Mechanizing some of the repetitive tasks associated with transplanting can reduce labor needs and increase production efficiency and capacity. This equipment is available as an integral part of a transplanter line or as separate devices for growers that do hand transplanting.

Tray or pot dispenser

The task of separating flats, pots or inserts is very time consuming. I have watched employees trying to keep up loading pots on a container filling machine. There is always that one pot that is stuck and won’t separate. It is frustrating and sometimes takes as much time to separate the containers as it does to fill them.

To keep up with the average potting machine you must load 2,000 to 4,000 pots per hour. That’s a rate of one pot every one to two seconds.

It may be more difficult to keep up with a flat filler. At an average rate of 20 flats per minute, you must separate the flat from the stack and then separate a sheet of inserts and combine the two. Many growers do this ahead of time because most workers can’t keep up with that pace.

Several equipment manufacturers have developed automatic container separators that feed into a pot or flat filler. A stack of containers is loaded into a tray or holder and fingers pull one container at a time off the stack. They are then fed into the intake of the filler. If inserts are needed, a second device takes care of these. Before purchasing a separator, check to see that the sizes and styles it will handle will match yours.

Dibble

Predibbled flats can save considerable time for transplanters. It can eliminate having to pick up the peg board each time and save five to 10 seconds. A motorized dibble placed on the output end of a container filling machine can do this task easily.

For potting machines, the dibble attaches to the machine and punches or drills the hole just after the pot is filled. The change from one size hole to another takes only a minute or two.

For a flat filling operation, motorized conveyor dibbles were developed. They are powered by a pneumatic or hydraulic cylinder. Adjustable rails guide and position the flats. When a flat moves into position under the dibble, it activates a microswitch or photoeye, which stops the belt momentarily and cycles the dibble.

Watering tunnel

Besides saving considerable time, a watering tunnel can do a more uniform job of wetting the container after it has been transplanted or before it is shipped.

Watering tunnels are mounted above a chain conveyor or perforated, polycarbonate belt that is powered by a variable speed motor. Side panels and a tray or tank below the belt catch excess water and direct it to a drain. A solenoid valve activated by a photoeye or finger switch turns the water on.

Water application rate depends on the type and spacing of the nozzles. Some manufacturers provide several stages to avoid washing out the seedlings or plugs.

You can develop your own tunnel or watering station fairly easily. A simple system consists of a set of water breaker nozzles mounted over the conveyor that takes the containers away from the transplanters. A solenoid valve activates the water supply and a ball valve controls the flow rate.

Tagger

Hand tagging takes from one to six seconds per container. Tagging machines were developed to reduce this time. They usually operate in conjunction with a potting machine, transplanting conveyor or automatic transplanter.

The tagger is usually located over a belt conveyor with the pots or flats passing under one or more tagging heads. The tags are held in a magazine or chute and fed to an insertion head. As the flat or pot comes underneath the head, the container is positioned and a switch stops the belt and the tags are inserted. Most machines insert several tags at a time across a flat.

Compressed air and/or vacuum is needed depending on the manufacturer. Control may be manual or by a preprogrammed solid-state device. With a controller, the flat or pot configuration is entered and the tag chutes positioned. Some machines have a stop signal to indicate when the tag supply runs out. Most machines will handle several styles of insert tags at a rate of at least 500 flats per hour.

The payback on the above devices is fairly short and also allows you to utilize your employees in more productive ways.

Brent Troost found his calling as a grower at age 12, when the local garden center gave him several leftover plants he’d been eyeing. He created “an impromptu garden” next to his parents’ house in West Michigan, where he planted flowers and vegetables that amazed his neighbors and sparked his lifelong passion.

Troost kept cultivating plants in his backyard as he grew older, and then worked at a garden center during high school. “Customers would ask me [for] advice about plants, and I was relatively knowledgeable because I’d been growing for years,” he says.

While studying ornamental horticulture at Michigan State University, Troost began working at Sawyer Nursery, a large perennial greenhouse in Hudsonville, Michigan, where he assisted the head grower, Paul Pilon. When Troost graduated in 2004, the nursery offered him the head grower position at its Alabama facility. There, he oversaw 100 acres of outdoor perennial container production.

After a couple years in Alabama, Troost moved to Miami to work for the color division of Costa Farms. As head of propagation, he managed production of 100 million plugs and liners in addition to managing Costa’s offshore unrooted cutting facility in the Dominican Republic.

After working at Costa for a couple years, Troost moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan — closer to his family — and joined Zylstra Greenhouses in the dual role of head grower and general manager. “I learned a lot about the details of general operations that a head grower doesn’t always think about,” he says.

When Zylstra’s owner decided to close the business in 2015, Troost moved to the head grower position at Color Point’s Granville, Illinois, wholesale bedding plant greenhouse. The facility, which Color Point acquired from Mid-American Growers in 2014, spans 85 acres of greenhouse production space — and also supplies plugs to Color Point’s 30-acre production facility in Kentucky, where the company is based.

Being head grower is “an opportunity to not just grow plants, but to watch people grow in their talent when it comes to growing plants,” Troost says. “I couldn’t be any happier.”

Bringing in beneficial bugs

Troost started working with beneficial insects while he was head grower at Zylstra. With the owner’s approval to explore biological pest control, Troost began releasing beneficial mites on his Dracaena spike crop to combat a recurring thrip problem.

As biocontrol proved effective, Troost expanded the program to address pests on other crops — until eventually, Zylstra’s entire young plant program used beneficial mites. When he joined Color Point, he leveraged this experience to introduce a biocontrol program, starting with young plants. In 2018, the program expanded to poinsettias.

“In fact, our whole poinsettia program was biological this year,” Troost said in 2018. “From sticks to finish, they never received any insecticides. We’re growing poinsettias without the use of neonics, and that’s exciting to me.”

Color Point is so invested in beneficial pests that the greenhouse actually breeds its own colonies of Atheta beetles and Hypoaspis mites that fight common pests. Aside from the bugs bred on-site, Color Point also brings in other beneficials, including: cucumeris mites, swirski mites, Steinernema nematodes, Aphidius colemani and other predator wasps to control thrips, whiteflies, fungus gnats and other pests.

“It’s a different way of thinking about [pest control] than just saying, ‘Let’s spray chemicals,’ so you have to overcome that mindset,” Troost says. “If you want to be successful using biological control, you’ve got to be persistent.”

That’s why Troost has a plant health specialist on his team who’s responsible for random virus testing, purchasing and putting out biologicals, and rearing beneficial colonies — all to ensure that the greenhouse provides clean, healthy plant material.

Cultivating growers

Although Troost pursued horticulture because of his passion for growing plants, his commitment to cultivating other growers is integral.

“It’s more than just the plants; it’s engaging your people and working with them on a daily basis — that’s the most important key to being a successful head grower,” Troost says. “I always say: The plant part is easy. The people portion is the hardest part.”

Troost manages 24 people at Color Point, including two lead growers, 20 section growers and two assistants. He meets with the whole team every morning to share a rundown of the day ahead. Then, section growers are responsible for making sure their crops are watered, sprayed and grown to spec. To ensure consistent quality, Troost and his lead growers walk and talk with section growers to provide hands-on, one-on-one daily training.

To further develop his team, Troost organized an all-day educational event in December 2018 — bringing in chemical reps and plant experts like Dr. Ann Chase of Chase Horticultural Research to discuss plant diseases, pests, biocontrol and traditional chemistries. He hopes to make the training day an annual event to help his team grow their plant passion and knowledge.

“I’m all about empowering my team,” Troost says, “so if I’m not here or if I go on vacation, I can sleep at night knowing that I trust their decision-making.”

It’s the New Year and you know what that means. ’Tis the season for resolutions and goal setting. As we all know too well, goal setting and making resolutions can be double-edged swords. On the one hand, if you don’t set specific goals, you can’t realistically expect them to manifest out of thin air. What’s the saying? It’s never going to rain roses, so if you want more roses, you’ll have to plant them. Or something like that. On the flip side, setting specific goals and then not achieving them — or never getting around to working on them — can be discouraging. So, let’s look at four easy ways to get on track with goals in 2019.

Keep it simple.

Structure can be good, especially when you’re working with employees on their work goals. But structure doesn’t require complexity. There are all sorts of fancy systems and acronyms out there for goal setting. I’m not going to bother selling you on any of them, because frankly I don’t use them. Or rather, I’ve tried a bunch of different ones, but have always found the simplest approach to goal setting works best.

My big goal-setting secret? Discipline. Write down a few goals and stick them in a place you see them regularly — like your day planner or your whiteboard. Then, look at them. That’s pretty much it. Really, it works. But I do add a little method to my madness. Each year, I make a list of five major or pie-in-the-sky goals. These are your big dream goals. You want to open a new business, write a book, write five books, complete the Iron Man, double your income, become a real estate mogul or retire at 50 in Provence, France. Wait, I’m retiring in Provence, so you can’t have that one.

Pie-in-the-sky goals will only ever be possible if you acknowledge in black and white that they could be possible. After all, pie exists... and so does the sky. Who says you can’t put the two together? Decide which dream goal you would like to achieve in one year, three years, and five years (or 20 years, whatever timeframe you want). Assign them that time target and write them down. If you don’t write them down, you won’t get any pie.

Next, pick one to five down-to-earth goals for the next 12 months, or whatever job or business time cycle you choose. Your earthly goals fall into the time-sensitive and measurable category, and might be tangible, such as improving your sales revenue by 1 to 2 percent over the next quarter, making a job change, getting your taxes done on time, hiring a new assistant, or walking or running a 5k event. Or they might be emotional, such as repairing a difficult work relationship or developing a more positive attitude toward your employees. Whatever you think will make a significant improvement in your day-to-day life or business operations. Small goals can have big ripple effects.

Put your goals front and center.

Once you write these goals down and give them a time target or hard deadline, you might be amazed at how they manifest. Often much sooner than you originally planned. I call that the reticulating activator effect. There is this thing in your brain called the reticular activator system (RAS). Simply put, it’s your brain’s filter system for channeling relevant information to your consciousness, based on what you happen to be doing, thinking about, or what you choose to believe.

When you decide you must have a Monstera philodendron, suddenly you see Monstera all over the internet, in your social feeds and in places you shop. You say to yourself, “Where did all these Monstera come from — they weren’t here before?” Yes, yes, they were. Your brain just wasn’t instructed to pay attention to them with intent focus. Same goes for your goals.

Case in point: Just as I typed the last period in the paragraph above, my husband walked in the room with a Sprinkles cupcake box for me, holding a chocolate peppermint cupcake. Just the day before, I’d said to him I was feeling a little put out because it had been a long time since he brought me a cupcake... and I really wanted a peppermint cupcake. He said, “Peppermint cupcakes don’t exist.” I said, “Sure they do, there has to be one out there somewhere.”

Some people call this RAS effect setting an intent. Whatever you want to call it, getting what you want boils down to your thinking about it and focusing on it with intention. You must put it out into the world. Now, I’m eating my peppermint cupcake.

Find a custom fit.

When it comes to goal setting for your employees for their job role, you need to have a bit more structure to your process. In this dynamic, you as the owner or manager are responsible for working with your employees to help set goals that both help them develop professionally, and help the company achieve overall goals. You’ll need to check in with your employees on goal progress on a set schedule.

Don’t expect a one-size-fits-all goal-setting system to work for all your employees. Some employees respond to rewards, and some respond to what may be taken away. Some employees value cash, some value time. Attaching performance goals to either benefits or consequences should be done with a keen understanding of the individual and tailored as such. Employee goal setting is a customized affair.

Put intention behind your effort.

Why do you and your company need to set goals? For me, that’s the most important consideration. Going through the motions of mandatory goal setting for the sake of it isn’t terribly productive or inspiring. From my own experience, the biggest reason for setting specific goals is to give meaning to my actions and effort.

Have you ever felt like you were working so hard, but not manifesting the results you feel you deserve? Spinning your wheels can be an exhausting and frustrating experience. Especially when you’ve put forth a lot of effort on a project or task, only to feel like you wasted a bunch of time. If there is no real intention behind the effort, what’s the point? If there is purpose, a goal, attached to that effort and time spent, then you — and your employees — get to feel confident about the work.

Ultimately, you don’t owe anything to goals you’ve previously set, but have not achieved. It’s quite possible that goals you set yesterday for yourself, your employees, or your company, are no longer relevant in today’s reality. The important part is setting the goals in the first place. Make the goal, work the goal, change the goal.

Leslie (CPH) owns Halleck Horticultural, LLC, through which she provides horticultural consulting, business and marketing strategy, product development and branding, and content creation for green industry companies. lesliehalleck.com

As we head toward the spring growing season, greenhouses are again filled with the diversity of species that characterizes annual and perennial bedding plants. And, with this diversity, we are reminded of the limitations we face in the greenhouse. Looking at the greenhouse environment, we have to pick a single air temperature for an entire greenhouse. Or if we are lighting, all the plants under lights will be subject to the same photoperiod. The same goes for crop culture. While the variety of commercially available products is staggering, and the possibilities when mixing your own endless, many facilities use one or two substrates and fertilizers. When you are limited in substrates and fertilizer selection, look at amending your substrates to take a one-crop-fits-all product and tailoring it before planting. This can save you time during production as you tend to the different needs of each crop. Substrate amendments can be used to improve macro and micronutrient fertilization, as well as modify substrate moisture and irrigation requirements.

One of the biggest ways annuals and perennials vary is in their feeding requirements from “light” (New Guinea impatiens) to “heavy” (i.e. vegetative geraniums). While this can be accommodated by applying stronger concentrations of water-soluble fertilizer, greenhouses can be limited in the number of fertilizer injectors or lines available. Adjustable injectors can provide different fertilizer concentrations from the same stock solution, but the amount of adjusting can become prohibitive, depending on the amount of variety and their spatial arrangement in the greenhouse. Controlled-release fertilizers (CRFs) are one option that can be used to simplify your fertilizer program. While the idea of using CRFs as the sole nutrient source does not appeal to everyone, CRFs can fill a supplemental role in a nutrition program. By adding between one and three pounds of CRF per cubic yard of substrate, depending on the fertilizer analysis and crop needs, you can provide extra nutrients for specific crops within a greenhouse with single or limited WSF fertilizer options.

Crops also vary in their micronutrient requirements. Several species do not require special accommodations, and these are placed in the “general” group. Some species either have a greater requirement for micronutrients or are not efficient at taking them up, and these crops are in the “micronutrient-inefficient” or “petunia/calibrachoa” group. Alternatively, some species are very efficient at taking up micronutrients, and these are “micronutrient-efficient” or “geranium/marigold” plants. This can be managed in one of two ways: 1) the availability of micronutrients; or 2) the concentration of micronutrients. For the “petunia/calibrachoa” group, they are often grown at a lower pH (5.4 to 5.8) to increase the availability of micronutrients in the root zone. However, supplementing with higher concentrations of micronutrients increases the amount of nutrients available to plants even at less-than-ideal pH levels. Conversely, the “geranium/marigold” group is usually grown at a higher pH to decrease the availability of micronutrients in the root zone. Reducing micronutrient concentrations in fertilizers also accommodates these plants. Amendments can help accommodate these differences even when there is only a single substrate or fertilizer. For the “geranium/marigold” group, incorporating some additional limestone in the substrate can raise the pH, limiting the availability of micronutrients. Alternatively, for the “petunia/calibrachoa” group, controlled or slow-release micronutrient fertilizers can be added to substrates. While the pH may still be between 5.8 and 6.2, the increased micronutrients should meet the plants’ needs.

Finally, you can amend your substrate to accommodate moisture requirements. The diversity among crops can create a challenge to meet the exact moisture requirements of each crop and, while a careful eye (or well-calibrated sensor) is the best way to manage irrigation, we can alter the physical properties of substrate to accommodate different crops. For those species that prefer to be grown on the dry side, loosen up the mix by adding additional perlite. The looser mix will provide more drainage and allow the substrate to dry down more quickly. Alternatively, for those crops that grow better with more moisture, add some additional ground sphagnum moss or vermiculite. This will help retain moisture for a longer period of time between irrigations for those water-loving crops.

We have enough constraints on production during our spring, but these amendments can be used to try and simplify your spring production just a bit. The more you can try to accommodate your crops prior to planting, the simpler it will be to grow across your entire range with a simplified approach. And the good news is you won’t need a complete mixing line to make your customized substrates. Something as simple as a watering trough (Fig. 1) or electric cement mixer can be all you need to amend small batches of substrate for big results.

Christopher is an assistant professor of horticulture in the Department of Horticulture at Iowa State University. ccurrey@iastate.edu