To grow or not to grow, continued

While listening to customer feedback is essential when we are considering which varieties to grow or not to grow, we also need to look closely at plants that we have had production or quality issues with. For example, we have struggled with Amsonia ‘Storm Cloud’, a Proven Winner that we added into our lineup a few years ago. We have never grown a successful crop of this plant; the first spring that we planted it, the plants bloomed before they were fully rooted, and we were unable to sell many out of bloom. (The flowers were absolutely beautiful, though.) The following two winters we overwintered crops, and neither crop survived, or the plants that made it through were too small to sell. This past season we had to conclude that the variety isn’t hardy enough for us to continue to grow, and we cut it from our production schedule.

Sometimes, we may feel that a certain variety is simply better than another and make decisions based on that. We used to grow the Proven Winner Heliopsis variety ‘Tuscan Sun’, and then when Tuscan Gold™ came along, we grew that one too. After seeing these two varieties side by side, we were impressed by the larger, brighter flowers of Tuscan Gold™. Last year we decided to stick with Tuscan Gold™ and cut ‘Tuscan Sun’ from our lineup.

Other times, we may need to take a look at what percentage of a crop we are able to sell through. For the past few seasons, we have grown several varieties of Rudbeckia hirta. These look great while they are in bloom, but they have a very short shelf life. Once they’re finished blooming, we can’t sell them, and we can’t overwinter them because they’re biennial. After a few seasons of only selling through a portion of the crops and dumping the rest, we realized that we could use this space in a better way and we cut them from our production schedule for this year.

Then there are the instances where we love a plant, but we have to make some cuts to allow more space for our biggest sellers. Aruncus ‘Chantilly Lace’, Cimicifuga ‘Hillside Black Beauty’, Geranium ‘Dark Reiter’, and Ceratostigma plumbaginoides are all cool plants that look great and grow well. We usually grow a couple hundred of these and sell through most of them. However, since we are growing thousands more Karl Foerster grasses and Millenium Allium each year to keep up with demand, we had to make the tough decision to cut these varieties for the time being.

We love trying out new and unique varieties and being able to grow several different varieties of plants – it’s one of the most fun aspects of being in production. We never want to produce plants that we don’t have confidence in, and if we can’t grow them successfully, then we don’t feel comfortable sending them to our customers. Taking a variety out of production because we feel it isn’t cold hardy or is disease-prone is an easy decision. But cutting plants that we like is very difficult. The good news is that we are looking towards the future, and we are optimistic that we will eventually have the space to start adding varieties back into production. We know that when that time comes, deciding which plants to add into production is going to be way more fun than deciding which plants to cut.