The CENTS show is coming up in OHIO, and the ANLA Mgmt Clinic is coming up in Louisville, KY. Two great events to sharpen some skills, do some networking, and learn about some new possibilities in our great profession.

For most people, the bulk of their income is going to come form earning power in their chosen profession. Therefore, from the standpoint of building wealth, free time is better spent sharpening one’s professional skills rather than studying investing.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 200,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 9 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

If folks do not believe there house is going to appreciate or at least stay at least level there will not be much enthusiasm to put money in those backyards which means no money in our pockets for sure.

We can only hope for a bottoming out of the market and a real start to the rise in the unemployment numbers putting Americans back to work, and a more positve outlook on the future.

Good luck to us all and to those in those pockets where there is some recovery go get ‘em, hit it hard and be thankful you are in the right place at what is a wrong time for the rest of us.

The rest of us will just continue to work hard, hope for the best just power through and have a good 2012.

Today it was 54 degrees and sunny. The cats were grateful and played outside most of the day, it was a great day to get some good fresh air and just enjoy an amazing December day.

It was so great I’d have to call it a Chamber of Commerce kind of day here in beautiful East Central Ohio.

Here’s to wishing everyone a Happy New Year and a great 2012.

Will I post more in 2012? I sure hope so

Rick Anderson

Soldiers helping soldiers

The story

Okay I pulled this account from Blonde Housewife, who pulled it from BlackFive(dot)net I’d been looking for something to post about today and this seems the most appropiate. On a day when so many gave the last full measure for the United States of America.

I pulled this from the D-Day website, some startling numbers of involvement

Operation Neptune

195,701 – Number of personnel assigned to Operation Neptune (sailors and soldiers)

25,000 – Number of Navy allies crews engaged in the framework of Operation Neptune

15,500 – Number of U.S. airborne units parachuted on June 6, 1944 at midnight

11,590 – Number of aircrafts provided for the operation Neptune (fighters, bombers, transport and reconnaissance aircrafts, gliders)

10,750 – Number of trips of the Allied air forces during 24 hours on June 6, 1944

9,500 – Number of Allied attack and support planes on flight on D-Day

7,900 – Number of British airborne units parachuted on June 6, 1944 at midnight

6,939 – Total number of ships deployed during operation Neptune

6,460 – Number of warships and civilian ships deployed during the amphibious assault

1,900 – Number of aircrafts and gliders used in the night of June 5 to 6, 1944

319 – Total interventions of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) on June 6, 1944

200 – Number of warships that participated in the naval bombardment of June 6, 1944 (battleships, monitors, cruisers and destroyers)

120 – Number of damaged Allied ships (June 6 to 30, 1944)

59 – Number of sunk Allied ships (June 6 to 30, 1944)

D-Day

The Invasion

Today is June, 6th.

History may record June 6, 1944 as the single most important day in the date of Western Civilization. It should. -Blonde Housewife

From BlackFive.net :

It actually started on June 5th. And it almost didn’t start then. The weather had turned bad. A great storm had blown in from the Atlantic. High wind and high seas had forced ships of all kinds back into bays and inlets. Low clouds made it impossible for aircraft to find landmarks. If the weather didn’t break, nothing would happen until at least July.

But the weather did break, and so, it began only a day later than planned.

There must have been about, oh, I don’t know, 15 of us there. Our two great men were there, Monty and Eisenhower. The poor weatherman had to talk first. Eisenhower asked Monty what he felt. ”Sure, I’ll do whatever you say, you know. We’re ready.” Then Eisenhower very calmly said, ”We’ll go.”

150,000 soldiers—American, British, Canadian, French, and many others—embarked on 5,000 ships, began moving towards places known today as St. Lô, Vierville-sur-Mer, Pouppeville, Arromanches, La Rivière-Saint-Sauveur, Pointe-du-hoc, Ouistreham.

The men on those ships, for the most part, didn’t know those names. They had simpler terms for the beaches where they would be spending the day—and for many, the rest of their lives. They called them Juno, Sword, Gold, Omaha, and Utah.

There were soldiers from many nations involved that day, all of whom deserve to be recognized and remembered. But as an American, it is the men from my country that I will write about.

Only about 15% of them had ever seen combat. But by this time, cold, wet, seasick, crammed into airless holds, or huddled on unprotected decks, many of them preferred combat to what they were going through on board ship.

Get us off these ships. I don’t care what’s waiting for us.

As it happened, though, it didn’t begin on the beaches, but in the air. On the night of June 5th, an armada of over 800 C-47 transport planes ferried the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions over the invasion fleet towards France. For them, the weather was still pretty bad. And it was dark.

It was going to be difficult. Everything depended on landing the pathfinders in the right place. Then the pathfinders had to light the dim beacons for the landing zones. The pilots carrying the airborne forces had to see the beacons, then they had to fly precisely, right over the landing zones.

Dwight D Eisenhower and the troops

And the Germans. Always the Germans, with searchlights and flares and the 88mm anti-aircraft cannon—the “flak” guns.

Getting everyone down alive, together, and ready to fight was going to be a chancy business. And the airborne troops knew it.

I lined up all the pilots. I says, ”I don’t give a damn what you do, but for one thing. If you’re going to drop us on a hill or if you’re going to drop us on our zone, drop us all in one place.”

But…they didn’t. The airborne forces were scattered. Almost no one landed on their programmed landing zone. Units from the two airborne divisions were scattered and intermixed, forcing officers and NCOs to create scratch units on the spot, with whomever they could find. The 101st Airborne Division commander, Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, found that his new “unit” consisted of himself, his deputy commander, a colonel, several captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels…and three enlisted men. He quipped, “Never have so few been commanded by so many.”

And still they fought. Gen. Taylor soon had gathered a force of 90 officers, clerks, MPs, and a smattering of infantrymen. With them, he liberated the town of Pouppeville. Elsewhere, American soldiers gathered into groups, and struck out for an objective. Even if it wasn’t their objective, it was someone’s, and they were going to take and hold it.

And when they took it from the Germans, the Germans tried to take it back. But the paratroopers held.

It was a terrible day for paratroopers, but they did terrible fighting in there and they really made their presence known.

By this time, the Germans knew something was going on, if not precisely what. Their responses were confused. Their commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had returned to Germany for a brief leave. He wasn’t the only one absent that night. The 21st Panzer Division’s commander, Lt. Gen. Edgar Feuchtinger, was spending the night in Paris with his mistress. Col. Gen. Freiderich Dollman, commander of the 7th Army, and many of his staff officers and commanders, were 90 miles away in Rennes, on a map exercise. Ironically, the scenario for that exercise was countering an airborne landing.

The Germans were surprised, yet subordinate commanders began to take the initiative, seeking out the paratroops and engaging them, trying to determine what was happening. Was it the invasion? A diversion from the expected landings in Calais? What was happening?

Then, as the black night gave way to the cold, gray dawn of June 6th, they began to find out. Looming out of the fog, a vast armada of haze gray ships and landing craft began to move ashore.

At 5:50am, the warships began shelling Utah and Omaha Beaches. In the exchange of fire with German artillery on Utah Beach, one of the landing control ships was sunk. As a result, when the first wave came ashore on Utah beach at 6:30am, they were 2,000 yards south of their designated landing point.

It was a blessing in disguise. There was almost no enemy opposition. Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. made a personal reconnaissance past Utah beach, and found the beach exits almost undefended. He returned to the beach to coordinate the push inland. By the end of the day, 197 Americans were dead around Utah Beach, but the landing force had pushed inland.

At Omaha Beach, the story was much bleaker.

At around 6:30am, 96 tanks, an Army-Navy special Engineer Task Force, and eight companies of assault infantry went ashore, right into the teeth of withering machine-gun fire. Despite heavy bombardment, the German defenses were intact. Because the landing was at low tide, the men had to cross 185 yards of flat, open beach, as the well-protected German gunners cut them down. Tanks were sunk in their landing ships, or blown up at the edge of the water.

Them poor guys, they died like sardines in a can, they did. They never had a chance.

The men from the 29th Division’s 116 Regimental Combat Team (RCT) and the 1st Division’s 16th RCT were pushed off course in their landing craft by strong currents, and landed with machine gun bullets spanging off the gunwhales of their LCT’s. When the bow ramp dropped, men were riddled with bullets before they could even move. Others, jumping off the sides of the ramp, burdened with their equipment, drowned as they landed in water over their heads. Many more died on the beach, at the water’s edge.

You couldn’t lay your hand down without you didn’t touch a body. You had to weave your way over top of the corpses.

The first instinct for many was to crouch behind the steel anti-tank obstacles, to take cover behind the bodies of fallen comrades, to try and scrape shallow trenches with their hands. And yet, they couldn’t. More assault waves were on the way, and the volume of fire was so great that to stay where they were meant certain death. The beach had to be cleared for the incoming waves of infantry, but to move across that open beach also seemed like a death sentence.

He started yelling, ”God damn it, get up. Move in. You’re going to die, anyway. Move in and die.”

And so they did. They crossed that empty expanse of beach to the only cover to be had, a narrow strip of rock shingle at the base of the cliffs, below a short, timber seawall.

Those who made it to the shingle in those first hours…just stopped. Behind them was a carpet of bodes, and a tide that ran red with blood, making the spray from the curling waves a sickly pink. Ahead of them were intact and well-armed German defenders. Those men cowering on the shingle behind the low seawall had seen their units decimated, watched successive waves being slaughtered as they hit the beach. Shocked and disorganized, they stayed beneath the seawall, in the only narrow strip of safety they could find.

Meanwhile, at Point-du-hoc, at 7:00am, the men of the 2nd Ranger battalion came ashore beneath the cliffs. Their mission was to climb the steep cliffs with grappling hooks and ropes, to capture the German heavy artillery threatening the Omaha and Utah landings.

Under heavy fire from the cliffs, they fired back with the small mortars that launched the grappling hooks. With their fellow rangers dying on the beach beside them, they grasped the ropes and climbed. They climbed until German riflemen picked them off. They climbed while they watched their buddies arch in pain, and then fall headlong to the rocky beach below. They climbed as the men above them plummeted into them while falling, threatening to tear their fragile grip from the rope. They climbed and climbed.

And when they got to the top, the Germans were ready for them. But the Rangers were ready, too. So they fought their way through the pillboxes and trenches surrounding the gun emplacements. Pushing through the Germans, killing them to capture the guns.

And when they did, they discovered that the guns weren’t there. The men of the 2nd Ranger battalion had captured empty concrete emplacements, at the cost of half their number.

Back on Omaha Beach, the carnage continued.

Confusion, total confusion. We were just being slaughtered.

And as for the men (Huh. “Men.” Most of them hadn’t yet seen their twentieth summer.) who had survived the holocaust on the beach, and who now hid behind the tiny cover of the shingle? Well, who could have blamed them if they had just quit? Decided that this one taste of violence and death was enough for a lifetime? Decided that they didn’t want to face what must have seemed like inevitable and horrible, painful death?

And yet…they didn’t. Somehow, they gathered whatever courage was left to them, and began to try and figure out how to get off that beach, and move inland.

We were recreating from this mass of twisted bodies a fighting unit again, and it was done by soldiers, not by the officers.

It was C Company of the 116th RCT, accompanied by men from the 5th Ranger Battalion, that began the push. At the top of the seawall was a narrow road, and on the other side of it, protecting a draw, was a mesh of barbed wire. Pvt. Ingram E. Lambert jumped over the wall, crossed the road, and set a Bangalore torpedo in the barbed wire obstacle. He pulled the igniter, but nothing happened. Caught in the open, Pvt. Lambert was cut down by machine gun fire.

His platoon leader, 2d Lt. Stanley M. Schwartz, crossed the road, fixed the igniter, and blew the torpedo. The men of C Company and 5th Rangers began crossing through the gap, some falling to enemy fire. As they left the beach, and assaulted through the draw, others followed. Those men shivering behind the seawall grabbed their rifles, stood up, and began leaving the beach, moving toward the Germans.

Other breaches in the German defenses followed. Company I of the 116th RCT breached the strongpoints defending les Moulins draw. The 1st Section of Company E, 16th RCT, who had come ashore in the first wave, along with elements of two other companies, blew their own gap in the wire, and moved inland. Company G, 16th RCT, needed four Bangalore torpedoes to cut a single lane in the wire and anti-personnel mines that were set up with trip wires.

The breaches were narrow, and tenuous. Follow-on waves still faced murderous fire from the bluffs overlooking the beaches, and there was still confusion as the timetable was set back by the initial fury of German defenses. The 18th RCT was originally scheduled to land at 10:30am, but didn’t get on the beach until 1:00pm. The 118th RCT was delayed even more.

By the end of the day 3393 Americans were dead or missing, 3184 wounded, and 26 captured. But the breaches in the German defenses had been made. The Americans were ashore, and they were moving inland. The “Atlantic Wall” had been broken, but at a heavy cost.

When I was relieved and I walked by, oh God, the guys that died that day — all those beautiful, wonderful friends of mine, the day before, the night before, kidding and joking.

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was the German Army’s Commander in Chief, West. He was a crusty old soldier who disdained the flashy accouterments of rank that a German field marshal usually wore. He was content to attach his batons to the shoulders of his old regimental colonel’s uniform. He was also a realist.

Knowing what D-Day meant, he called the Chief of Operations for the German Armed forces, Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl. “What do you suggest we do now, Herr Feldmarschall?” Jodl asked.

“End the war, you fools! What else can you do?” replied the old warrior.

The American Vet

Here’s the promo line:

Plants growing around your bum? Yes! This wooden chair by Kinokoto is designed to be a stress-free zone with wells for plants in the seat back.

Plants!

The above is a close-up of the chair and below is the big picture look

The Plant Chair

So, is it usable? How would you fit this chair into a landscape? A stand alone piece maybe? Part of some sort of set? I dunno.

As for myself I am having a hard time getting past the milk crate look.

Kinokoto

Kinokoto is a Japanese  company that designs all sorts of modern looking furniture, if you have a chance check some of it out. But it’s all in Japanese, so fair warning.

I am completely out of this part of our industry but no matter, with over 200 hundred acres behind me with a lot of fallen material, I’m ready!

Here’s some footage that’s not part of the regular TV series AX MEN.

A very tough job and a very necessary job.

The Rygards

Sango Kaku

I always knew that the decline of the housing market was going to hurt/effect our industry for years.

It’s a true game changer and there are going to be losers and survivors. I doubt there will be many outright winners.

So . . .  I was reading through my ANLA forum and this letter showed up from John Barbour the head honcho at Bold Springs Nursery. John is a very reputable guy in the Nursery business with over 25 years running Bold Spring along with it’s now 1,200 acres.

1st Crash

Prices dropped off from everyone involved and buyers/consumers squeezed hard knowing that folks were desperate for business, and these actions are going to cost us in the long run.

Please read over and respond here or directly. I am interested to hear your take on Mr. Barbour’s forecasting on prices for nursery stock.

Slow Recovery

I continue to see nothing but bad news about housing numbers and recovery. Including crazy numbers about the amount of empty houses in America which all add up to lost work and income for us.

We need to be smart, and clever, and resilient in the coming years. I think we’re in for a long bumpy, uncomfortable ride.

WHY TREE PRICES WILL INCREASE

John H. Barbour, President, Bold Spring Nursery

Price increases are a sore topic. In our current economic climate, cost cutting has become a way of life as businesses fight to conserve cash and preserve margins. The unwelcome news of a price increase from a supplier is usually the last thing a buyer wants to hear. The ornamental tree business has been no different. Growers have suffered a crushing over-supply of trees which was, in fact, developing 6 -7 years ago, but was masked by the frenetic pace of construction through the middle part of the decade. When the bubble burst in 2007-2008 the demand for trees was reduced dramatically, beyond what few of us have ever witnessed. Since that time, growers, desperate to maintain a market share, have reacted by cutting prices for each of the last 3 years to the point where prices, on some items, have reached 30-year lows.

Unlike many businesses, tree growers cannot simply downsize their company to a scale that matches their sales. Existing inventory requires upkeep and that costs money. Like everyone else, growers have aggressively cut costs to try to staunch the negative flow of cash. That is a tall order in a world where the costs of raw materials such as burlap, diesel, and plastic have only increased. So, in many cases, fertilizer, pesticides, pruning, and staking have gone by the board. The results of excessive cost cutting are evident in the marketplace this year and many growers are simply not capable of supplying trees of adequate quality. For most growers, even the cost of culling bad trees is daunting when cash is tight and so the trees sit around, on display in the fields or, in the case of containers, growing increasingly pot-bound.

The other major area of cost cutting has been a sharp decrease in tree-planting in nurseries. Many cash conscious growers have realized that if they cannot afford to maintain what they have, then there is little point in putting more trees in the ground. As a result, tree planting has declined 70-80% over this period. This reduction occurred progressively: first by about 20% in 2008-2009 and then an additional 30-40% in each of the two following years. This trend has only just begun to become evident, with many smaller-sized trees and evergreens becoming scarce this spring. Over the next two years the breadth of shortages will increase dramatically and progressively, as more gaps appear while the old inventory outgrows the market, becomes ruined from neglect, is sawed down to increase spacing, or grubbed out entirely to prepare fields for re-planting.

Growers are watching carefully to see which items are selling out and they will raise prices whenever market conditions allow. This is not a matter of greed as much as survival. Most nurseries are just hanging on and absorbing losses, if they are even doing that. We are all watching while prominent nurseries fail, unable to continue in an economic meltdown that was nearly impossible to predict.

The shock waves from the sub-prime melt-down will continue to be felt, but will soon be felt in different ways. The crash of demand will be followed by a crash in supply caused by a reduction in the number of nurseries that have been willing and able to continue to risk investment in the planting and maintenance of quality inventory these last three years. And just as the construction boom masked the over-supply of trees 5-6 years ago, the construction bustis masking the currently developing shortage. When we experience even a modest resumption in new construction, the shortages will be difficult to manage.

It is important for businesses to educate their customers for what is coming. There is a special challenge for those who are bidding projects that are further out. There is a shocking gap between the desperate pricing of 2010-11, and the prices of, even, the over-supplied market of 2007. But when scarcities become prevalent, prices will return to their former levels, and eventually go higher still. That market of shortages may be much closer than you realize. Buyers should be prepared for price increases in fall 2011 and very large increases in 2012 and 2013.

That means for most of us it’s $50.00 bucks to fill the tank(at minimum).

$4.00 When?

It appears just a matter of time that gas will reach the $4.00 mark for a gallon. When this happens will the American public drastically cut back and just stop driving, which would in turn drive prices down to some degree?

Problem is, these type of prices really hurt our industry. This is a no-win story for anyone in the design, install, or maintenance side. We all lose.

Electric

The cries will go out to buy more electric cars, but electric trucks, dump trucks, mowers, skid-steer loaders etc., are a long way from electric capability. It’s impractical and pie in the sky.

The idea that electric cars are the answer is just not practical, maybe down the road but not now. And . . . btw, where is all that electric power going to come from to power those electric cars? Gas, natural gas and coal.

Drill

We need to continue drilling in the Gulf, put those folks back to work. To go after the shale oil, and to continue to use coal. The United States burns coal much more efficiently and cleaner than anywhere else in the World, and we have a lot of it.

Jobs

Lets put Americans back to work, lets use what we have here, and not use what’s over there.

Let Americans create the work and the jobs. Lower the gas prices. Make us more efficient and viable.

Let’s improve our profit margins.

Let’s make America and Americans successful again. Let’s make our industry profitable, worthwhile and  fun again.

Let’s go!