Welcome, Welcome, Welcome. Thanks for visiting the new improved McNeal Growers website. We are going to be updating the site over the next 6 months.
The Nursery is now moving in a new direction. One important part of that new direction is to improve the amount of information we provide about all the plants we grow.
In the past we were content to grow and experiment with a huge range of plant species. The only limit was it had to be adapted to our soils and the erratic climate.
Over the last 25 years that was thousands of species. I was happy being a grower and I liked that role better than salesman, truck driver or bookkeeper.
The consequence of all that growing and exppermentation was the nursery crowded with small numbers of lots of great plant species. Since they were unknown and there was little or no information on their use it made it hard for anyone to know what to do with them. We left it up to the customer to find source information about how to landscape with all these plant species. That was pretty difficult and time consuming.
Now we are using the web site as solution. It will take time but we hope to provide more than enough information about the plants we grow so you can be confident choosing our plants for your landscape project.
The goal of the nursery has never been to grow and grow. We like being a small local grower, it lets us provide the level of help and service that our customers need. We would also like to think this is our way of making the area we live a better, more beautiful place. This does put a limit on how much we can grow. In the past there was not enough space to grow enough of each species to maintain adequate numbers for sale. The limited space meant a large number of stock plants were mixed in with the sales stock. Some of the feed back we got was, we had a lot of plants but none of them were for sale. As a grower the plants have to come form some where. We grow all our plants from seeds or division. To do this means we have to keep some mature plants that aren't for sale so we can get seed or divisioin from them. One solution is to just not grow so many kinds of plants. We didn't really want to do that. We wanted to maximize the number of new species we could grow in our limited space and still maintain their constant availability. Our solution to do this was we picked those species that grew relativly quickly. The plants that were slower we decided to sell in smaller pots sized so the coudl be ready faster. The other obvious choice was to grow everything in smaller pots adn we can fit more plants into the limited space. We can still offer some of the slower growing species like Aloes, Agaves, Yuccas, Sotols, Puyas, Dyickias and other succulent types but in smaller pots.
The idea of growing more smaller plants so we could still grow a larger variety of species fit in well with another idea we have had. There were limited choices for tough groundcovers that could replace part or all of lawns. Later on I willl post some articles on lawns and turf grasses. For the most part lawns are the most expensive, time consuming part of the landscape for private residences or commerical porperties.The City of Aution is now proposeing a new $1 billion dollar water treatment plant. Right now in the city 70% of all treated water goes to landscaping. So the city will spend $750 million so we can spray drinakable water on to the ground. Not only does that sound like a silly waste of money, water is a limited resoucre we can not afford to waste.
We want to do our part and increase the variety of low cost options to lawn grass. Our goals are to grow our ground covers in larger enough numbers so we always have them available. To provide the growing information about them so anyone can learn to use them easily. We have been growing grasses and grass-like plant species like sedges for decades. The selection of Grasses and sedges present a problem in that they have less distinct parts that helps to identify the individual species. The reason it's important to know the individual species is that so you can pick the properly adapted species. In the past the nursery industry produced plants that were chosen for their general adaptability. A once size fits all type thinking of landscape plants has evolved into a Landscape business that has become more sophisticated in it's selection of plant species for different habitats. The lesson learned now is the types of plants one would need in the shallow rocky soils of the hill country will be different than those needed for areas of black land clay. It is easier to make the argumant now that it is more economical now to choose the plant species suitable to the site conditions than modifiy all the site conditions to suit the plants. This means it is vital to choose only those plant species that will be properly adapted to the site conditions.To make the correct choices you must know more about the plant species available. With the web site we hope to post enough material to facilitate those choices and make them easier.
The first big change will concern the sedges we grow and getting the information about them on to the web site. One thing to keep in mind about the sedges is that each sedge species has a certain set conditions that it prefer. If you can match the proper sedge to the conditions you have on a job you will have a trouble free, low maintenance ground cover. It is very important to know the sedges species to pick the proper one. Presenting information to help you find the proper sedge is going to priority of the web site.
The first change then will those that help in learning about the different sedges, how they look and how to pick the proper species. We will soon have sedge page that lists the sedges in a table that will allow you to compare the various sedges. One thing to consider is that the information we post is only applicable to the species of sedges we grow. I have spent a great deal of time with the latest keys and my microscope to identify correctly the species we grow. The problem with sedges is you can only ID them if you have seed and the latest literature like botanical keys that describes the various species. So the information presented here may not apply to any other sedges if they are not correctly indentified.
In the next few months as I get them written we will have information sheets available to download for each species. Because the speed and bandwidth constraints we can't put photos that have a high enough resolution to be useful on the site. If we did it would make the site slow as molasses. What we can do is have individual species data sheets that you will be able to download and printout.
Keep coming back to see the changes and the new features.You can always call to information