Nat King Cole gave us “Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer.”
The Royer’s Kids Club added “daisy” to the rhyming pattern with its Aug. 17 event. Available in each of our stores, the free event gave children ages 5 to 12 an opportunity to make a Sweet Summer Daisy Bowl arrangement.
The kids club’s final 2013 event is on Oct. 26, when all stores will celebrate Halloween and our annual “Bouquets for Books” book drive to benefit local libraries. We’ll provide more details in the weeks to come.
Paula Egolf is a professional artist, her acrylic paintings having been exhibited at juried shows, galleries and museums.
Apparently she’s also an inspiration to her 10-year old granddaughter Orla Egolf (photo). Orla, a fourth-grader in the School District of Lancaster, is the winner of Royer’s Flowers & Gifts’ 2013 birthday card design contest. Her prize is a flower delivery on her next birthday.
“She’s very much her own person,” Paula Egolf said of Orla. “Since she was a baby, she has always had a very definite bent toward color and design.”
Orla’s design – comprising a cake with candles, bumble bees, smiley-face balloon and, of course, flowers – graces the electronic card that all Royer’s Kids Club members will receive on their birthdays in the coming year.
The Royer’s Kids Club is free to ages 5 to 12. With parental permission, children may register for the kids club at any Royer’s store or online at www.royers.com/kidsclub. Membership benefits include a membership card, Web site activities, an e-mail newsletter, contests and in-store events.
“Where will I wander and wonder? Nobody knows But wherever I`m going I`ll go In search of a Rose”
–From the song “In Search of a Rose” by The Waterboys Tom Royer regularly visits South American farms to check on the flowers that are grown specifically for Royer’s Flowers.
Just after Labor Day, Tom Royer is going in search of a certain type of rose.
“We don’t want a rose,” said Tom, Royer’s senior vice president and chief operating officer. “We want a rose. We want the best rose and that’s what we need to do to be competitive in our business, is find the best of the best.
“We pride ourselves in doing that. Our flowers last longer, they’re bigger. We constantly have to be looking at all the things that are available to us to make what we do in the flower business better than what anybody else does.” Tom, who visits flower farms in South America multiple times each year, will be returning to Quito, Ecuador, to meet with three or four rose growers (and a lily grower).
In some ways, this is nothing new. Tom is always in pursuit of better-looking, longer-lasting flowers.
“I’m constantly looking at farms,” Tom said. “It’s just now that the focus has been more on Ecuadoran roses.”
Specifically, he is looking for roses that have bigger head sizes, consistently. It costs more to ship fresh-cut roses from Quito than from Bogota, Colombia, the single-biggest source of Royer’s roses.
“So all things being equal, why would you buy from Quito?” Tom said.
“Well, Ecuadoran roses have always had a little bigger head size, and we’re focusing more and more on that.”
While its farms are capable of growing roses comparable to what is found in Quito, Bogota experiences more rain and clouds that can be detrimental to head size.
One of the growers that Royer’s buys from in Colombia also operates farms in Quito.
“And so we’re getting some of their Ecuadoran farm’s (roses)” and comparing with the ones from Bogota. “And the thing you see is the head size is bigger.”
Tom’s trip will help him determine which one or two farms in Quito he will work with.
“But we’re experimenting with them because you can’t just get a shipment and say, oh, OK, great, this is wonderful or it’s terrible. One shipment doesn’t tell the story. You have to do it over a number of months.”
And even then it’s a never-ending process. “But wherever I`m going I`ll go In search of a Rose”
Wherever he’s going, Tom is in search of a rose, too. The best rose he can find.
Birthday girls Maddie, left, and sister Annie.
Melissa Castellano is expecting her third child, a boy, in August. When he turns 5, he can join the Royer’s Kids Club.
“If his sisters have anything to say about it,” Melissa quipped.
Sisters Annie, 10, and Maddie, 6, are veterans of the kids club, although the family’s ties to Royer’s run even deeper than that.
When Annie was 3, she attended a holiday open house at our Harrisburg store. It snowed that morning, and to complete the festiveness of the day, Annie won an Advent calendar at the open house.
As Melissa said, Annie “has a bond with the store.”
The girls share August birthdays and like to have their parties together. This year, they wanted a garden party theme – and they wanted to celebrate at Royer’s.
Melissa broached the idea with Harrisburg store manager Shannon Fink at a kids club event. Shannon’s team was more than happy to oblige.
The Castellanos arrived an hour before to set up for the two-hour event. They brought birthday cake and other food, as well as clay pots for the 17 children.
While Annie’s group was eating in the store’s loft, which was decorated as a butterfly garden, Maddie’s party was decorating the pots in the store’s design room.
Melissa’s grandmother died in March, so this was the first time she wasn’t there for Annie and Maddie’s parties. In her honor, the children filled their pots with African violets, the grandmother’s favorite.
The day was a big hit with the birthday girls.
“They loved it,” Melissa said. “The girls said a couple times it was a dream come true to be let loose in a flower shop.”
For the second year in a row, the readers of the Carlisle Sentinel newspaper have voted Royer’s Flowers as the best florist on the West Shore.
The newspaper announced the results of its 11th annual “Best of West Shore” survey in the Aug. 4 print edition.
Readers cast thousands of ballots, submitted by mail and online.
This is just the latest in a string of top-florist honors for Royer’s: May: York Sunday News’ “Best of York County” June: Susquehanna Style magazine’s “Best of Harrisburg” July: Susquehanna Style’s “Best of Lancaster”
From left, Greg Royer, CEO, Royer’s Flowers & Gifts; Jackie Dahms, manager, Royer’s West York store; Joe Arthur, executive director, Central Pennsylvania Food Bank. The West York store was recognized for collecting the most pounds of food among Royer’s 17 locations.
Our third-annual “Royer’s Stems Hunger” food drive collected 2,486 pounds of non-perishable items for the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank and the Greater Berks Food Bank.
From June 21 to 29, Royer’s asked customers to drop off donations at any of our 17 Royer’s in Berks, Cumberland, Dauphin, Lancaster, Lebanon and York counties. In return, customers received a free carnation for each food item, up to a maximum of six carnations per family per visit.
This year’s donations exceeded the amount of food collected in the food drive’s first two years combined.
The Central Pennsylvania Food Bank distributes more than 16 million pounds of food and grocery products every year to more than 600 soup kitchens, shelters and food pantries in 27 central Pennsylvania counties.
The Greater Berks Food Bank collects, stores and distributes food to more than 270 food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, after-school programs, and senior housing facilities in Berks, Schuylkill and western Montgomery counties.
It’s getting to be back-to-school time, but the Royer’s Kids Club isn’t letting go of summer easily.
For the next free kids club event, on Aug. 17, children ages 5 to 12 will have an opportunity to make a Sweet Summer Daisy Bowl arrangement. Participants also will receive a balloon.
Time slots are available at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. at each of Royer’s 17 stores in Berks, Cumberland, Dauphin, Lancaster, Lebanon and York counties.
Registration is required by calling your nearest Royer’s store. Visit www.royers.com for locations and contact information.
For more information about Royer’s Kids Club, visit www.royers.com/kidsclub.
Roger Esbenshade, president of Esbenshade’s Greenhouses Inc., with a poinsettia cutting and the pot it will grow in.
Retailers and consumers might count down the number of shopping days left until the holidays. At Esbenshade’s Greenhouses Inc. in Lancaster County, it’s a calendar of growing days.
One of the 100 biggest greenhouse operations in the United States, family-owned Esbenshade’s is a significant grower of poinsettias. Royer’s Flowers & Gifts is one of Esbenshade’s biggest poinsettia customers, to the tune of 30,000 plants each year.
In order for Royer’s to have poinsettias to sell starting around Thanksgiving, Esbenshade’s has to start growing the traditional Christmas plants during the summer.
In fact, poinsettias account for 75 percent of Esbenshade’s summer workload and 15 to 20 percent of the company’s annual sales. Esbenshade’s sells poinsettias to customers throughout Pennsylvania and into surrounding states and sometimes as far away as Boston.
This helps to explain why Roger Esbenshade, the company’s president, has a young poinsettia spilled out on a desk in his air-conditioned office in mid-July, when the outside temperature is approaching 90 degrees.
A computer controls when mist sprays on young poinsettia plants.
Three stages of root growth on poinsettia cuttings.
Poinsettias grown for the 2012 holiday season.
He has been looking at the plant’s roots under a microscope, “to make sure nothing funny is going on.” Besides proper root development, he tests for levels of pH and fertilizer in the “growing medium,” a mixture of composted bark, peat and the mineral perlite, which appears as tiny white rocks.
“If you wait until the plant itself starts to show the problem, then it’s usually much wider spread and much more difficult to make a correction,” Esbenshade said.
His parents – Lamar and Nancy – founded the company in 1960. Today, Esbenshade and brothers Fred, Scott and Terry own and operate the wholesale business from a complex of buildings on Route 322 just north of Lititz. A sister (there are seven siblings in all) works part-time for the company.
Every week throughout most of the summer, Esbenshade’s receives poinsettia cuttings from three different suppliers. These cuttings are two and one-half inch stems that will become the hundreds of thousands of poinsettias that Esbenshade’s will nurture in its greenhouses.
The cuttings have no roots; those will come in short order but only after Esbenshade’s workers stick them into the bark-peat-perlite mixture in pots. (Esbenshade’s also grows starter plants for other growers; these roots develop in a foam cube). The plants will stay in these pots right up until they are delivered to Royer’s.
The pots are in Esbenshade’s “Gilbert” greenhouse, which is named in memory of an employee who died. They are lined up, row upon row, on tables and under automated misters.
A pinch to unleash potential
A cutting by itself is fragile: left in the sun for 20 minutes, Esbenshade said, it will die. Regular misting is necessary for the cuttings to sprout roots. A computer considers plant and air temperature, humidity, light intensity to determine each burst of mist for each table.
It takes four weeks for the plant roots to grow fully. At that point, Esbenshade’s “pinches” – snapping off the tip – the cutting to force lateral branch growth. Everywhere there is a leaf is the potential to grow a new stem. This potential is unleashed by the pinching.
“There’s a hormonal change in that plant that stimulates that growth,” Esbenshade said.
At up to 100 degrees, poinsettias will grow faster the higher the temperature. Above 100 degrees, growth tapers.
Red poinsettias are the traditional variety and account for 70 percent of the plants the company grows, although they come in many varieties and sizes. When asked what his favorite variety is, Esbenshade at first quipped:
“By December 25th, my personal favorite is an empty greenhouse.”
Really it’s the “marble star,” whose leaves (or bracts) feature a “bold pink center” and white edges, Esbenshade said.
Esbenshade’s follows strict growing schedules to ensure that it produces the highest-quality plants it can for Royer’s, which holds Esbenshade’s to exacting standards. What’s more, Royer’s is based just 15 miles away in Lebanon, which makes it easy for co-owners Mike Royer or Tom Royer to get a first-hand look at the crop.
Variety (some grow faster than others) and hoped-for size determine the growing schedule.
“If we want a plant that’s 30 inches tall, then we have to start that in June,” Esbenshade said. “If we want one that’s 8 inches tall, that doesn’t get started until August.”
It’s possible to force faster growth, but then the plant lacks the stem strength and big bracts that distinguish the Esbenshade’s plants from, say, the poinsettias found at big-box retailers.
“It has to look different,” Esbenshade said of his company’s poinsettia crop. “The average consumer has to recognize that it’s something substantially different. We don’t try to explain to them that it’s different, we grow something that they recognize is different.”
We’ve extended the deadline for the Royer’s Kids Club birthday card design contest until Aug. 7.
Between now and then, download the entry form here, create your birthday card design, and drop it off at your nearest Royer’s.
If we pick your design, we will use it for the birthday card that every kids club member receives on his or her special day. And for winning, you will receive a free flower delivery on your birthday.
So get out your markers and crayons and get drawing!
The readers of Susquehanna Style magazine have voted Royer’s their favorite florist in Lancaster County.
The magazine dubbed its July issue the “Best of Lancaster” edition.
Royer’s has five Lancaster County stores: Columbia, Ephrata, Lancaster North, Lancaster West and Leola.
In June, Royer’s was named top florist in Susquehanna Style’s “Best of Harrisburg Edition.”
