Technical advice: make your crops ready for the customer

Written by Ulrich Eberhardt, Technical Specialist.

Now as a busy period with bedding plants has started or will start soon (depending on the area where your company is located and where your customers are selling) the last phase of the crop begins. Important is now to fine-tune the crop and make it ready for your customer – both for retail and consumer. 

Very important is to focus on a good shelf life. Bedding plants like Pelargonium, which are planned for sales the coming weeks should get enough N to build up sugar to survive shop conditions and to take off right away after planting at the consumer. A potassium focused fertilization boosts flower bud and is perfect in the bud building stage – but later a more balanced feeding with high EC will help to create high consumer satisfaction. Of course, the best way to give this consumer experience is to add controlled release fertilizer to all bedding plants like Syngenta Flowers recommends for Calliope. 

Ship at the right temperature

Another point, which is very often not in focus: make sure that plants are kept in an environment without Ethylene impact and with good air circulation to remove Ethylene which is build up. So do not keep plants in a truck without air conditioning and air movement. Moreover, take care that plants are shipped at the right temperature (truck drivers very often do not know how the temperature should be like Mandevilla which love a higher temperature of 12°C minimum in the truck).

Take your time to control your plants

As most are busy now with selling and shipping plants it is not very easy to keep up with all the culture work, which is needed to grow perfect plants without too much labor effort. Therefore, make sure that you take your time not only to feed and water your plants, but also to spray PGR in time to avoid to strong growth. This leads very often to too big plants that will cause many yellow leaves due to tight spacing and with that time and labor at packing. Bonzi is one of those PGR, which works good also under warm conditions and can help to make your plants round, bushy and easy to pack. 

Please contact your local sales representative or the teach team for more details on PGR and other growing related questions. We will support you!