PotMakers and Plants for Store in Singapore
Answered by: Conrad Richter
Question from: Teresa Yeo
Posted on: November 17, 2000

We are an educational and a retail outlet for herb plants and are interested in purchasing the following from your company:

1. Herb plants - culinary, healing and fragrance

2. Potmaker.

Given a tropical climate in Singapore, would appreciate your advice on the best types of plant to ship in for (1) and what is the minimum required for us to proceed. For your info, we are going for a soft opening on 2 December. Besides the above, are there any related educational products that you could recommend as well.

Please accept our apologies for the long delay in answering your query.

To get the 40% discount for PotMaker(R) the minimum order is one case of 20 PotMakers. Because shipping costs to Singapore are quite high, we suggest that you consider a larger order of 10 cases. For ten cases we can offer a better discount and the shipping cost per PotMaker will be much lower. If you let us know what quantity of PotMakers you are interested and how you would like them shipped, we will be pleased to provide a quote for the shipping cost.

Surprisingly there is very little reliable information about what herbs do well in tropical areas. Some herbs cannot tolerate the heat and others cannot tolerate high humidity. Some of the herbs that cannot survive a full season in the tropics can often be grown as short season "annuals". So, the answer to your question does not have a simple and easy answer, and to some extent, you will need to experiment to find out which herbs will do best in your area.

As a first approximation to establishing a list of herbs that are tolerant of your climate, you can use the hardiness zone ratings for herbs. The USDA ratings are from 1 (coldest) to 11 (warmest). Zone 11 is southern Florida in the United States which is neotropical. We have added one more zone, "T" or "11+", to denote the tropics. You can use these ratings as a guideline to indicate which of the biennial and perennial herbs are likely to survive your tropical climate. I would choose herbs rated for zones 10, 11 and 11+ (or "T" or "Tropical") to start with. The annual herbs are not rated for hardiness because survival over the winter is not an issue for gardeners. For your purposes you could start by assuming that all annual herbs will grow in your area.

So, with this starting list of zone 10-11+ biennials and perennials, and all of the annuals, you can experiment growing herbs in your area and refining the list as you learn more about how these herbs grow.

The hardiness zones for all of Richters herbs can be found in the Richters Herb Growing Infobase which is found in the Richters InfoCentre area of our website at http://www.richters.com.

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