Pallets for Apopka nurseries and foliage growers

What a grower needs

• Clean, dry pallets in season, in the size the carts and racks fit.
• Odd sizes sometimes, so dimensions matter more than count.
• A way to clear broken pallets out of a growing yard.
• Storage that does not turn a stack into a mould bed.

The wet-yard problem

Orange County's nursery and floriculture industry was ranked eighth in the nation in a 2009 county report, and a nursery is wet by design. Irrigation, shade houses and summer rain keep the air damp. A pallet stored there needs cover, a gap under it and moving air, or it will be above 20 percent moisture before it is needed.

Send dimensions

If the pallet is not a standard size, send length and width. The custom page explains what a builder needs.

Why plant pallets are different

Potted plants ship on racks, carts and pallets whose footprints follow the pot and the tray, not the grocery industry. A grower may use the 48 x 40 for some products and a cart for others, and the cart often gets its own base. Water and soil come with the freight: a pallet that has stood under irrigation or carried wet pots holds more moisture than one in a warehouse and may have soil in its joints.

What a buyer or recycler wants to know

• Whether any pallets came into contact with soil, fertiliser or pesticide.
• How long the stack has been in a shade house or open yard.
• Whether sizes other than 48 x 40 are present, and in what quantity.

A pallet in a plant yard, step by step

1. Potted stock is staged on a pad or in a shade house, often watered from above.
2. A pallet is loaded wet, with soil and leaf litter in the joints.
3. It travels on a truck and is unloaded at a distribution dock.
4. It returns, or does not, and the empty waits in a yard where irrigation keeps the air damp.

What that does to the wood

Four wet steps in a chain leave little time for drying. A grower who stacks returned pallets on timbers, in a breezy spot, and lets them dry before loading again gets many more trips from the same pallet.

Carts, trays and the pot

Nursery stock is packed by pot size. A one-gallon pot sits in a tray of several; trays stack on shelves of a rolling cart, and the cart or its base replaces the pallet for much of the trip. Pallets still carry bagged soil, mulch, fertiliser and empty pots, which arrive on standard 48 x 40 decks. The yard therefore holds two populations of pallet: those that belong to the plant side and those that came in with supplies.

Soil and chemicals on the wood

A pallet that carried fertiliser or pesticide, or that has stood in a spill, should not be offered to a food or pharmaceutical buyer. A grower that can say which stacks are from supply deliveries and which from the growing yard gives a recycler the means to route each correctly. Soil in the joints is a problem for reuse, though not for recycling to chips.

Mulch, bark and bagged media

Bagged potting mix, bark and mulch are heavy when wet and travel on stacks that reach shoulder height. A bagged-media pallet is a plain pallet with a wide footprint load, and the bags sag between deck boards unless the boards are close together. Growers who buy these products by the truckload end up with the supplier's pallets on the yard, in whatever condition they arrived, and in sizes that may differ from the nursery's own.