I haven’t had much time this week to keep the blog up to date. Sorry for that. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going on.
The Nursery Landscape Expo is going on in Houston this weekend. Clay is down there checking things out for us. Yesterday morning Clay and I went through and tentatively scheduled production numbers for next spring. Our next steps are to finalize the planting specifics and pricing. We are working on some new stuff for next spring that I’m really excited about.
We have our first 2 crops of pansies, snaps and dianthus planted along with the first crop of #4 pansies, #4, #6 and #8 kale/cabbage and J6 petunias.
The mums are looking alright. The Grolink mums did not come through the iron deficiency as well as the Yoder mums did. The Grolink mums are stunted and have not filled out well. We still do not know what caused the iron deficiency. The soil and fertilizer people that analyzed the samples we sent them both say that it wasn’t their product that caused it. We did find out that the batch of Fafard soil that we had did not have a sufficient started charge of nitrogen. Farfard takes a sample of each batch they run and keeps it on hand to do comparison analysis. Their sample had plenty of nitrogen. I wonder if there was some sort of chemical reaction that happened in the bags of soil or in the pots after planting that used up the nitrogen and iron or otherwise made it unavailable for the mums. If I was smarter I might be able to figure it out.
We also started planting our first crop of poinsettias last week. They should be done planting them today. The plants look great, and shouldn’t have any problems getting established. At bottom of this post there is a video of the girls planting some #6 pink in one of our smaller houses.
The weather here has been some thing else these last two weeks. Twelve days ago it was 104 degrees. Then it cooled off to 95 degrees 10 days ago. Then it started raining 7 days ago and rained for 5 days. We got 5 inches and the temperatures have been around 90 for the highs and 65-70 for the lows. Perfect mum weather. Now it’s supposed to rain again for the next 4-5 days. Too much rain is not good for the mums.
I did this fast so sorry for any typos.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIVl5hHutyc&hl=en&fs=1