Plant Shipping Tips and Guarantees

First, if you are willing to make the effort to follow my suggestions for receiving your plants in good condition, I’ll generally replace plants that arrive dead, although I’ll expect you to pay shipping for the replacement order.  The costs of replacement shipping are generally not covered in our guarantees. Our remedy for most live arrival issues is replacement of the product.

Second, unlike fruit flies, which I generally ship regardless of my concerns, I assume you will want me to hold your plant order until I feel there is a reasonable chance for the order to arrive safely.  I will be in touch by email to discuss this.  When conditions are moderate, I’ll ship plant orders immediately.

Below I present a bit of information on how the shipping process works, and the issues that can affect your fruit fly order.  The main preventative measure you can take is to arrange to have your order held at a local FedEx counter for you to pick up, and you should consider this if the temps are going to be over about 90, or below 40 in your location, or at the hub cities, as described below.  If there are temps below 40 or above 90 in Indianapolis, or above 90 in Memphis (the two main FedEx hubs, see below for more on FedEx hubs) you may also need to be concerned.  That’s the short version, see below for more information!

Weather is the primary concern for plant shipments, and both cold conditions and heat can cause damage to delicate plants.  One of the highest risk spots on your plants trip to you is on the truck on its way to your home, the delivery guarantee for 2^nd day shipping is as late as 8 pm, which means that if it is hot, or cold at your end, the box can be exposed to dangerous temps on the truck as it travels to you.  The best remedy to this problem is to have the box held at a local FedEx station, the larger and closer to your airport, the better, since the closer to your nearest large airport, the earlier the box will be placed inside out of the heat or cold.  Please feel free to contact me for help in finding your FedEx locations! 

Unfortunately, there is also another way for your box to be overheated or chilled, which is as it routes through the hub city.  I apologize, this is a bit in depth, but it will help you to understand what we are up against!  All FedEx Express (as opposed to Ground) shipments travel through one of three different “Hub” cities on their way to you.  In the past this occurred during night time hours, but now it generally occurs in the afternoon of the day after the package is shipped. Part of this process involves being unloaded and moved around outside, and when temperatures are very hot, this can result in your plant order getting overheated, or when it is cold, they can be chilled or frozen.  There is little to be done about this, during the winter I use heat packs when necessary, but they only do so much.  The three hub cities are Indianapolis, Memphis and Fort Worth. Unfortunately, it is difficult to say through which hub boxes will route, although in some cases I can guess accurately…My main tips for guessing-   Any destination address within about 300 miles of a hub is going to be served by that hub.  The South East region will generally be served by Memphis. If you have placed orders with us in the past, you can look up the tracking info on a previous shipment, and see which hub the box routed through, this is generally going to be the same for each shipment, but things like storms or unusual conditions at one of the hubs can throw everything off.