A flurry of snow and wind shook the walls. But inside the greenhouses at Fessler Nursery near Woodburn, plants and people alike basked in warm, humid air.
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Fessler is an indoor nursery. All its operations happen inside greenhouse walls. So even ahead of the biggest winter storm of the year, plants are protected from the elements.
Which is a good thing. Winter is the nursery’s busiest season, said Katy Fessler.
Katy is one of several family members who own and operate the decades-old nursery. Her husband, Marvin, is founder Ken Fessler’s son.
While many crop-based farms slow down their operations during the cold months, nurseries ramp theirs up. Mother’s Day weekend is Fessler’s equivalent of Christmas. Spring is its busiest selling season, and the only time of year the nursery opens to the public. So the months leading up to spring are all-hands-on-deck.
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Oregon is the third largest nursery producer in the country, and most of that production happens in the Willamette Valley. Nurseries in the state produce and sell hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of plants every year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Oregon Association of Nurseries.
About 80% of the Oregon-grown products are sold out of state, said Jeff Stone, executive director of Oregon Association of Nurseries.
And the industry keeps growing, Stone said. State growers sold $1.3 billion worth of nursery and greenhouse products in 2022, up from $1.19 billion the previous year. Those products are the state’s top agricultural commodity.
Propagating, producing plants
Fessler is in the business of growing decorative plants – mostly flowers, but also poinsettias and vegetative annual liners. It grows annuals (the kind that die every year) and indoor houseplants, and outsources some perennials (the kind that grow back in the spring) for its retail store.
It sells some as rooted cuttings, others as full-grown baskets.
Fessler is a certified root-n-sell wholesaler for international plant breeding companies Ball, Selecta and Suntory. Propagation is roughly 25% of its business. That’s what was keeping some workers busy on a cold February morning.
Leonardo Perez has been working since 7:30 a.m., organizing cuttings so they can be rooted and left to grow. A cutting is a small piece of a plant – usually a stem – that will grow into its own plant.
The cuttings have come from all over the world: Guatemala, Brazil, South Africa. Fessler will sell most of them to other growers and nurseries in the West after doing the tedious work of sticking and rooting them.
At two side-by-side workstations, a combination of machinery and human handiwork root the cuttings. One machine does the work of preparing the pots with soil and punching a stem-sized hole in the middle. Down the assembly line, human hands place, or stick, each cutting into its pot. The cuttings are then labeled and conveyed under a set of misting machines.
One machine over, a machine is doing the sticking. It plucks a cutting from a neatly-assembled row and sticks it into its own pot. An air compressor helps separate leaves so cuttings don’t stick together.
This machine can stick as many as 10,000 cuttings per hour.
“We don’t do that,” Katy said. But they will cycle through as many as 500,000 cuttings in a week.
Once they’re potted and labeled, the cuttings are moved to an adjoining glass greenhouse to grow – but just a little bit. This greenhouse is built specifically for the delicate work of propagation. Glass walls provide extra protection from the outside weather and venting roofs help control the temperature. Pink lights provide warmth and light, but the cuttings don’t stretch toward it as they would to sunlight.
Pots are placed on heated benches and stay “cozy and warm” from below. Misting machines are set on timers so no plant is over or under-watered.
When the cuttings are ready, Fessler workers trim and move them to a cooler greenhouse. They are sorted, alphabetically by name of species, so when the time comes to ship, they are easy to find.
Except for the rhythm of the sticking machines, propagation is quiet work. The greenhouse is calm.
Not so a few doors down.
Fessler also produces its own potted plants, full grown, for wholesale and retail. Their first stop in this 850,000 square-foot maze of greenhouses and warehouses is the potting shed.
Here, machines that nearly reach the ceiling churn coconut core and other natural materials into soil mixtures. Different plants get different formulas.
In the back, Yanet Silva and her team are filling baskets with soil. Spanish music plays on a big speaker.
They might be safe from the snow in this shed, but Silva said they still need to get ahead of it. Snowfall that night and the following morning did, indeed, leave many Oregonians stuck at home.
“We’re trying to do everything we can today so we can hunker down tomorrow,” she said.
Wholesale production is roughly 60% of the nursery’s business, said Tanner Fessler, production and sales manager (and resident grandson, one of 10, and Katy’s nephew).
Finished baskets and potted plants will go to garden centers and big-name retailers such as Fred Meyer.
Fessler produces some of its annual geraniums, fuchsias, and mixed baskets for its own retail operation, which is 15% of its business. It’s not as robust as, say, a retail garden center, Katy said. But shoppers would be pressed to call it small.
“We’re like the Costco of nurseries,” Katy said. Whatever customers want, Fessler has “a lot of it, and good quality.”
Katy is responsible for preparing the retail space, which is open April through June.
In adjacent greenhouses, already-potted plants are left to mature. Fourteen-inch baskets will be ready to ship in April. A greenhouse full of carnations is “almost ready,” Katy observes.
The Martha Washington geraniums next door need more – more time, more light, more space.
Plant people
Nursery work is a delicate system. Each step requires careful attention.
Which might explain why the nursery employs up to 90 people during the peak winter season. Fessler mechanizes steps when it can, but even operating those machines requires human attention.
And no machine can replace human knowledge.
Nursery work is a steep learning curve, said Tanner.
Tanner, 24, recently graduated with a degree in agricultural business from Cal Poly and has stepped up as production manager.
Some tasks are easy and repetitive, Tanner said. But to learn the life cycle of a plant, to understand what each plant needs and when – that takes time.
It’s time Fessler employees are willing to give. Most full-time employees have been around for years. Tanner said of the nursery’s roughly 50 year-round employees, maybe 10-15 have started in the last five years.
Rafael Guzman is one of them. Now the tropical foliage manager, Guzman met Tanner at an internship on a berry farm. Guzman had studied berry farming at OSU. Berries were his background and, he thought, his future.
Tanner introduced Guzman to Fessler and nursery work three years ago. Guzman never looked back.
“I like nurseries because it’s a more controlled environment,” Guzman said. The plants he grows in greenhouses are less at nature’s mercy. He is directly responsible for their health, because he manufactures the environment they grow in.
“You can shape it how you want,” he said.
It’s also, by some metrics, easier work than he was used to in the fields. He doesn’t have to work in extreme heat or brutal cold. It’s less labor-intensive than harvesting or pruning.
Even compared to outdoor nursery work, Tanner agreed, greenhouse labor is less strenuous. And Fessler is always looking for ways to make it easier.
“We want to keep the people we have as happy as possible,” he said.
Oregon’s nursery industry, which includes Christmas tree farms, employs close to 10,000 people, according to 2021 data from the Oregon Employment Department. They earn an average of $38,019 a year. Crop-based farmworkers, meanwhile, earn roughly $31,000 a year.
Fessler was created by plant people, and in honor of plant people.
Ken started the business in 1960 (officially, though he’ll tell you it started in 1958). His reasons were threefold: he hated livestock (his family raised 1,000 chickens and a cow). He liked plants. Most importantly, his mother loved plants.
“My mother was a plant lady,” Ken said while trimming leaves and bulbs from recently-propagated cuttings.
Officially retired, the 83-year-old is still in the greenhouses nearly every day. He founded Fessler Nursery with his wife, Marie, and it grew with the help of other plant people, both in and outside of the family.
“It was just one small area,” Perez said, in Spanish, remembering his early days at Fessler 25 years ago.
Perez, 50, has spent half his life working at the nursery. He watched Tanner grow up. He helped the nursery “grow and grow.”
He is unequivocally proud of the nursery and his role in it, he said. The Fesslers, Perez’s coworkers, “they’re like family.”
Shannon Sollitt covers agricultural workers throughReport for America, a program that aims to support local journalism and democracy by reporting on under-covered issues and communities. Send tips, questions and comments to ssollitt@statesmanjournal.com.
