Well, it has been quite the week since my last column. Over three inches of rain last Saturday night, snow Sunday night and then tropical storm force winds on Monday. Well, it was the wind that did us in. A tree from the forest next door got completely uprooted by the wind since the ground was so soft from all the rain and as it came down took out our power line, phone line and internet at the store at around eleven in the morning. The tree came down about twenty feet away from two of my employees that were out marking plants in our garden center at the time, needless to say that stopped quickly. We had to close down the garden center as the lines were laying across several trees in our garden center and completely draped across our driveway to the warehouse. 

So until we could get NYSEG to the store to cut power to the lines no repair work could begin. They got here by five in the evening and had power cut by six, so that repair work could start early on Tuesday. Ross Electric came out Tuesday morning to make the needed repairs as the electric service and meter were ripped off the wall when the lines came down. Ratner & Son paving came out with chain saws to cut up the tree, and we had that moved out of the way quickly and all the electrical repairs were finished by eleven in the morning. So we called NYSEG (on our cellphone) to back out to turn the power back on and once we get power Spectrum would come to fix the internet. Well NYSEG didn’t make it by days end Tuesday as there were a lot of power outages around the county, so hopefully first thing Wednesday. 

Meanwhile in the store on Monday we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to get a register going again so that we could still stay open. We changed point of sale systems this January and all the back plans didn’t work. So after two hours of being closed simply because we couldn’t ring anything up, we finally cobbled a register together using my office computer/server as the cash register. Because we had no internet our regular credit card readers would not work, but we have a “Square” unit as a backup that works off of a cell phone. We had lights in the store as we have a backup generator that will power almost sixty percent of the store, but not the coffee room, office or bathrooms. The water still worked as the well pump is powered by the generator as well, but to use the bathroom we had a battery operated lantern hung on the doorknob. We managed to make due and hopefully things will get back to normal by the weekend, but with the nice weather midweek I expect it may get a little busier than we can handle if we don’t get things rectified. 

With our power issues, our greenhouse cooling system of opening the roof does not work and on Tuesday when it was fifty-six degrees outside, with the sun our greenhouse got ninety-four degrees, which is way too hot for the perennials that we have started out there. So Wednesday if the power isn’t back on we have to roll up the sides of the greenhouse so that it can air out faster and not build up as much heat. And on top of it all, the berry bushes were delivered Tuesday afternoon and another perennial delivery will be in Wednesday afternoon. That alone would keep us busy and now this. Well on the bright side the weather once the storms rolled through has been wonderful this week, and we have been able to get things set up in the garden center a lot sooner this year. Hopefully the warmer weather will stick around for good this spring, and we can get an early start to the season. Until next week, keep looking on the sunny side....