Consistent crops with custom blends

Photo courtesy of Acorn Farms

Kevin Johnson appreciates the value of a reliable, quality growing medium.

For the past eight years, the greenhouse manager at Galena, Ohio-based Acorn Farms has depended on Lambert’s custom-blended products. The partnership began out of necessity, when his previous supplier discontinued its custom mixes. Additionally, Johnson and his team found that would-be replacements were fraught with consistency issues, including sticks and rocks that would jam up their potting machines and bale shavers, causing significant production delays.

“The bigger particles would gather in the chains and the belts of the equipment and bind it up,” he says. “When the machine goes down, you have to take it apart and clean it out. That’s not very efficient.”

Johnson reached out to several companies, but Lambert was the most welcoming and responsive, he says. Their product experts provided an immediate solution, creating a custom blend tailored to Acorn Farms’ specific needs.

According to Johnson, Lambert’s first batch was a perfect match, requiring no further adjustments and immediately eliminating the machine-jamming debris, improving both quality and efficiency.

“(Lambert) made it an easy process,” he says. “Right off the bat, the product came the way we needed it. There wasn’t any back-and-forth tweaking of different batches.”

As an operation that started decades ago to supply its retail division, Oakland Nursery, Acorn Farms has grown into a vast, 800-acre wholesale growing operation that serves landscapers, municipalities and garden centers across a wide regional footprint, with some products reaching the East Coast and as far west as Colorado. The greenhouse division alone grows a massive range of ornamental crops, from spring pansies and summer baskets to fall mums and poinsettias. For all of this, Johnson depends on Lambert’s custom-blended peat moss.

Johnson says he values this consistency in Lambert’s peat mix because it removes a major variable from production. When a crop isn’t thriving, he knows the problem isn’t the soil mix, allowing his team to focus on other potential issues. This reliability is critical for a business with quick crop cycles to stay on track.

“We have a custom blend because we have pretty high pH water,” he says. “So, they work with us to bring in a lower pH soil, add mycorrhizae, wetting agent and a shot of controlled-release feed in there as well.”

Johnson notes the Lambert blend offers Acorn Farms two key benefits: It helps plants last longer on the retail shelf and aids landscapers who use the plants in municipal projects, where a consistent feed is vital for sustained success.

Johnson also praises the responsive and knowledgeable customer support from Lambert’s sales team, who readily connect with technical experts to answer his questions. This combination of high-quality product and excellent service gives him the confidence to recommend Lambert to other growers.

Acorn Farms has been so pleased with the partnership that it recently trialed wood fiber and plans to incorporate it into its Lambert custom blend next year, a move that aligns with its goal of greater sustainability.

“This year, we were able to trial enough of the wood fiber to grow a full crop,” he says. “It worked well for us and didn’t require us to reinvent our watering or fertilizing processes. Using a product that is potentially a recycled waste product, or at least more renewable than perlite or peat, seems like an obvious choice for us.”