HIST: CULT: Tagging, and Marketability
- To: i*@egroups.com
- Subject: HIST: CULT: Tagging, and Marketability
- From: h*@aol.com
- Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 17:27:09 EDT
Hello, Charlene.
About tagging. When the irises bloom just write on their leaves with a
Sharpie, in the middle leaf of the fan. Then when you lift and divide them
you will know what you have. If you are not planning on lifting them you can
mark whole clumps by creating barriers with coat hangers. Cut off the loop
and straighten the coat hanger. Bend down the ends and insert into the ground
between clumps of a color. Make a map of the clumps with color noted. Either
of these will get you going for a first sort. You will have some rhizomes
that you are not sure about and those should be lined out separately after
digging and color IDd later, or discarded if you are really overrun with
things.
Now about the idea of selling older irises. What James says is only part of
the story.
<<Your old irises will probably mostly wind up on the compost heap. I'd keep
not over a half dozen plants of each variety, and then if you buy other
historics of similar description you may get lucky and eventually have an
identifiable named variety blooming at the same time. Looking at pictures
just gets you into the ball park.>>
There are other ways of getting your older irises identified and I encourage
you to make every effort to do so before discarding large numbers of them.
The Historic Iris Preservation Society can help you with this situation.
<<It's fun, but for an inventory of a commercial iris farm you are better off
to just buy modern stock from commercial IRIS growers. You will find that
this is what brings the customers to you.>>
That is what will brings SOME of the customers to you. If you intend to sell
only locally you will probably want to bring in some mid-age things--like
from the 1980s-- that can be purchased in commercial quantities at modest
prices from the larger wholesalers. Your emphasis should be on color
diversity and strong growers. Remember that anything you sell will be being
swapped around among your customers in four years, so rotate that inventory,
don't give them all the good stuff all at once, and keep something new coming
in.
If, however, you intend to ship, that is another story altogether and that
potentially brings you into the sphere of those interested not only in
historic irises, but also heirloom/antique plants generally, or garden
restorations, or garden history. There is a market for identified historic
irises and it will repay some bother to try to determine if you have rare
things to offer before forming any firm marketing strategy.
<<They already have the old stuff growing at home, or they can buy old
unnamed stuff at the flea market for $1 a pop -which is one way you can get
rid of your excess.>>
In my humble opinion it is also a great way to shoot yourself in the
pocketbook if you are sitting on the good stuff and don't make every effort
to find out what it is before selling it off cheap.
<<That said, tracing back old varieties is good and useful experience, and
the detective work is lots of fun. I once recouped some of my time by selling
a comic detective story on the discovery that much of the stuff from a
similar lot turned out to be Alcazar.>>
Ah, the mighty ALCAZAR (Vilmorin, 1910)! A very famous iris that everyone
assumes is offered by every commercial grower of Historic Irises, but which
is not. I've been actively encouraging the growing of it so that I will have
places to send people to buy it instead of having to dig it out of my
mother's garden every time it shows up on a plant list for a garden
restoration project. There was gold in them there rhizomes, James, and that
is no joke.
Good to see you on the list, Charlene. Let me know if I can answer any other
questions about the market for historic irises.
Anner Whitehead
Commercial Source Chairman
Historic Iris Preservation Society, AIS , <http://www.worldiris.com >
HIPSource@aol.com
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