How the services fit together
The seed house at 21 Old Mill Road Rr 3 is arranged in three bands. The seedling house holds the trays under glass.
The middle yard carries the nursery rows of potted stock. The bench end holds the potting bench, the soil bin and the
irrigation tube run. Our services follow the same bands, which is why a client can enter at any point and still meet
a complete routine. A tour begins in the seedling house. A bedding stock plan works across the rows. A workshop
happens at the bench. Pre-orders and delivery runs connect the rows to the road. Garden plan consults sit outside
the band system entirely, because they begin with the ground a client already owns.
Every service below is described in the same pattern: what happens, what the crew records, and what the client
receives. That pattern is deliberate. It lets a nursery manager compare services quickly and it lets us quote without
inventing scope on the call.
SSeedling House Tours
A seedling house tour is a guided walk through the glass band of the operation, and it is the most common first step
for a new client. The tour lasts about ninety minutes and follows the stock from tray fill to hardening. We stop at
the seed tray grid, the bench under the panes and the irrigation tube run, and at each stop we ask the same question:
what record does this object produce, and who reads it.
Tours are useful even for operations that do not intend to buy a system. Seeing a working label scheme beside a
broken one often reveals the fix in a single morning. We bring a printed tray label template and a soil bin level
sheet, and visitors leave with both. The conversation usually turns to seasonal planning, which is why the tour pairs
naturally with the bedding stock review described below.
Tours run by arrangement on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in small groups of no more than six people so there is room at
the bench. Bring closed shoes and expect to stand for most of the visit. Cameras are welcome. Write to
bud@stellarbud.lol or call +12724372060 to reserve a bench hour.
BSeasonal Bedding Stock
Seasonal bedding stock planning ties the planting calendar to the stock register. The work begins with a variety
list and a promised quantity, then works backward through hardening weeks to sow dates and forward through collection
windows to delivery runs. The result is a single seasonal sheet that shows every variety, every bench position and
every promised flat on one page.
The register behind the sheet is what makes the plan honest. When a customer reserves bedding stock, the reservation
lands on a bench position rather than a general pool. When a cold week delays hardening, the delay moves the
collection window on the sheet and the customer sees the new date in the same view. There is no separate phone tree
and no guesswork at the bench.
We prepare bedding stock plans in late winter and review them again at midsummer, because the second half of the
season rarely matches the first. Clients receive the printed seasonal sheet, the underlying register and a short
written note on what to watch in the coming weeks. The service is priced per season rather than per variety, which
keeps the incentive on accuracy instead of volume.
PPotting Bench Workshops
Potting bench workshops are half-day sessions for crews who want a cleaner bench routine. We begin at the soil bin
and work outward: how the bin is filled, how the level is marked, how trays are arranged on the bench, how labels are
written and where finished flats are staged before they move to the rows. Every habit is demonstrated at full scale,
with real stock and real soil.
The workshop produces three takeaway documents. The first is a one-page bench routine that can be pinned above the
bench. The second is a tray label template sized for the crew own stock. The third is a simple staged delivery sheet
that links bench output to the route plan. We print all three on the day so nobody leaves with a promise of a
document that never arrives.
Groups are capped at eight so every participant gets bench time. Workshops are usually held on a Wednesday morning
and can be run at our Princeton bench or at a client site if the client bench is accessible. The fee covers
materials, printed documents and a follow-up call two weeks later to answer questions that only appear in practice.
NNursery Row Pre-Orders
Nursery row pre-orders replace the loose reservation notebook with a register that reserves stock by row and bench
position. A customer claim is recorded against a variety, a sow week and a collection window, and the claim is
visible on the same sheet the crew reads when they water. If a row fails or a tray is short, the claim is flagged
immediately rather than discovered on collection day.
The register is deliberately plain. Each pre-order has a customer name, a contact line, a variety, a quantity, a
reserved row and a pickup window. There are no hidden status codes and no colour schemes that only one staff member
understands. A new crew member can read the sheet on the first morning and still make a correct decision about which
flat belongs to which claim.
We set the system up at the start of a season and train the front desk and the bench crew together, because
pre-orders fail when the two groups keep separate records. Clients receive the register, a printed claim sheet and a
short training session. The service also covers a mid-season review, which is usually the point where a nursery
discovers that its promised quantities were optimistic.
GGarden Plan Consults
A garden plan consult begins with the ground, not the stock list. We visit the site, measure light through the day,
check drainage, note access for a wheelbarrow and record what already grows well nearby. Only then do we write a
planting sequence, because a plan that ignores the ground will fail no matter how good the stock is.
The written plan describes each bed, the sequence of planting through the year, the maintenance tasks that follow and
the quantity of stock needed for each stage. It is written for the person who will actually do the work, which is
rarely the person who commissioned the plan. Where a grounds crew will maintain the beds, we include a simple weekly
checklist and a photograph of the expected result at each stage.
Consults are available for households, community grounds and small commercial sites. A consult concludes with a
printed plan, a seeding order that can be placed with the seed house and an optional review visit in the following
season. We do not sell plants as part of the consult, which keeps the advice independent of the stock list. If a
client wants stock from our own rows, that is a separate and clearly priced order.
DDelivery Run Days
Delivery run days group orders by route and by hardening stage so plants travel when they are ready. A route is
planned on Thursday, a manifest is printed from the same register that tracked the trays, and the van leaves on
Friday with a sheet that matches the bench record line for line. Any flat that was short at the bench is already
marked and the customer has been called before the van is loaded.
Manifests are the heart of the service. Each route sheet lists the customer, the address note, the reserved row, the
quantity and the handover instruction. The driver signs each line at handover and the signed sheet returns to the
register the same day. That single habit removes most of the arguments that follow a delivery season, because the
record shows what left the yard and who accepted it.
We can support a single van or a small fleet, and we can integrate the manifest with an existing route planner if
the client already has one. The goal is never to replace a working route. It is to make the route and the stock
register speak the same language, so the crew at the bench and the driver at the gate are working from one truth.