It seems like just the other day we were kicking off the 2018 Royer’s Kids Club schedule with a Valentine’s Day-themed event. We’re not sure where the time went, but we had a lot of fun with everyone who attended one or more of our five kids events throughout the year.
The photos above are from our final event, held Nov. 10 in each of our stores and featuring a Veterans Day theme.
Thank you to everyone, children and parents alike, for participating this year. We love having you in our stores and sharing our knowledge and passion for everything related to flowers.
We wish everyone a safe, happy holiday season. Meanwhile, we are putting the finishing touches on plans for another great kids club schedule in the year ahead. We can’t wait to tell you all about it!
Royer’s is collecting cards and coloring pages for area military veterans Nov. 11-Dec. 4 as part of the American Red Cross’ “Holidays for Heroes” program.
Cards may be dropped off at any Royer’s during normal business hours. Free coloring pages can be downloaded here: Christmas Tree Santa Ornament Reindeer Dreidel
The Red Cross offers these guidelines for preparing cards:
Use generic salutations such as “Dear Veteran” as cards addressed to specific individuals cannot be delivered through this program.
Include messages of support and thanks.
Sign your name to them.
Don’t include letters or other personal information (photos, addresses).
Red, white, blue and you!
For its final kids club event of 2018, the Royer’s Kids Club is honoring the service of all U.S. military veterans.
Children ages 5 to 12 will have an opportunity to make a patriotic arrangement, featuring red and blue carnations and an American flag.
As the price of admission, participants are asked to bring a new children’s book for Bouquets for Books, Royer’s annual book drive to benefit area public libraries.
Participants also will receive a balloon and may decorate a coloring page for Royer’s annual Holidays for Heroes event, which honors veterans and active military members.
Time slots are available at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Registration is required by calling the nearest Royer’s store.
Watering used to take two or three hours; now it can be done in 15 minutes.
Plants arrayed on flood table.
Plants are watered from the bottom through grooves in the tables.
Water not absorbed by plants goes back into a reservoir.
To understand how flower growing has changed in the past four decades, consider 1, 7 and 9.
Those numbers identify the three remaining greenhouses at Royer’s corporate complex in Lebanon. As the breaks in number sequencing suggest, Royer’s had more greenhouses back when we grew our own flowers – nine total at the corporate complex and six more nearby on Colebrook Road.
However, a perfect storm occurred in the 1970s: An oil embargo made it prohibitively expensive for Royer’s and other florists to heat their greenhouses, while Bogota, Colombia was found to offer ideal temperatures and sunlight for growing flowers. In the intervening years, most flower growing has shifted to South America.
Today, as Tom Royer, senior vice president and COO, pointed out, Royer’s isn’t a grower but rather a holder of plants. That is, the company buys from growers both inside and outside the United States. Those plants and flowers are delivered to the corporate complex, where they reside before being distributed to Royer’s 16 stores in seven counties.
Much of the “holding” occurs in the three greenhouses. Two of them – numbers 1 and 7 – are the beneficiaries of substantial new investments in equipment designed to improve plant quality and operating efficiency.
Turn of a timer, flip of a switch
Specifically, we more than doubled our flood table capacity (Royer’s got its first flood tables in 1999) for automatic plant watering and installed a shading system that can control the amount of sunlight with the flip of a switch.
Each flood table has its own water reservoir. Once per day, we turn on a timer that floods the table for typically 15 minutes but longer if external conditions warrant. The plants, lined up in rows, drink through openings in the bottom of their containers.
In other words, a worker doesn’t have to tend to each plant individually, a time-consuming proposition considering the hundreds of containers.
“Now I can water all these plants in 15 minutes,” Tom said, “whereas it would take somebody two or three hours to do that day after day after day.”
Conserving water
The reduced labor also will improve quality, as watering won’t ever have to be sacrificed for the sake of other time demands. (In some cases, watering from above can cause damage, such as stains on violet petals.)
Of course, not all plants need the same amount of water.
“Just like people, they drink different, they eat different,” Tom said. Reflecting those differences, Royer’s separates plants by type (all violets on one bench, for instance) or at least by pot size and waters them accordingly.
Water that isn’t absorbed by the plants goes back into each table’s reservoir so it can be conserved and reused.
Another greenhouse variable is sunlight. In greenhouse 7, which holds blooming plants, a system of cables and pulleys operates the fabric shade cloths. By controlling the amount of sunlight, Royer’s can maintain an internal temperature of 75 degrees.
“If these shade cloths weren’t on here,” Tom noted on a warm, sunny day in early October, “it would be a lot hotter in here.”
Tom said the expenditure on flood tables and the shade system are the price of doing right by customers.
“It’s an investment in the future,” he said. “It’s worth it to me to do that because long term I’m going to have better product. It’s going to be taken care of properly. It will grow better, too.”
Give a new book, get a fresh bouquet.
That’s the simple proposition behind Royer’s Flowers & Gifts’ annual children’s book drive, which this year runs Oct. 28-Nov. 10.
Bouquets for Books benefits public libraries in Berks, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lancaster, Lebanon and York counties.
For each new book, donors will receive a free bouquet, up to three per family per visit, while supplies last. Used books will not be accepted.
For more information, including library wish lists, visit royers.com/bouquetsforbooks.
A field of babies breath and a breath-taking mountain view in Quito
Located in the northwest part of South America, Ecuador’s name betrays another fact about its geographic location. Ecuador is Spanish for equator, the imaginary line that separates the Earth into northern and southern hemispheres.
Quito, Ecuador’s capital, sits more than 9,000 feet above sea level. That combination – proximity to the equator and elevation – are what make Quito a near-perfect place to grow flowers. A 2015 article in the Financial Times noted that Ecuador was the world’s third-biggest exporter of cut flowers, 73 percent of which were roses.
“Roses grown at high altitude have a much longer growing cycle than those cultivated at sea level, up to 15 weeks as opposed to eight, so it is perfect for long-stemmed varieties with big heads,” said an official with a Dutch flower breeder. “The cold nights mean that you get a lot of bi-colors, with contrasting hues on the edges and the insides of petals, which are very sought after in certain markets.”
Tom Royer, our senior vice president and chief operating officer, had been to Quito on multiple occasions prior to his latest visit in September. His nephew, area manager Geoff Royer, had previously joined Tom on trips to flower farms in Bogota and Medellin in Colombia.
Product quality
Because more flower growers ship out of Bogota than Quito, freight costs are more competitive, Geoff said. Quito also has a higher minimum wage that gets passed along to flower buyers.
While Royer’s has tended to buy most of its roses from Colombia because of cost, Tom and Geoff felt compelled to visit Quito because of the undeniable quality of the product there.
This was Geoff’s first exposure to Quito. “The first thing you notice when you get into Quito is the landscape,” Geoff said. “Where Bogota is a plateau and very flat, Quito sits in a river valley.”
Elevation is elevating
Quito is some 700 feet higher in elevation that Bogota.
“That 700 feet is what makes all the difference,” Geoff said. “Because the flowers are closer to the sun, its intensity is much higher. This leads to bigger roses and brighter colors. You can buy the same varieties in both places, but in Quito they are that much better.”
Tom and Geoff wanted a first-hand look at “what’s out there and what’s new,” Geoff said. “We visited a few growers, some whom we’ve dealt with before and others not. As always, we are trying to find the best, longest-lasting product that’s out there.”
Among the Quito-grown products that Royer’s customers could be seeing: –Hydrangea: “It’s a bigger head and the colors are different from the white and blue that we carry now. There are even some with variegation in the colors,” Geoff said. –Painted rose: This is a white rose with outside petals hand-painted red. “We sometimes have that that variety of white rose, but the painting is different from anything we’ve had before,” Geoff said. –Babies breath: Tom and Geoff visited a new grower. “What we get now is called Million Star, a variety that has a smaller flower. This grower offers that but also other varieties with bigger flowers and sturdier stems,” Geoff said.
You might call Karen Nowak a late bloomer when it comes to contests.
Nowak, a retired teacher from Leola, Lancaster County, said she never wins anything. She didn’t even enter Royer’s Flowers & Gifts’ online name-the-arrangement contest right away before submitting a different suggestion daily for a week.
“Yeah,” she said, “I just thought it was fun. Each day thinking, now what can I do?”
Fun and, ultimately, fruitful. Her submission “Citrus Splash” was selected as the winner among more than 900 entries in the contest, which ran July 15-31.
“Better late than never,” Nowak said upon learning of her win.
Debuting this fall, Citrus Splash will be available in four sizes, small through extra large. The arrangement, which Nowak will receive as a prize, features yellow alstroemeria and daisy pom pons, peach hypericum and mini carnations, and orange carnations.
Greg Royer, Royer’s president and CEO, said the response to the annual contest never ceases to impress him.
“The volume and creativity of the entries says a lot about how passionate our customers feel about flowers,” he said. “Congratulations to Karen and thank you to everyone who participated.”
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts will celebrate the start of a new school year with a free Royer’s Kids Club event on Aug. 25.
Children ages 5 to 12 will have an opportunity to create an arrangement featuring yellow and lavender daisy pompons, leatherleaf fern and a back-to-school stick-in.
Each participant also will receive a balloon.
Time slots are available at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Registration is required by calling your nearest Royer’s store.
Every day, Royer’s makes dozens – if not hundreds – of flower deliveries to homes and businesses in seven counties. It’s likely that you’ll encounter one of our vehicles on any given day.
What’s less well known is that we’re also picking up flowers. In the summer, we make regular visits to Elm Family Flowers in Lititz, which supplies us with thousands of gorgeous, locally grown sunflowers.
In fact, we buy all of Elm’s sunflowers, which we sell by the loose stem and in a variety of arrangements that we make.
Native to the Americas, sunflowers were domesticated around 1000 B.C., according to Good Housekeeping. Not only are they beautiful, but they also produce seeds (1,000 to 2,000 per plant) and oil.
When they are budding, sunflowers literally turn toward the sun, a trait known as heliotropism. The French word for sunflowers is “tournesol,” or “turns with the sun.”
‘SUPER FRESH’
Daniel Lapp of Elm Family Flowers said his father bought their Elm Road dairy farm in 1986. In 2007, the Lapps augmented the dairy farm by starting to grow flowers. Elm has supplied sunflowers to Royer’s for five or six years.
“Daniel and his family are a joy to work with,” said Tom Royer, Royer’s senior vice president and chief operating officer. “We are glad we can work with a local grower who gives us super fresh sunflowers.”
Today, the Lapp farm devotes one acre to sunflowers. To put that into perspective, farms planted 1.7 million acres of sunflowers across the United States in 2014.
Elm’s growing season begins in late March and continues until the final harvest in early fall. Lapp said the first seeds begin in a heated greenhouse in what are known as plug trays. After a couple weeks, they are transplanted into the ground but covered with fabric that allows sun and moisture to get through but protects against frost.
“It retains a little of the daytime heat during the night,” Lapp said.
The transplanted seeds require 80 to 90 days before they can be harvested. By comparison, seeds planted directly into the ground will require only 50 to 60 days.
The last sunflowers of the year will be planted by Aug. 10 to beat potentially harmful cold temperatures.
“I usually figure Oct. 10 or 15 is when we’re going to get a frost,” Lapp said.
No matter the temperature outside, of course, sunflowers project warmth wherever they are.
Greg Royer, president and CEO of Royer’s Flowers, and David Carl, corporate and foundation giving manager, Central Pennsylvania Food Bank.
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts’ annual food drive collected 1,699 pounds of nonperishable items, pushing the total to more than seven tons since the event began in 2011.
Royer’s Stems Hunger, which took place June 16-30, collected 166 pounds for the Greater Berks Food Bank and 1,533 pounds for the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank.
For each nonperishable food item, donors received a free carnation.
Besides Royer’s 16 stores, the food drop-off locations included eight Drayer Physical Therapy Institute locations in the area.
