The Festive Rush That Buried My Little Nursery in Paper

The place and the way I ran it

My nursery sits on a dusty stretch of road on the northern edge of Pretoria, where the tar gives way to gravel and the veld starts pushing back against the town. I have been here for nineteen years. I dug the first beds myself, hauled the first bags of compost off the back of a borrowed bakkie, and planted a row of syringa saplings that are now taller than the shade cloth. People know me by name. They come for their spekboom and their aloes, their tomato seedlings in spring, their poinsettias and their potted conifers when the year turns toward the festive season.

For nineteen years I ran the whole thing on a green metal cash box, a fat calculator with worn rubber buttons, and a stack of carbon slip books I bought from the stationers in town. A customer chose a plant, I looked at the little handwritten price tag stabbed into the soil on a plastic stake, I punched the numbers, I wrote a slip, I made change out of the box. That was it. That was the entire system, if you can call it a system. My late husband used to tease me that I kept the books in my apron pocket, and he was not wrong.

I was proud of it, honestly. Stubborn about it. When my niece told me years ago that I should get a computer for the counter, I laughed at her. I told her the plants do not care about computers, and neither do I. I knew my stock by walking through it. I knew roughly what came in and roughly what went out. Roughly was good enough. For a long time roughly really was good enough.

When December turned on me

Then came the December that broke me. I can still feel it in my shoulders when I think about it.

It started the way it always does, with the first hot weekend when everybody suddenly remembers they want colour on the patio before the family arrives. But this one did not slow down. It kept building. The Saturday before the sixteenth I had cars parked all the way down the gravel and out onto the verge. I had two casual helpers I had taken on for the season, both good with a spade and hopeless with numbers, and me, running between the till table and the shade house and the pile of compost bags, apron heavy with coins, slip book flapping.

The trouble was the volume. When you sell three plants an hour you can hold it all in your head. When you are selling a hundred, when there is a queue of impatient people in the heat, each holding a tray of seedlings and a bag of bone meal and a pot they pulled off the wrong shelf, your head simply cannot do it anymore. I was writing slips so fast the carbon smeared. I was guessing at prices because the little stakes had fallen out of the pots or faded to nothing in the sun. Someone would ask what the big cycad cost and I genuinely did not know, because I had priced it eight months ago and written it on a tag that was long gone.

The mistakes I could not see

The mistakes crept in quietly, the way weeds do. You do not notice the first one. You notice the twentieth.

I would sell a flat of petunias for the price I had in my head from last season, not the price I had actually paid the grower this season, which had gone up. I was losing money on every tray and cheerfully handing people change while I did it. I over charged a dear old man for his fruit trees because I misremembered, and he was too polite to argue, and I only realised that night and felt sick about it. I had no way of knowing what was actually selling. The bedding plants were flying out and I kept running dry of the marigolds, but I had three hundred lobelia going leggy and unloved in the back because I had over ordered them and had no record telling me so.

At the end of each of those long days I would sit at the kitchen table with the cash box open, the coins in little towers, the notes flattened out, and my calculator, and I would try to make the money in the box agree with the slips in the book. It never agreed. Never once that December. Always short, or once strangely over, which frightened me more because it meant I truly had no idea what was happening. I would sit there past ten at night with a cup of rooibos going cold, adding the same column five times and getting five answers, my eyes burning, the moths knocking against the window.

The evening the cash box gave up

The night it finally cracked me open was two days before Christmas. I had taken more money that day than any single day in nineteen years, and I should have been overjoyed. Instead I was on the kitchen floor, literally on the floor, with slips spread out on the tiles around me in some order that made sense only to my exhausted brain, trying to work out why I was nearly eight hundred rand adrift. Was it stolen? Was it a mistake? Had I given someone the wrong change on a big sale? I could not tell. I had no way to tell. The green cash box sat on the table above me with its lid open like a mouth, and I remember looking up at it and thinking, quite calmly, you have beaten me. You cannot do this anymore.

I did not sleep. And somewhere in that not sleeping the stubbornness finally drained out of me. All those years I had told myself that a proper till was for chain stores and impersonal places, not for a little nursery where I knew everyone. But sitting there I understood that the paper was not keeping the place personal. The paper was stealing my December. It was stealing the part of the job I actually loved, which is walking a nervous first time gardener to the right shade of clivia and telling her she cannot kill it even if she tries.

Asking the question I had refused to ask

The morning after Christmas, when the nursery was quiet and the leftover poinsettias sat in their sad red rows, I made myself do the thing I had refused to do for years. I phoned my niece and I asked her, properly asked her, how other small shops keep track of what they sell and what they still have. She did not gloat, bless her. She just started explaining how a proper point of sale system works, how it holds every price so you never have to remember or guess, how it counts your stock down as you sell so you know the marigolds are nearly finished before you run out.

I was quiet for a long time on the phone. I think she thought the line had dropped. I was just letting it sink in that I had spent nineteen Decembers doing in my aching head what a machine could have simply held for me. She told me plenty of tiny businesses, one woman operations smaller than mine, run everything now through a pos point of sale system that fits on a small counter and does not need you to be clever with computers at all. That last part mattered to me more than anything, because my fear was never really the money. It was that I am a plant person, not a numbers person, and I did not want to be made to feel stupid at my own till.

What the quiet season taught me

I spent that slow January learning. I was slow and clumsy at first, and I said some words in the shade house that I would not repeat in front of my grandchildren. But I sat with it. I entered my stock, plant by plant, and for the first time in nineteen years I had an honest list of everything I owned and what it had cost me. Seeing it laid out like that was almost emotional. I had been carrying all of it in my head and my apron and my smeared slip books, and here it was, held steady at last, a proper pos system doing the remembering so I did not have to.

The following December was a different animal. The rush came, harder than ever, the cars down the gravel again, the queue in the heat. But this time when a woman asked what the big cycad cost, I knew in two seconds, and it was the right price, this season's price. This time the money agreed with the record at the end of the day, every day, and I went to bed at a reasonable hour instead of sitting on the kitchen floor at midnight surrounded by paper. This time I saw the marigolds running low while there was still time to order more, and I did not over buy the lobelia.

The green cash box is still here. I keep it on a shelf in the shed, with a fern in it now, because I am sentimental and it carried me a long way. But I do not miss those Decembers on the kitchen floor. I got my evenings back. I got the loveliest part of the work back, the walking and the talking and the telling people their clivia will forgive them. And I learned, late and stubborn as I am, that keeping proper track of things did not make my little nursery any less mine. It just let me breathe.