colourful-flowers

Specialist Plants

2008-01-23T15:16:00.001Z

Ok so one of the things I hate is garden writers featuring bloody obscure plants you can't find in garden centres. Sometimes I think garden writers and presenters find the most obscure plants they can, almost as a badge of honour. 'Look I've found this really obscure plant, bet you can't'. Well no, it came from a field in Outer Mongolia and there's two in the world. Oh and it needs - 20 degrees at night and 30 degrees during the day, no water and an exact pH of 4.2. - You get my drift.

So my blog will unashamedly feature plants the majority of the time you’ll find in most garden centres at the right time of the year.

However as a commercial nursery there are some plants that for some reason get dropped off the radar that are actually good commercial plants. And there are probably thousands of really good plants waiting to be turned into good sellers. So we do look around each year at everything that comes out and we do keep an eye out at the RHS shows and the National Plant Collections (I'll do a post on that one day!). Its also quite enjoyable of course!

Osteo Silver Sparker - great Osteo with lovely leaf varigation which unfortunately this photo does not show clearly!!

We've just relaunched ‘Osteospurnum Silver Sparkler’. This was a plant that's listed in the RHS Plant Finder and is still available but not in major garden centres. Its a specialist plant really now. Its a hardy Osteo and has great varigated foliage, with a nice white flower. Its one of the very few Osteo's with a varigated foliage. We saw it in the Osteo National Collection in Cheshire and we've spent last year bulking up. So it will be availabe in most major garden centres accross the UK and its from us! So thats a good example of a nice plant being re-found and bulked up to commercial levels.

So a good little catalogue is Derry Watkin's 'Special Plant Seeds'. http://www.specialplants.net/.

The flower above is Mentzelia decaetala. Now the flower above is different to the one I saw in Derry Watkin's catalgue but it did catch my eye. I 'googled' the plant name and turns out its a native US plant ans its not at all commercial. Its too stangely and has no real form and I'm not sure you'd want it in your garden. So I guess once you see something you like the look of, always research it before you order it. See if you like the form of the plant and if it could actually survive in your garden.

Anyway I'm interested in the Papavers and the Thumbergia 'African Sunset' from Derry's seed collection. I just love Thumbergia but again more of that later in the summer!

Interestingly we're always being told that white flowers don't sell. Except within London where white appeals to the trendy minimalists ! (What do minimalists do with all their clutter. Everyone has clutter.)

Hey ho!!

Rain, Rain

2008-01-18T10:16:00.000Z

After a week of almost constant rain we’re getting a bit wet here in West Sussex. Personally, as a horticulturist I like rain. However I only like rain at certain times of the year. Rain in October to February = good. Rain in March to September = bad. Of course I don’t mind the odd spot of rain to keep the grass green, in fact I don’t mind heavy rain between Monday to Friday but torrential rain between March to September, over the weekends. is a total disaster for us horticulturists. This is for the simple fact that the fickle UK general public don’t buy plants when its raining.

It fact the fickle general public don’t tend to buy plants when there’s the Olympics’, World Cup Football or European football on the tele as well, oh and the occasional royal event. So there are a few garden centre owners delighting in England’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008. Me – I’m devastated, its always a poor summer when the big football tournaments are going on and England aren’t participating. Steve McClaren should be sent to the Tower as far as I’m concerned even if he may have inadvertently helped our plants sales for 08!

Anyway its still raining. Interesting last year we had a cracking early Spring and then come the middle of June it started raining and didn’t really stop until September. Garden plant sales crashed and some parts of the country garden centres were under water. Go back to 2006 and we had a water crisis with Southern Water issuing hose pipe bands and that had a big impact on plant sales in the effected drought areas, namely West Sussex.

Here’s a photo of some of the fields close to our nurseries and some of the fields just behind our nursery. Pretty dam wet eh?

So maybe you can see why I’m maybe a bit obsessed by rain. We need it; but not at weekends. We need it: but not too much that we flood and can’t get in our gardens and not to little that we have hose pipe bands. Welcome to the delicate nature of being a horticulturist. We can build as many fancy glasshouse and polytunnel structures and systems as we want but we’ll always be controlled by the weather.

I tried to be clever (its never works) and copy the table showing the current water levels at our local reservoirs. Anyway here's the link from Southern Water (http://www.southernwater.co.uk/educationAndEnvironment/managingResources/default.asp ) showing the current water reserves at their 4 water reservoirs. Amazing really that after the wettest summer ever (or something like that) and one of wettest winter (so far, possibly), that Bewl Water and Darwell are still not full. I suppose it shows what a bad situation we had in 2006.

Here’s a link to the weather website that we use to see if we have to prepare the nursery for winds or storms: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/se/littlehampton_forecast_weather.html Its set for West Sussex weather but you can use it for the whole of the UK. It’s what the tele weather forecasters use.

Anyway that’s it for me. As long as no one is killed and no one’s house is flooded I’m quite happy for the rain to continue until the end of February please. That way the reservoirs will maybe be full and they’ll be no hose pipe bands and the Great British General Public can buy and water their plants to their hearts content, during a nice dry Spring. Yippee, can’t wait!

Spring is coming!

2008-01-15T16:44:00.000Z

So OK we've had huge rain storms today and winds are blowing us all over the place, but belive it or not spring is only 10-12 weeks away. How do I know this? Because we've starting potting up our geraniums - always a sure sign that spring is not that far away!

I thought maybe someone out there may interested to know where there gernaiums come from and how we grow them here in the UK. Well basically you average geraniums will start its life in a warm climate: this can be the Canary Islands, Isreal or Africa (especially Kenya) for Europe and Columbia and Kenya for the American maket. Why warm countries? Well geraniums are a summer flwoering plant that likes warm weather so you can't really grow gernanium mother stock (the mother plants that supplies all the cuttings) any where else that a nice warm climate. The more even the temperatures the better (i.e the close the day temperature is to the night temperature the better) which is why Kenya and Africa are increasing important.

Its fair to say that geraniums have been coming in from Africa, Isreal and the Canary Islands for over 30 years, so this is not a a new development. Is it enviromentally freindly to ship plants so far accross the world. Well there's been recent study on rose production in kenya which shows that its more effective to grow plants where we don't have to use fossil fuels to heat them. I would say the same very probably applies to geraniums, although a there are no studies to prove that yet.

Geranium cuttings are very effeicently packed into cardboard boxes so the cost of air freight is very cheap and efficient. There are now not that many geranium propagators (companies that add roots to a plant) left in Europe. The ones that are left are basically massive propagators and have acheived huge economies of scale. The major propagation companies for geraniums are based in Holland. There are still a few companies that root geraniums in the UK but its hard for them to compete with the larger European propagators.

Anyway our cuttings now come in trays. Trays are useful as it means you don't have to pot the plants up immmediately (although the sooner the better really). When you're potting up 30,000 pots a week like we are you do need to have the flexibility of being able to keep the plant in the tray, in case of emergenices, like your potting machine breaking down!

Here is a rooted cutting, just come in and ready to pot.

So we had a big delivery of geraniums today, which came over from Holland over the weekend. We hope to have all these potted by the end of this week. Our geranium varities are still mainly Fischer Tango's? Why, well up until this June we were the Fischer agent but more importantly we really like the dark leaved nature of the Tango's and they do have really good colour availability which is good.

Here are the geraniums being unloaded from the lorry.

We are now madly busy potting these geraniums up. We don't actually spend much money on heating these gernaiums. We keep them frost protected and that's it. Some companies will try and pump some heat in to be the first on the market. Dutch grown geraniums are likely to be heated. We like ours to be grown 'cold' so that they adapt to UK spring conditions nicely. Instead of getting a shock of being planted outdoors our cold raised plants are already used to cold nights and won't just sit in the soil feeling sorry for themselves for a few weeks. We're very lucky in that we took over an iold chrysanthmum production nursery last year. Its has 'thermal screens' that keeps the heat from escaping at night. The screens are hugely expensive so they are not used for ornamental cold production. We use them becuase they are there and they make such a huge difference to our heating costs. In fact unless its say -2-3 degrees outside, its unlikely we need to heat. It makes such a difference.

Our potting machine with a few thousand gernaiums already potted in the distance.

We use a potting machine for speed and efficiency. As you can see it only really needs one and a half people most of the time (the half person floats around doing other jobs, hence the 'half' bit. We don't cut people into half, we are a nice company!). Our big investment has been in conveyor belts which transports the pots around the glashouses. Really useful.

Laying out the plants from the potting machine.

So that's it. The beginning of Spring is here. The geraniums are being potted up! I'll keep you imformed of how there doing. I'll also feature some more crops as the weeks progress. Our Chilli's get sown next week ready for the summer! Now summer does feel like a long way off.

Colourful Tubs

2008-01-08T08:07:00.000Z

So my first blog has been up a week and not a whimper. Oh well. I expect 'Colourful - Flowers' isn't neccesarily a great blog for January is it? But now's the time to start planning what plants you want to buy and where to put them. So hopefully this blog may give you a few ideas.

I had a few Petunias kicking around spare last Spring and I have a rather nice fern that I have in a pot. It looked lonely so I planted the petunias around it. The colours are all wrong I know but for a mish mash its looks OK doesn't it? I like the way the fern gives the combination a different texture.

You'll be please to know that the mass potting at work has now commenced. We started potting up the Osteospurnums last week and this will continue for at least another 10 weeks. Our first batch of gernaniums arrive today. Our Senneti's are now fully planted up, having been potted up just before Christmas. I'll post some photo's of these crops growing shortly and I'll give you an explanation of each plant once they are flowering and ready to go to the shops.

It's interesting that bulbs seem to be sprouting early this year. Is it just us on the South coast or are others seeing the same thing? So are we going to get an early or late Spring this year. The horticultural industry is a bit worried becuase Easter, the key gardening weekend of the year is so early this year (last two weeks of March) and could be too early for any decent gardening or plant sales. April and May is when all our bedding type flowers are sceduled to be sold, with May being the real key month. Last year was just a crazy year with an amazing early Spring and almost summer like conditions and then around the first week in June the rain arrived and we didn't see Summer until September. Last years Summer weather was also a really good year to see which plants perform or don't perform in poor Summer conditions i.e no sun and rain, but I'll go into that in more detail in future blogs.

Anyway must dash....

Colourful troughs

2008-01-03T14:57:00.000Z

OK so its the 3rd Jan 2008 and I really thought I ought to start posting on my blog. The blogs called 'Colourful flowers' and that's what I hope to show. I meant to stick up photo's of my 2007 efforts last year but life's been too busy until now. So I'll try and drip feed the photo's from last year in before Spring 08.

The trough above is one of my more successful efforts this year. I have to say 2007 was a poor gardening year. We had a great May and then it just rained from mid June onwards. It wasn't until it warmed up in September that the baskets really came alive. That said I find it hard to keep baskets and trough going past mid August normally so to have my baskets going full pelt until late October was great.

As usual I've used Fischer varities. That's becuase up until June 07 the company I work for was the Fischer agent for the UK. I've got hooked on the Goldsmith / Fischer bedding varities (a) because we sold them (b) because of the their great garden performance and (c) becuase of their great colour range.

Unfortunatly due to Syngenta's take over of Fischer, we can no longer get hold of Goldsmith varities for 08 so we've had to move to Syngenta varities for the 08 season. I'm pretty annoyed about this becuase I like to spend 1-2 years testing new varities and basket mixes before settling on commercial mixes. Howver this year we've just beeen forced to change with little notice.

The mix of the trough was incredibly simple, mainly because it was from leftovers from the nursery. Usually I like to do trial mixes as a 'look see' for possible commercial basket combinations in the future. This year I just grabbed what I had handy with not always great results. Next year I'll plan a bit more!

Anyway I used 'Jamboree' petunia's from Fischer / Goldsmith (http://www.goldfisch.co.uk/). There are so many different type of Petunia around now. Basically every major breeding house has to have its own range of Petunia's to remain competitve. Perhaps the best known range of Petunia's in the UK is the Surfinia range. It fact some people will call Petunia's Surfinia. Surfinia is just a tradename for Suntory's range of Pentunia's. Why are they so well known. Becuase they were well marketed as well as being amongst the first in the new generation of Petunias. Being first on the market counts for a lot in commercial horticulture. (In the US 'Wave' Petunia's , are the most well known. Again they were the first 'new' Petunias in the US market).

Anyway I like the Jamboree's as they have nice big flower heads which I think is important for basket work, especially big baskets or troughs. They are also a bit more branchy and showy than Surfinia. The only downside is that they are a bit upright in habit - they do trail nicely but not as well as other varities out there.Howver the size of the flowers outweighs the downsides!

I also used the new range of Techno' Lobelia from Fischer / Goldsmith. Seed raised Lobelia (i.e grown from seed) really suffers from the heat of a UK Summer. So although it bulks a basket up great in the Spring it can completely run out of steam in a hot Summer. This new Lobelia is heat resistant (so they clain) and its also from cuttings. It was bred in California, US so I expect their claim of heat resistance is valid. Cuttings generally give a stronger plant but they are more expensive so I doubt you'll find this variety in polysteren packs at Homebase or B&Q. They just won't fit within their required price points I expect (and they carry a royalty, which always bumps up the cost a little but without royalties you'd get no new varities).

My 'Techno' Lobelia kept flowering until late October which is amazing. However I'm going to reserve judgement until a warm hot summer. But they look promising. They bulked up really niceley and just never stopped flowering.

Also I'm really excited now about the Everlast Gerbera's we commercially trialed last year. I had some in my garden all spring, summer, autumn and now winter and ,believe it or not, the flowers are only now starting to fade. Wow - Everlast indeed. Not much point showing a photo now. The flowers aren't what you would expect from a cut flower gerbera - no where near as showy or big and they were only two colours around last year (white and pink). We were a bit negative when we grew the pots to a saleable stage becuase they had hardly rooted. However they've really proven themselves as good garden plants as far as I'm concerned.

And that's the problem sometimes with commercial plants - they may not be great on the wholesale nursery (as they may not root fast enough or they are slow growing, or even too expensive to grow ) but they could be fantastic garden plants . I think this is the case for Everlast Gerbera's. I visted a great garden centre in London ( Sunshine Garden Centre, Durnsford Road, Bounds Green, London, N11 2EL; http://sitebuilder.yell.com/sb/show.do?id=SB0002253357000050 ) before Christmas and they were raving about the Everlast Gerbera's and asking where they can get hold of it, so I reckon this could be the new plant to watch for 08 / 09. You heard it hear first.

Anyway that's the end of my first blog. I still have some more photo's from last years baskets and trough efforts. So I'll post these soon.