My Palm Tree Nursery and Economic Stimulus

As I BLOG along about the Recession, I'm looking out at my California backyard with a giant greenhouse and hundreds of Palm Trees. I can't help but draw some parallels between my Palm Nursery and the economy.

I raise my palms from seeds. I generally sew them about 1000 at a time. Big box of good soil, water and sunshine- in about three months they start popping up. When they've got a few leaves on them I transplant them to pots and the small new plants become medium sized plants. When young they're susceptible to pests, too much heat or cold and I have to shelter them somewhat as a group and do some minor weeding-other than that, they pretty much grow on their own. I fertilize them when they get older.

Usually about a third will die no matter what I do, for a variety of reasons, every so often there will be some kind of blight or disease and I'll lose more than half. The survivors are transplanted into a larger pot where they will grow into strong, disease-resistant, healthy mature seed bearing trees.

When compared with my Palm Nursery, our current economic moves don't seem to make much sense. It looks like we aren't planting any new seeds, we've just had a major blight on all of our medium sized plants, and the big ones that haven't been sold are diseased or contracted to sell their seeds for the next 20 years. In the mean time we're spending alot of money on new pots, gardening tools and plastic for the greenhouse, instead of putting every seed into the ground we can.

Hope for the future rests in making sure the small and medium sized plants (businesses) we have left are protected in perfect conditions and given a shot of fertilizer so they have the best chance at becoming big trees. If some of the big trees (big businesses) are sick, the standard practice in the nursery is to quarantine them so they can't affect others, and not waste resources on them that can be better utilized by planting new trees. And we need to plant a few thousand new seeds right now. Over time we'll have a full, healthy nursery (economy) again.