Patrick Bellrose grew up loving plants and gardening, hence his bachelor's degree in horticulture from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Thirty-six years later, he's struck by the irony of that.
Patrick Bellrose grew up loving plants and gardening, hence his bachelor's degree in horticulture from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Thirty-six years later, he's struck by the irony of that.
"I went four years to college to learn how to grow plants, and now I spend all of my time on accounting, employee relations and purchasing," he said.
Bellrose operates Fahr Greenhouses Inc., a wholesale grower in Wildwood, and this is his make-or-break season. He has expanded the year-round, full-time staff of seven to 40 with the addition of full- and part-time temporaries to drive trucks, work in the office and, especially, pot plants.
It "just takes lots of hands and lots of hours," he said, to transplant 40,000 pots of geraniums, 60,000 other annuals and 1.5 million seedlings.
In his 40 plastic-roofed greenhouses, a total 75,000 square feet altogether, it's green-up time for rows and rows of columbines, astilbes, sedums, hostas, begonias, coleuses and -- new this year -- hydrangeas, verbenas, spirea and low-growing shrub roses.
The mix evolves from year to year along with Bellrose's reading of plant and garden trends. Although the company does a small retail business on site, its major customers are retailers and professional landscapers, about 450 of them, mostly within a 150-mile radius of St. Louis.
But it's his sense of what his customers' customers -- individual gardeners and homeowners -- want that drives what he sticks into the ground and loads on his trucks.
The speed with which people switch houses these days makes them impatient with plants, he said.
"They want instant gratification. They don't want little plants." So, he's giving them bigger and more mature ones than he used to and more combination planters. These one-of-a kind arrangements of bright annuals, potted, portable and ready to brighten bare or dark spots around house or garden are "the hot thing" in the business these days, he said.
This year he's raising perennials for the first time, because it's become fashionable among gardeners to mix them with annuals in the same beds. Besides, Bellrose said, he wanted to capture sales that some of his customers were taking elsewhere.
Bellrose married into this business, begun in 1950 by Dorothy and Leonard Fahr, his wife Mary's parents, who grew cut flowers for the St. Louis wholesale flower market.
When competition from growers in Colombia and Ecuador cut into that business in the mid-1970s, Fahr Greenhouses moved with the market into houseplants. As that craze died, so did that line of business, replaced in the 1980s by indoor blooming plants, such as mums, azaleas, poinsettias and tulips. Fahr still grows them, but outdoor, spring plants have gradually overtaken them in volume.
So, more than ever, Fahr's is a seasonal business. Staffing up for it is always "a huge challenge," Bellrose said. "I'm very particular about who I hire. I just can't stand people who aren't reliable, who don't show up."
Hiring is critical, because this is a labor-intensive operation, although less so than it used to be as Bellrose has invested in machines that mix potting soil, sow seeds and pop seedlings out of their containers. Anything that limits the number of times plants pass through human hands before they're out the door helps keep costs down.
After labor, Fahr's biggest single cost is heating, about $90,000 a year for a combination of propane and natural gas. Herein lies another reason for the move into perennials: They can grow at 38 degrees at night, compared with 65 degrees for pretty much everything else.
Business has been growing pretty steadily for the last three or four years, Bellrose said. "Gross dollars may be down this year, but we're hoping the profit will be up."
Time and the weather -- the fewer rainy weekends that slow sales at gardening centers, the better -- will tell. Sometime next month, "kind of like a retailer five days after Christmas," he will have a good fix on his profit -- commonly, 4 percent a year on gross sales, he said.
Bellrose has taken pains to master the numbers side of the business, and he has invested in computer programs that help him decide what crops to grow, when to plant them and how many containers to order. He also pays close attention to an industry where he sees a lot of consolidation, along with more competition from large growers in the southern United States and, thanks to favorable exchange rates, Canada.
Because Fahr is only a medium-sized player in the larger market, he said, "We're always looking for that niche, what we can do better than anybody else."
Leonard Fahr died in 1968. He wouldn't know the business now, with five times as much greenhouse space as back then and a global reach. Bellrose orders seeds from Africa and cuttings from Guatemala and Costa Rica.
"We also get a lot of things from Israel," he said. "They harvest it on Monday, and we have it (by Federal Express) Wednesday morning."
Dorothy Fahr, 82, drops by now and then from her house next door.
"Her comment a couple of years ago is we make more in one month than they did in a whole year, and we spend more in one week than they did in a whole year," her son-in-law joked.
Patrick and Mary Bellrose are parents of four, three of whom have graduated from college and work in other fields. But Maria, the youngest, is a horticulture student at the University of Missouri. She's thinking about joining the business. But no rush, no pressure.
"I told her I want her to work elsewhere before she comes back here," Bellrose said.
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