Green Giant’ and viburnums; all to sell as step-ups. The nursery also sells to a few plant brokers from the Atlanta area.

Joe grows 'Murray' cypress and Carolina sapphire cypress for a few Christmas tree farms, and the nursery has a standing order of Thuja trees for one customer that either steps them up or puts them in the field for Christmas trees.

“We’ve started selling in the last two to three years to some mail order nurseries,” Joe says. “That's really steady because they don’t buy a lot every time, but they buy every other week.”

The nursery delivers to McMinnville, Tennessee, Charlotte, North Carolina, Western North Carolina, Western South Carolina and to North Georgia. Joe drives the deliveries himself, and most of the deliveries are two hours or less.

Joe started growing more hydrangeas over the past three years and sells them in three- and four-gallon containers. He grows some Proven Winners hydrangeas – ‘Limelight’ and ‘Little Lime.’ Joe also grows all the Knockout roses in 5-gallon squat-pots. He reserves some empty space on the property for those, and the space sits empty for about eight months because he sells out of the roses in the spring, and he holds the space for the next order.

“They take up a lot of space, and when 2,500 of those plants come bare root in the spring, I have to have a place to put them,” Joe says. “By putting them in that 5 [gallon] rather than the branded pot 3 [gallon], it gives us a much bigger plant. The landscapers really like that because [the plant] looks established. Some of the garden centers like it. They get calls from customers saying, ‘we want some Knockout roses and get them from the guy with the big ones.’”

The nursery continues to seek out new plants to bring success to its customers. Joe goes to tradeshows, and he looks through suppliers’ catalogs for new and improved plants. When Joe finds a new plant, he’ll buy 300 to 500 of them to trial at his nursery.

“If it doesn’t work out, I can afford to lose that,” Joe says. “I don’t buy 10,000 of them.”

Joe will grow the plant for a year or two and evaluate how well it grows at the nursery, what kind of problems he has with it and if the customers like it. If the plant does well, he buys more and incorporates it into the operation.

“Every year I buy six to eight plants and get rid of two or three,” Joe says. I’ll keep the ones that perform best, that we can grow faster and sell for more because we’re not going to expand anymore.”

A systematic and efficient operation

The nursery has 37 greenhouses of varying sizes. Joe determined the sizes of the greenhouses based on layout of the property to take advantage of the available acreage.

When designing the greenhouses, Joe left enough space in the center for him and his team to drive the tractor and Gator through them. This set up is convenient when they need to pick up and drop off plants.

“I try to be as efficient as we can, and the furthest anyone has to walk is 12 feet,” Joe says. “The greenhouses are covered in 30% green shade cloth because it’s so much cooler than the 50% black we used to have. The plants thrive under it.”

There are two houses used for propagating and cuttings. In one of the houses, Joe stores plants that are going to need to sit for the winter. He has plants such as viburnums that need a winter of dormancy before potting as well as camellias and azaleas which won’t get rooted until wintertime. Then the team will pot them in the spring.

“My guys call that guaranteed employment,” Joe says with a laugh. “They know they’re going to have to pot that eventually.”

Joe is honest with his customers. Rather than selling, he will hold plants for longer periods of time so the roots can fully develop within the container. He’ll suggest that the customer come back a few months later when the plant has a fuller top, buds showing and a complete root system.

To take advantage of space, Joe will convert his covered hoop house into a place to store gallons in the winter once the cuttings are moved out. Then in the spring his team will move the gallons out, clean the house up and start doing cuttings again.

The nursery has a pond with two pumps that are used to water the property; most of the water in the pond comes from a lake that is a quarter mile away from the nursery. Everything is watered by an overhead sprinkler system, and Joe tries to have all the plants watered by 1-2 p.m.

There are two separate media piles of pine bark. One pile has 8 pounds of dolomite per yard to raise the pH and sweeten the soil. Also mixed in the pile is 4 pounds of Talstar to control ants and 2 pounds of Micromax. The second pile has 4 pounds of dolomite, 4 pounds of Talstar and 2 pounds of Micromax.

“Azaleas, camellias, blueberries and some of the ferns go in the more acidic pile,” Joe says. “Everything else goes in the regular pile. … Straight bark is about a pH 5.0. I don’t want to pot them straight because it’s so low, and over time it gets lower. So, if I start at pH 5.0 that’s going to be really acidic.”

In January, Joe and his team begin using fertilizer and herbicide. They use Harrell’s custom nursery fertilizer for potting media. They start with Harrell’s 17-5-10 solid granule fertilizer.

“[The fertilizer] won’t kick in until March anyways, so it’s not a matter of timing, it’s a matter of if we have the time to do it and we do it. … The fertilizer is really good. It works, and it doesn’t burn the plants. It feeds over a long period of time, and the plants look healthy.”

In late May and early June, they switch to Harrell’s 17-5-12 solid granule fertilizer. Then in mid-September, they’ll switch to a 12-6-8 to give the plants some nutrients for the winter and keep the plants green. In January, they’ll start again and put pre-emergent herbicide on at the same time.

“In January, it’s ‘okay guys, let’s start,’ and they load the plants on the trailers and bring them inside the greenhouses,” Joe says. “If it’s pouring rain or cold, doesn’t matter. They don’t have to say, ‘well, we’re going home.’ No, we’re working. It’s raining. We have work to do. … It’s wonderful to work under the plastic during a winter rain. It’s so peaceful to hear the drops on the plastic above you, without getting wet.”

Being in the southeast, Joe must take the right precautions to avoid Japanese beetles in May and whiteflies in August. They apply preventative sprays on all the houses about every six to seven weeks, and they spray the rest of the nursery around three times a year.

Ordering ahead

Athens Wholesale Nursery sells 95% of its plants in a typical year. The nursery has several customers that submit large orders a year or more in advance, so the nursery has orders booked for fall and spring 2024.

Joe has always encouraged his customers to order ahead, and he encourages other nurseries to use a similar business model because he believes pre-orders make nurserymen better businessmen.

“Nurserymen have to sit down and actually think about what they want rather than just go, look and browse,” Joe says. “For a nursery as a whole, that’s a lot better. I like knowing what I’m going to sell, so if I’m short of something, I can find some liners or I can do more liners. If I know it’s gone and I want to keep up with the demand of it, [pre-orders] give me the chance to know because I have it booked.”

The nursery sells all its native azaleas every year. Most of them are ordered by customers when Joe sends out his monthly catalog. The native azaleas were listed in the September catalog, and by the middle of September most of the native azaleas were sold and tagged for Spring.

“I pushed [pre-orders] for a lot of years, and some people paid attention to me, and some people didn’t,” Joe says. “But after COVID, demand was so great that year, everybody sold out of everything. [Customers] are ordering early now."

Joe and his team tag the plants with numbers correlating with the customer. As soon as the order comes in, they go out to the nursery, block the order and tag the plants. Once the plants are tagged, the workers know not to sell any of those plants because they are already pre-ordered.

Joe started growing Japanese maples eight to 10 years ago. He bought 650 1-gallon containers of Japanese maples in September 2022, which fills an entire greenhouse. They were sold and tagged for October 2023. Now, the Japanese maples are ready to deliver, so they will be gone just in time for Joe and his team to pot up new ones for 2024. This is one area Joe hopes to expand in the next couple of years if he can get enough product because he believes he could fill three greenhouses and sell them all.

“But with 5 1/2 acres of space, you have to figure out how many you can grow, what you can sell and what you can afford – all those business decisions,” Joe says.

The nursery isn’t really in the tree business, but they grow a few for when customers want one or two with their order. Joe uses a pot-in-pot system to prevent trees from blowing over. The outer pot has a metal bar going through it at the bottom, and they place the potted tree inside the outer pot.

www.agnga.com

A team player

Athens Wholesale Nursery is a member of the Athens Georgia Nursery Growers Association (AGNGA) and the Georgia Green Industry Association (GGIA).

When Joe visited Athens, Georgia, before moving he visited several nurseries in the area and noticed that there wasn’t a local association. So, once he moved to Georgia, he invited several nurserymen to his house and explained that having a group would be in everyone’s best interest.

In 1986, Athens Georgia Nursery Growers Association (AGNGA) was founded by Athens Wholesale Nursery and several other nurseries: Classic Groundcovers Inc., Evergreen Nursery, Griffith Propagation and Jack’s Creek Farm.

After the association began, the AGNGA started to exhibit at shows in a block. Since they were all small nurseries, setting up as a group increased their business. Exhibiting as a group made customers aware that they could go to Athens and buy liners, perennials, trees, shrubs and more.

“It was a big hit,” Joe says. “We had arches and banners. Athens Street was the place to be. After that show, groups from North Georgia and middle Georgia started to exhibit as a group as well.”

The AGNGA is a group of local nursery growers with a common goal of producing quality plants, and Athens Wholesale Nursery along with other members of the AGNGA will pool orders to satisfy customers’ needs. The group also orders supplies together to save money.

“We’ve ordered plastic together, and we’ve ordered fertilizer together,” Joe says. “When we buy it at that kind of volume, we get a better rate, and the suppliers only have to drive in one direction.”

If a customer needs 200 hydrangeas and the nursery only has 125, Joe will reach out to a different nursery about supplying the remaining 75. It’s a win for everyone. The customer receives 200 hydrangeas, and the other two nurseries work out a payment agreement.

This past spring, Joe was delivering an order to a customer who also wanted a few plants from Classic Groundcovers Inc., so Joe went next door to Classic Groundcovers Inc. and bought the plants his customer wanted, loaded them on his truck and delivered them to the customer.

“Classic Groundcovers bills me, and I bill the customer,” Joe says. “The customer saves money on freight because I’m bringing it instead of UPS bringing it. It works out for everybody. Classic Groundcovers makes a sale they wouldn’t have made. The customer gets what they want, and I make a little bit on the transaction. What’s not to like about that?”

Southeastern Growers is the largest nursery in the AGNGA with 500 acres of land and over 200 acres in production. Angel Creek Nursery is another member with 170 acres, and Classic Groundcovers Inc. has 60 acres. Every other nursery in the group is more like Athens Wholesale Nursery, at around 4 acres to 12 acres.

“Having a group has been very successful,” Joe says. “We are all small nurseries, but put us together and we become one big nursery. We are not competitors. We are cooperators, and that’s put a lot of money in everybody’s pocket.”

Overcoming challenges

For the first 15 years of the nursery business, revenue went up every year because the nursery was expanding. Then from 2003 to 2006 the business hit a plateau, and revenue started going down when the recession came.

“I knew the recession was going to be bad, and I borrowed almost all of my line of credit,” Joe says. “I decided that I was going to be a survivor, not a victim. … In Georgia, during those three years, one third of the growers went out of business, and half of the landscapers went out of business. For me, failure was not an option. So, I borrowed heavily, and I’ve paid all that back. We have almost no debt. I bought a new tractor in January, and I only have a few more payments to make on it.”

Joe put money aside so that when opportunities came along, he was able to buy supplies. The suppliers knew Joe by reputation, and they knew he would pay them. So Joe was able to get plants when others couldn’t.

“It took us about six years, till about 2012, for revenue to start to pick up again,” Joe says. “It picked up every year from then until it went down slightly last year because we didn’t have enough plants. We’d sold out so much during COVID that by 2022 the plant volume wasn’t there.”

One of the biggest challenges Joe faces is with the supply chain – getting enough products and getting them in a timely fashion. This past year and the year prior, he struggled to get his liners on time. They were supposed to come in April, but they came in September.

“Well, if you get it in September, you aren’t going to have it in the spring,” Joe says. “The liners weren’t ready, so the plants that we wanted to sell weren’t ready because we didn’t get the liners on time.”

Over the past year, Athens Wholesale Nursery also faced challenges with cold weather. In December, a cold front blew through. Joe knew it was going to be cold, but he didn’t realize how long the cold was going to last.

“We thought it would be 15 degrees, and it got down to 7 degrees,” Joe says. “It stayed below 30 degrees for 84 hours, which for us is devastating.”

He lost a couple of crops that were already sold. His team potted them recently and the plants didn’t have enough root mass to keep going. The older plants sitting beside these were fine.

In March, it was warm for five weeks. Then for two nights in a row the temperature dropped down to 28 degrees, and all the non-native azaleas’ buds burned off.

“We have not seen the [non-native]azaleas bloom this year, but it looks like we’re getting ready to see some,” Joe says. “We just didn’t sell any because customers would ask if they were in full bloom, so it’s been a challenge.”

With only 5 1/2 acres, Joe can’t really expand his operation to increase business. So, over the past several years, he has increased his business by growing more expensive plants in the same square footage.

“That’s a way to expand your business without spending any money on rock, irrigation, cloth and houses,” Joe says. “We’ve taken some plants that are bread-and-butter plants, and we’ve put in specialty plants instead.”

The nursery grew rhododendron for a number of years. As the heat increased, Joe couldn’t grow them to the quality he wanted, so he decided to switch to camellias.

“We don’t lose many of them, and I sell them for a higher price,” Joe says. “I’m probably making $1.50 to $2 more per square foot than I did before.”

Athens Wholesale Nursery increased its business in 2023 compared to 2022, and most of the nurseries Joe knows did the same. He expects that people will continue to buy plants at a similar rate in 2024.

“There’s an old adage, in the spring, gardeners will garden,” Joe says. “Usually that means they don’t really care what the economy is doing. They’re going to spend money on plants, and gardeners will garden. For us as an industry, that’s wonderful.”