What does “funky” mean to you? For many, it can relate to smell, a rhythmic dance or even trendy clothing. But for Jen Browning, technical service specialist for western turf and ornamentals at BASF, the term “funky” relates to pests. In the third part of the Funky Pests series, Browning discusses a commonly overlooked issue that complicates pest management for growers.

“My funky pest is weeds in the greenhouse,” she says. “Weeds are competing for resources with our plants — they’re hogging water and nutrients. But the real reason why weeds are a funky pest is because they are a Trojan horse for insects and disease.”

According to Browning, weeds can be hosts to powdery mildew, aphids and other pests. If allowed to flower, there can be thrips hiding inside the buds, which essentially creates a reservoir of crop-visiting pests.

She says the weeds that grow under a bench or in between sidewalk cracks can be easy to overlook because scouts tend to focus on the plants where insects and diseases are more obvious. However, weeds can actually make the insect and disease pressure worse.

While most growers do pull greenhouse weeds, Browning says they’ll sometimes end up in an open trash can and hang out there for days, dispersing insects and disease back onto the crop.

“The spores and bugs bounce out of the trash can, or get transferred to workers who reach inside,” Browning says. “It spreads the pests around the greenhouse — but this can be remedied by something as simple a tight-fitting lid on the container and frequent trips to the main trash collection area.”

Some example of weeds that Browning classifies as detrimental to greenhouse cleanliness are algae and liverwort. They are a food source for shore flies, which in turn may transfer pathogens around the greenhouse. Because they eat algae and carry diseases — like powdery mildew spores — they add to the disease pressure by flying around and touching crops.

“They can transfer pathogens right onto the plants,” Browning says. “Meanwhile, the grower’s thinking, ‘Why do I keep having this problem? Where is it coming from?’ It’s coming from the weeds in the greenhouse. That’s why sanitation is so important.”

Weeds themselves are one of the lesser pests in greenhouses, so their impact on IPM can be overlooked — this is why Browning considers them to be funky.

“I think of funky as the unexpected,” Browning says. “Funky can be when you don’t know the pest or don’t know where it’s coming from.”

In her breakdown of pests, Browning — who is also a trained entomologist and horticulturist — categorizes them as “funky,” “maybe funky” and “not funky.”

“Funky pests” are the ones that surprise you, like weeds sneaking in bugs and disease. “Maybe funky” are the ones you need help identifying — maybe they are a problem, and maybe they’re aren’t. “Not funky” are the ones you recognize immediately and know how to deal with: aphids, mites, powdery mildew.

But Browning says even known pests like aphids and thrips can be funky because of their ability to create an unexpected situation. Aphids can build up large populations seemingly overnight, which Suzanne Wainwright-Evans mentioned in the previous Funky Pests article. (bit.ly/unusual-aphids). Browning notes that warm temperatures in greenhouses enhance rapid development of pest populations. “The higher the temperature, the faster they go from being an egg to a reproductive adult,” she says.

“And sometimes the pest isn’t who you think it is,” she says. “You may deploy an insecticide or biological control agent that doesn’t work — because the pest you are seeing isn’t the right target for that tool.”

But weeds aren’t so complicated. They hide in plain sight and there are some simple tricks to keep them from making your pest problems funkier than they need to be.

“Greenhouse sanitation is not a sexy topic,” Browning says. “People don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about this — it’s boring! And it’s entwined with labor issues. We have fewer people to do more work than ever in the greenhouse, so pulling those weeds, even if they’re little, and quarantining them in a closed container works. Include the weeds you do see in your spray regimen — fungicides and insecticides should be applied to them as well between weeding cycles. These are some easy ways to help defunk the greenhouse.”

Training new employees how to water is very difficult — greenhouse staff and owners concur. Many growers have told me that watering is their No. 1 training need. Why is it so difficult to learn or teach how to water properly? Many argue that there is art in this practice, and that art is unteachable. Teaching someone how to paint like Leonardo da Vinci is impossible. Yet, anyone can learn the basic skills of drawing and painting.

Watering is not an easy task. Individuals need to consider multiple factors before deciding whether to irrigate or not. Hence, teaching it is not simple either. I argue that when training new employees, we need to communicate better and more often and emphasize the whys and the hows.

Tip No. 1: Define watering.

New employees must understand that irrigating crops is not about pouring water or turning on a water valve. Watering is about maintaining AIR and WATER balance in the root-zone — that is the ultimate goal.

Tip No. 2: Explain WHY watering is difficult.

Regardless of the operation size, all greenhouses producing ornamental plants are EXTREMELY diverse. Walk with your team in the greenhouse, point out the diversity and explain WHY watering everything with the same volume and frequency is not appropriate. For example, you can see a small greenhouse dedicated to retail and another greenhouse producing for wholesale. Both have the same “diversity problem.” For example, on the top scenario, you can point the different materials of the hanging baskets (coconut fiber will allow the media to dry faster than plastic), small containers need less volume per irrigation but higher frequency, hanging baskets receive direct light while plants on the bench are partially shaded, each container contains a different mix of crops, and the canopies are dense or the crop is too high, making it difficult to visually assess moisture. Workers who are aware of the differences are more likely to pay attention while doing the task. Explain how fluctuating weather patterns makes watering difficult. We tend to talk about seasons as a parameter, but the truth is that the oscillation of temperature and sunlight that we see within a week in spring and fall is broad. In Connecticut, we can go from a snowy-dark-cold day to a sunny-bright-warm day in less than 24 hours. Prepare your staff to respond to these unplanned changes.

The weather itself calls for a watering decision. On top of that, workers must decide what to do instead of watering. Workers may fear being perceived as if they are not working hard enough and the easiest way out is to grab a hose which may be WHY some workers overwater. Head growers must communicate with their staff to make sure they all agree about how weather patterns will affect daily tasks. If the staff member’s role is to water a section, but the crop doesn’t need it, then the staff should have a clear directive about what alternative activities to conduct.

Tip No. 3: Discuss WHY plants need water and WHY excessive or insufficient levels affect crops.

Photosynthesis is the process in which solar energy converts to chemical energy. For photosynthesis to occur, a water molecule must be broken down. Hence, without water, there is no photosynthesis; without photosynthesis, plants will not grow. Water also carries nutrients and helps maintain cell/plant turgidity. The take-home message is that plants need water to maintain structural integrity and perform basic functions. Plants also need oxygen in the root zone to maintain essential plant functions. That is why we cannot keep the substrate saturated. Explain physical properties of the growing media. When we fill containers with growing media, there will be gaps between the media particles. If we cover the bottom of the container so nothing comes out, and then add water — the water will fill those spaces, leaving no room for air. If we then let the free water drain, a portion of the water will remain adhered to the media particles and there is also air space. This is known as container capacity.

Tip No. 4: Agree on HOW and WHEN to water.

The instructions for most activities in the greenhouse are specific — hence why they are easy to learn or teach. For example, dip the cuttings before transplant, after (x) number of days transplant (#) liners to an (x) size container, a given amount of product per area or container, spray every number of days, prune to a given height, etc. However, most operations don’t communicate that specifically about watering. I recommend that every operation develops clear guidelines for watering. I know it’s not a simple task (that is why we started acknowledging the complexities), but it must be done. Everyone in the operation MUST agree on what is the criteria to irrigate or not to irrigate. Dry media does not always call for action and growing on the dry side has many benefits for ornamental crops.

Tip No. 5: Retain your employees

Retrain to make sure the staff has not deviated from the original guidelines.

The author is an assistant professor and greenhouse extension specialist at the University of Connecticut. You can reach her at rosa.raudales@uconn.edu.

Every grower has a story to tell. Whether it’s the tale of a startup business founded by a young hobbyist trying to make a living or the generations-long history of a family that’s been working in the greenhouse for decades upon decades, each one is unique. And each one is a great tool.

The story behind your operation is a powerful tool that can bring your staff together, brand your product and show your customers why they should choose you. If your staff and customers know how you got where you are today, they’ll be able to connect with your brand. And that’s important to the newer generations of both consumers and employees.

Holtkamp Greenhouses, which you can read about here, is a great example of how to tell your story. Like many growers, the Holtkamp family has a long history in horticulture, going back generations to their roots in Germany. When I visited them in Nashville earlier this year, the first thing I noticed was the pride they take in their heritage. The second was the pride they take in their plants, especially their new varieties.

The company does a great job of telling its story and sharing all that goes into its plant breeding program. If you visit their website at optimara.com, you’ll find that information up front and center. They tell you who they are, what they do and why they do it all on the home page.

But while they’re proud of their past, they’re also proud of their future. The operation is best known as the largest producer of African violets in the world. And while African violets aren’t a new favorite by any means, Optimara has found a way to keep innovating by introducing new options for houseplant-hungry consumers and offering online buying options. That innovative spirit is part of both their past and their future.

Looking to the future, your story can be a great way to capture younger buyers. Who you are and where you grow are becoming more and more important.

And as the newer generation gains more buying power, sourcing is becoming more important as well. People want to know where their plant material is coming from, and if it’s local, that’s definitely a story you want to tell. Consumers are becoming more and more environmentally conscious and making purchases based on their values. They’re looking for ways to lower their carbon footprints and support local businesses, so marketing yourself as one is a good way to capture the demographic.

One of the best marketing tools you have is your story. Don’t be afraid to use it.

Photo © cendeced | Adobe Stock; All other icons: various Adobe Stock

An integrated environmental control system (ECS) is the best tool you can have for making science-based growing decisions, hands down. Integrating all your equipment under one system, not just your temperature and humidity controllers, but also lighting, water treatment, irrigation, CO2 enrichment systems and alarms, provides better data, tighter control, increased energy savings and reduced waste.

Some systems will analyze your harvest statistics and record labor tasks to improve productivity. Such systems use anticipatory logic to make predictive changes to your climate, particularly important in a dynamic greenhouse environment where sunlight changes every few minutes on a partly cloudy day. This allows you to focus on growing your crop rather than worrying about your climate. For example, whereas non-integrated equipment may require several adjustments per day as conditions change, the greenhouse that my team managed only needed adjustment seasonally (four times per year).

ECSs store and display data to allow you to fine-tune your programming. They warn you when things go wrong via audible alarms and call-out texts, emails or phone calls. Lastly, with experience, a grower can learn to diagnose equipment problems using data graphs, often long before an alarm condition is reached. Because of their capacity to amplify the skills of a good grower, I recommend to my colleagues that they invest in the best ECS system they can afford.

Here are some tips on getting the most out this vital tool:

1. Do your homework. When selecting a system, you need to make your best judgment about which companies will be around five years from now. No matter how good the system is, if the company that built it goes belly up, you will no longer have access to upgrades, service or spare parts. I’ve seen this happen at two multi-million-dollar research facilities: the first at an agricultural chemical company, the other at a Big Ten university.

Another mistake I’ve seen more than once is believing a system designed for controlling offices can control a room full of plants, especially a greenhouse. If you’ve never spent time in a greenhouse, you’ll be surprised at the rapid cycling rate of equipment — things are turning off and on all the time. This just doesn’t happen in an insulated, opaque building occupied by people. Ask your network of colleagues about the systems they’ve worked with. Find growers using the systems you’re considering. Don’t stop with just one opinion, and I promise you that patterns will emerge that will allow you to make the best selection.

2. Perform routine equipment checks. The curse of all automation is the complacency it breeds. Unlike the failsafe engineering of an aircraft, the ECS does not have a sensor on each piece of greenhouse or grow-room equipment indicating that it is functioning. It sends the signal to turn it on or off, but that’s all it knows. It is up to you to make sure the fresh air damper actually does open and close or the greenhouse exhaust fan hasn’t slipped a belt and is no longer spinning. Training staff to recognize improper functioning and perform routine maintenance checks is vital.

3. Don’t skip the training. Too often, even though you were offered a certain number of hours of free training on your system, in the rush and excitement of starting a new facility, this training gets dropped. This is true especially when you realize just how little daily input these systems require. Other times the vendor may not voluntarily provide it unless you insist. Put this training on the calendar, tell everyone of its importance and try not to be interrupted during it.

4. Build in lightning protection. When lightning struck my ECS’s outdoor weather station, the charge traveled down the wires to the individual greenhouse controller that the weather station was wired to and fried it. Luckily, the charge did not travel further upstream destroying others, as a fail-safe was built in. Inexpensive communication chips were designed to fail when overloaded, protecting the boards of other controllers.

5. Plan for future equipment. When designing your system, have at least one spare standard electrical outlet controlled by the ECS. This will allow you to quickly add equipment later, such as an extra dehumidifier, or maybe something that hasn’t even been invented yet.

6. Add the ECS to your preventative maintenance schedule. Create a maintenance plan and assign responsibilities to it. If the fans that aspirate your sensor boxes fail, the sensors will measure higher than the room temperature when the lights or sun heat up the box. If your system uses wet wicks to measure humidity and those wicks go dry or get covered in a biofilm, they will measure incorrectly. Grime on glass thermistors that measure temperature/relative humidity (RH) affects the reading. Weather stations need to be calibrated and checked; I once had rain get inside a supposedly sealed electronics board for an outdoor humidity probe, causing inaccurate readings.

7. Snug the wires. Make sure signal and communication wires are tightly screwed down to their terminals. For the first few months in my new facility, I chased false power-outage alarms that would only last a few seconds, until I realized that several dozen terminals across the facility were not snugged down.

8. Don’t wait for sensors to fail. When some temperature probes fail and signal is lost, they often cause an alarm condition reading such as -40° C, which allows you to know exactly when it happens. However, many times I observed that the sensor reading just froze at the last measurement and the room continued heating or cooling as it was at that moment, until it was too hot or too cold and there was no alarm! For this reason, I chose to replace my sensors every two years, even though they rarely, if ever, needed calibration until the day they stopped working.

9. Never drill into the controller cabinet. ECS cabinets are sealed from the environment when the cabinet doors are closed. That being said, there are some things to avoid. Though it may seem like a good way to clean a cement-floored corridor, never use a leaf blower that will stir up dust. Keep cabinet doors closed when you’re not present, as water lines have been known to burst in greenhouses where UV light from the sun weakens uninsulated plastic pipes. Never drill into the cabinet, as the metal shavings will short-circuit electronics.

10. Use static discharge bands. When working on circuit boards, such as wiring in new sensors or changing chips for a software upgrade, always wear a static discharge band around your wrist and have it attached to a ground in the cabinet. Without this protection for the equipment, you may not even see or feel the static spark, but the resultant “ghost in the machine” damage is very hard to troubleshoot.

11. Understand what happens during a power outage. Typically, because of battery back-up, everything returns to normal after a power outage, and the programming just picks up where it left off. However, scheduled irrigation cycles may have been missed, and the ECS doesn’t know it. Therefore, in the case of a power outage, check to ensure this has not happened. Also keep in mind that some valves mechanically close or open when not powered, depending on their construction. For example, heating valves may be “fail open” or “fail close.” The ECS may not know what position the valve is when power returns. They eventually synchronize again, but it may take several hours. For this reason, it is vital to ensure heating valves are synced with the ECS following a power outage.

12. Keep spare parts on hand. Store fuses, chips, input/output boards and even a spare controller, though this can cost thousands of dollars. Trust me, you will thank me for this advice when that moment comes, which is always at the worst possible time, such as the evening before a major holiday. None of these specialty components are likely to be found in a local electronics store.

13. Affix mechanical drawings inside the cabinet door.  Keep copies of “as built” drawings in each cabinet for your use as well as use by any electricians or electronics specialists you contract for a repair. Just as important is to keep charts of any modifications you made yourself, such as additions of watering valves or new sensors. Include the configuration programming and calibration of those components, as these little details are too soon forgotten. Laminate these papers to protect them from deterioration.

14. Study your climate graphs closely. Understand what normal looks like, so you can better understand abnormal. You may think that troubleshooting problems is all about observing the actual equipment, but some problems only arise under certain weather conditions, which are hard to replicate. Some problems happen invisibly, such as when a heating valve at my facility was malfunctioning. It never resulted in an alarm condition, and it’s unlikely that a human could have observed or felt it, but the temperature was being controlled poorly.

15. Create a troubleshooting binder. When there is a malfunction, print a copy of the graph, label what the problem was and how it was resolved, and create a troubleshooting binder. Until I learned to do this, I would find myself looking at a graph and knowing I had seen that problem before yet couldn’t remember what it was.

16. Expand capability on your own. Learn how easy it is to add sensors (inputs) and equipment (outputs). Your vendor can assist you by phone and send diagrams to you by email. I was able to train my students to install irrigation valves, wire them to the ECS, configure and program them. We also installed humidifiers, infrared (IR) canopy sensors, motorized light-deprivation curtains over single tables, redundant temperature probes, soil moisture sensors, PAR sensors and web cams.

17. Dial it in. The true power of integrated controls is the fine-tuning of the environment. With an understanding of programming and close observation of climate data, you will be amazed at what you can achieve. We had a researcher doing important supplemental lighting research, requiring the same daily light integral, or accumulated light, in the greenhouse across all seasons and weather patterns in our Midwestern U.S. location, where it naturally varied from 2 mols/m2/day to 50 mols/m2/day. By using two layers of shade curtains and smart control of lights, we were able to “dial in” a DLI of 12 each day with an error of just less than 2 mols/m2/day.

By properly understanding how the climate affects plant physiology, growers can use data from an ECS to fine-tune optimum environments or even apply controlled stresses to achieve their production goals. Similar conditions can be maintained crop after crop, season upon season, for the predictability and uniformity of plant attributes. Graphical tracking and user expertise allow for troubleshooting and repair of mechanical or programming errors that might linger for weeks or months with no one the wiser. The anticipatory logic and fast cycling capability of these systems is quite literally the difference between responding to environmental conditions and creating those conditions.

The author is director of Ag Projects for Core Cannabis in East Lansing, Michigan.