The facts about shipping plants
When you order plants from any commercial nursery, chances are that the plants will be shipped to you via air cargo or by a commercial express shipping company. Plants are perishable, of course. Once the plants leave a nursery, the number of ways they can perish grows with every leg of their journey.

Robrick Nursery works to reduce the chance of injury to your plants during shipping. While Robrick Nursery cannot guarantee the condition of your plants after they have left our Nursery, we have worked to design a packaging system that helps protect our plants on their journey to you. Our goal is for you to receive your plants looking as beautiful as when they left our nursery.

What could happen?
As plants travel across the country, their containers are handled by numerous hands, placed on a variety of transportation vehicles and exposed to a wide variety of climate conditions. An express shipper’s duty is to move packages from point A to point B as quickly as possible without inflicting “too” much damage on the cargo. In doing so, containers are often treated rougher than we would like.
When packages are transferred from one transportation mode to another, they are tossed, pushed, pulled, kicked, thrown on carts and run over rollers. During these transitions, narrow, top-heavy boxes can tip over and their contents can be unknowingly destroyed.
As trucks rumble across bumpy roads and around sharp turns, their cargo shifts and bounces. Once again, a narrow top heavy box will not stay upright in these conditions.

Physics cannot be changed by printing 'up' arrows on the sides of boxes. All the printed directions on our competitor's narrow boxes cannot force their boxes to stay upright.

The need for a lower center of gravity
Robrick Nursery ships a lot of plants and our shipping experience helped us develop a container system that protects plants from the stress of rough travel. The Robrick Nursery wide footprint box has a low center of gravity and is not likely to tip over during transport or transfer. As our boxes our stacked next to our competitors boxes, the stability of our boxes can be seen as the other boxes struggle to keep their balance.
Not only do our boxes manage to stay upright, but they are designed to house our plants securely in individual layers that offer a second degree of stability. The inserts in our boxes fit our trays snugly to prevent shifting while they are being bounced around the country.

What about the weather?
When plants leave our beautiful Florida climate, they have grown accustomed to our mild temperatures. As plants move about the country their containers can be subjected to a severe range of temperatures. Radical temperature changes on our human bodies play havoc with our immune system. Imagine what fragile young plants must feel like when they are experience large temperature fluctuations. Even worse than temperature fluctuations alone, we all know what happens to young plants when they are placed in near or below freezing conditions.

Good insulation is the answer
The key to successfully traveling through an unknown temperature spectrum is to insulate the plants enough so that they will not recognize the changes around them. Beyond buying our own temperature regulated trucks and planes, Robrick Nursery needed to reduce our plants' exposure to damaging temperatures.
We found that the heavy weight materials used to construct our boxes, combined with our layering method, helps maintain a steady temperature in the depths of the boxes where the plants are housed. Not only do our double layered boxes help insulate our plants, they also provide a sturdier shipping container with a more stable center of gravity.

"How do you know Robrick Nursery's boxes create a temperature friendly environment?"
We have performed box studies and collected temperature data to show the stability of temperatures inside our boxes.
We used a controlled environment to measure temperature changes over time within our shipping boxes. Our studies show that the survival rate of our plants should stay high over the course of a normal shipping period, even when the containers are subjected to wide temperature fluctuations. A well insulated box will not completely maintain the original packing temperature, but will allow the temperature to change gradually over a long time. Avoiding rapid temperature changes is the first step in helping plants survive the outside elements. Extending the temperature change time as long as possible is the second step in keeping plants healthy.

The Data
Our measurements were conducted using Sensitech TempTale Manager Modules. Our welder has a large walk-in freezer where he stores game that he has hunted. We placed our boxes in the freezer and recorded three separate measurements over 44 hours. The three measurements were the freezer temperature, our Summer Box temperature, and our Winter Box temperature. As the graph below displays, our winter box will protect our plants from freezing temperatures over the course of a normal shipment.