It’s Buying Time Again

Welcome to the fourth annual Lawn & Garden Retailer Visual Sourcebook. You’ll notice that our Sourcebook continues to grow every year as we add more companies to the listings and more products to the “Marketplace.” By the way, if your product or service is still not listed, you can add it yourself at www.lgrmag.com.

I’m sure you remember the unique formatting of the Lawn & Garden Retailer Sourcebook from years past. If so, we’ve formatted it exactly the same and kept the same “visual” design. Yes, this is at heart a standard buyer’s guide where you can find sourcing and contact information for companies that supply the green industry. Its sidebars and photos are also a source for product and business ideas. And most importantly, it’s an active database that can answer your questions at any moment. Well...this magazine is not actually active, but its online version is. If you want to do some 21st-century reference searching, log onto our Web site at www.lgrmag.com and click on “buyer’s guide” to search our electronic version.

The printed form of the Sourcebook starts with an extended “Marketplace” on page 6, which serves as a visual representation of many of the products and companies that are listed throughout the following pages. The second part of the Sourcebook, starting on page 26, is an alphabetical company listing of some of the best suppliers to our industry. Lastly, we’ve included a listing of product categories and the companies that supply them on page 70.

What’s New

The past three years, this is where I have signed off for the year, highlighted the new things we have coming up next year and thanked our readers, advertisers and editorial advisors, but not this year. After hearing over and over that three months was too long to go without a new issue of Lawn & Garden Retailer, we finally caved and decided to add another issue, publishing 10 issues a year instead of nine. Instead of taking a break the entire fall season, we will only be taking off the months of October and December, and publishing our final issue of the year in November. Hopefully, this will stop anyone from going into withdrawl, especially when you see how much there is to dream about in the next 80 pages.