Let me present a somewhat different viewpoint :-) I've worked in the nursery industry for several decades. Every retail nursery I've worked for had a 12 month return/warranty/guarantee policy but only on woody plants - trees and shrubs. Never perennials, annuals or houseplants. And other than producing a receipt (or verifying our customer database) to ensure the plant was in fact purchased at that nursery and bringing back the dead plant (or a photo if too large to remove and return), we never hesitated to refund or credit the customer regardless of the reason. Why? Because the actual volume of returns experienced by nurseries adopting this type of policy is less than 2% of total sales........IOW, a drop in the bucket in the larger scheme of things :-) And by adopting such a policiy the retail establishment gains far more in customer goodwill than it loses in refunded returns. FWIW, the vast majority of returns tend to be customer's fault (don't beat me up - it's true!!)with improper watering the number one cause. Next on the list is improper planting or just unsuitable planting. My current nursery does not warranty certain borderline hardy plants so they are excluded but sold with a warning that they may not be fully hardy. Buyer beware!! And there are limits -- if our records indicate we have refunded the same plant previously, we will usually refund again but with the firm caveat that next time it's theirs for keeps!! Since I do not buy mail order I really can't speak to their policies but I'd have a very hard time personally expecting anything bare root to be warranteed. It is just a very risky way of presenting and shipping plants under the best of conditions.

Our garden club uses colored plastic knives stuck into each pot. There is a color chart hung on the wall above each area of plants - just a poster board with knives glued to it and the price for that color knife. We have not heard of any swapping of prices going on, but our prices are so cheap, anyway, that it would be unlikely. At check-out a helper pulls the knives and notes on a little buck-slip how many of each color, and then the cashier tallies the total, while the knives go back for wiping with antibacterial wipes and sorting/saving for next year. Pretty easy and efficient. For plant identification, each member gets as many small labels as they need to fill out before bringing their plants, or they can do it when they come.

One of my tasks this winter is to make labels for the plants I bought in the last two years. I had been using Avery Weatherproof labels, but after a few years they're starting to come off. I'd like something a bit more permanent. It sounds like the P-touch labels may work. I had been printing from my computer (now a Mac) and would like to continue to do that. I'm thinking about getting the P-Touch 2730 and wondering if anyone is using that. Also, trying to decide between the TZ tape which I think is what people are referring to as UV protected. There is also an "Extra Strength" tape - wondering if anyone has tried that. It says it has "up to twice the adhesive strength than regular p-touch tapes." I want them to stay on my zinc markers, but not to be too hard to handle.

Maria Elena.....Our Dymo labeller was the old style one I mentioned we had before the Brother one was bought. We found the Dymo labels tended to unstick themselves from whatever after a while, more so from curved surfaces like the tops of electric plugs (the front face has raised lettering on so couldn't stick labels there) and even from some flat things too. Perhaps because the tape was rather thick and rigid...? Also the machine wasn't that efficient in embossing, sometimes it didn't print all parts of a letter, on other occasions it failed to move the tape through and printed two characters on top of each other! Plus it was a pain dialling up each character with that wheel type arrangement having to keep spinning it back and forth through the whole alphabet. It was OK at the time I guess as there wasn't anything else, but now there is! Looking at the two prices quoted above and their similarity......Brother gets my vote in this instance! Gill