'Ewa plant nursery closing

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

Tony Crane of 'Ewa Beach was among the customers at Kahua Nursery yesterday afternoon. The 'Ewa business will cease its retail operations on Sunday. The 15-acre nursery has about 100,000 unsold plants left. Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser

Charrise Quon, the nursery's propagation supervisor and office manager, painted the words big and bold: "Going Out of Business." She then hung one of the signs on a truck parked along an old sugar cane road, right next to busy Fort Weaver Road and its incessant throng of cars.

"People see all this traffic and think that this place must be a gold mine," said co-owner Alan Gottlieb as he walked through the 15-acre nursery and its 100,0000 unsold plants. "I assure you, it's not."

Kahua Nurseries Inc. will end its retail operation at 5 p.m. Sunday. The eight employees who remain will then begin dismantling the watering system, tearing up concrete sidewalks, uprooting whatever 200 trees are left and breaking down sheds and greenhouses to return the property to its natural state.

The end of Kahua Nursery represents an unfortunate footnote in the development of the 'Ewa Plain.

While the nursery survived by developing a niche market catering to nearby new homeowners, it never made a profit. And the owners ultimately believe that the area's rising land values would have forced them into the decision they ended up making last month.

They still have not spoken to Campbell Estate about what kind of lease prices they might face when the current 20-year-lease expires in two years.

"We didn't have to," Gottlieb said. "The handwriting was on the wall."

So the irony, Gottlieb said, is that the very customers who kept Kahua Nursery running were also probably driving up the company's expenses.

"You could say our clients put us out of business," he said.

The end of Kahua Nursery also means an uncertain fate for the employees left behind. Many of them are immigrant laborers who came to the nursery when the O'ahu Sugar Mill closed down.

Since Gottlieb and his partner Jim Wriston made the announcement of the closing to the employees three weeks ago, none of the workers has found another job.

Juan and Marcela Taguicana, who are originally from Cagayan in the Philippine province of Ilocos Norte, need to find work and applied for jobs at another nursery in Pearl City.

"Nobody hiring," Juan said.

As Quon painted the going-out-of business signs, she said her thoughts were on the nursery's employees.

"A lot of them only have labor experience and aren't prepared for a lot of other jobs," Quon said. "But they're all good workers."

Big dreams in 1989

Gottlieb and Wriston started Kahua Nursery in 1989 with big dreams. It was an offshoot of the operations of the former Kahua Meat Co. slaughterhouse nearby. The slaughterhouse was run in part by Kahua Ranch and Ponoholo Ranch, where Gottlieb is the treasurer and handles administrative affairs.

The partners hoped to use some of the runoff from the slaughterhouse to irrigate their plants. And they thought they could make big money wholesaling plants and trees to the nearby housing developments.

Gottlieb, Wriston and Wriston's then 10-year-old son, James IV, began by building benches and planting cuttings in their spare time.

The expected steady stream of developers never materialized. But within a few years, the nursery was bringing in as much as $1,400 a day from nearby new homeowners looking to transform their yards.

Cindy Crane started buying plants at the nursery 10 years ago for her first home in 'Ewa Beach. Yesterday, she snapped up 99-cent plants, aloe and gardenias for her new one.

Over the years, Crane figures she has easily spent several thousand dollars at the nursery.

Cumulatively, it just never seemed to be enough, Gottlieb said.

"We had a lot of very, very loyal customers who spent a lot here over the years," he said. "But we'd be lucky to get 30 people coming through here on the weekends. Even less on the weekdays. ... As owners, we never took a dime out of the company."

Providing jobs

With a high of 15 full-time employees and another dozen part-time workers three years ago, Gottlieb said, the nursery essentially was just running to keep the workers employed.

So from today through Sunday, everything will be sold at least at half price. Sets of three pots that have been sitting on palettes for years will go for $5, Gottlieb said. And he'll do almost anything to get rid of 14,000 naupaka plants that remain from a speculative wholesale deal last year that never came off.

Crane will be among those coming back, possibly as early as today.

"It's a shame," she said. "But everything's on sale."

After Kahua Nursery closes, Gottlieb can't imagine any other retail business starting up again on so much land in the 'Ewa Plain.

And he certainly doesn't expect one to make a profit.

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8085.