Before the term “plant blindness” was coined in 1998 by botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, the majority of people in the U.S. had lost their collective ability to notice the plants around them. What was common knowledge to our ancestors has become an obliviousness about where our food comes from, the importance of plants to the health of humans and animals, and a failure to appreciate the role of plants in the very survival of our planet. Seed Your Future has been working tirelessly to turn things around and inspire more people — especially youth — to appreciate the role of plants in our world and perhaps explore a career working with plants. Modest gains were being made.

Then the world changed. A global pandemic altered every facet of life for humans including how we live, work, eat, play and socialize. Fear of going outside, fear of connecting with others and fear of an unknown plague forced us not only to isolate from one another, but from the natural world. Even though decades of solid research affirms the ability of plants and nature to heal, cure, soothe and inspire, access to outdoor spaces was restricted. Even enjoying one’s own backyard or balcony was seen by many as a risk too perilous to take.

As media coverage exploded about the spread of the pandemic, the Seed Your Future movement searched for the voice we would take to help provide respite from a growing panic. While the pandemic was, and still is, a dangerous issue, we chose to spread messages about the power of plants to support our mental and physical health — especially in times of crisis. Our #NatureNeverCloses and #YearOfThePlant campaigns provide inspiration about plants and nature. We were trying to change the vernacular. It’s about physical distancing, not social isolation. Being around plants, growing plants and even just looking at flowers and plants has been proven by study after study to improve our mood, provide hope and nourish us from both hunger and despair.

While we can never say that there is a “silver lining” to the pandemic, the fact is there are more people expressing interest in plants, growing their own food and flowers, purchasing houseplants, seeds, garden supplies and spending their time improving the world around them with plants. A “green lining,” as it were.

As people who have plant-passion, this truly is the defining moment we’ve been working for. Economists report that garden and plant retailers experienced one of the best sales seasons ever in 2020, which has continued into 2021. Families are choosing to spend their precious funds on growing their own food, enhancing their surroundings and buying houseplants to cheer their isolation.

But people can be fickle, attention spans short, and if we don’t capitalize on this moment, time will pass and interest in gardening and plants may wane again. So, what can we do about it?

I believe the answer is straightforward. It’s you, and me, and other educators, and plant-enthusiasts, and frankly, everyone who already knows that the fate of our world lies in the next generation embracing the importance of plants not only to humans, but to animals, and to Earth.

Call to action

Our job is to show others the way. So, how do we do it? I suggest that the focus should be on kids. Families are hungry for meaningful, enjoyable activities for their children.

Here are just a few ideas of what you can do today to make a difference:

1. Show kids the power of plants and the rewards of careers working with plants. Whether you are a parent, a teacher, a youth program leader, a horticulturist or someone simply passionate about plants — you can open kids’ eyes to the wonders of the plant world.

Seed Your Future’s BLOOM! Campaign has sample lesson plans, activities, an online learning module and more. Use the activities with your family, your students and your youth programs.

Make it fun! We recently created three DIY videos of fun projects to do with plants. Check them out and do them with the kids in your life. These include: Grow Your Own Plants with Hydroponics, Make Your Own Fun Light Maze for Plants and Use Plants to Dye Your Own Clothes.

Check out one of Seed Your Future’s partner’s resources for gardening with kids. KidsGardening.org has many projects and activities. Pick a few and have some fun.

2. Encourage families to get involved in one of the cool plant-based citizen scientist projects they can do in and around their homes and communities. The Chicago Botanic Garden’s national BudBurst project is one of our favorites.

3. Use the excellent #PlantsDoThat free resources and infographics from the National Initiative for Consumer Horticulture. They tell the story of how plants make a positive difference in our lives.

Green careers

If kids don’t notice the plants in the world around them, how can they develop a life-long appreciation for plants, and why would they ever have an interest in a career working with plants? We must show them how plants impact our lives every day, and the diversity of careers across the art, science, technology and business of plants.

But we cannot serve these ideas up to kids “the old way.” Through Seed Your Future’s focus group research with kids across the country, kids gave us some sage advice: stop using “weird” words like “horticulture,” show them through video and social media content how plants can change the world, and have “cool” young people tell them about their rewarding (#ILoveMyPlantJob) careers. They coined the term “plantologist” instead of “horticulturist” and urged us to connect plants to what they are already interested in such as sports, fashion, medicine, technology, art and more.

We’ve created a few dozen videos already. Check them out on our YouTube channel (search for “We Are BLOOM!”). But there’s more you can do today. Create and share your own fun videos. If you don’t have the expertise to make an informal video, you likely know a young person who does. Ask them to help you make a fun video about your passion for plants. If you are a green-collar pro, talk about your career and tell them why #ILoveMyPlantJob.

And check out our free online Career Exploration Tool (www.seedyourfuture.org/careers). With more than a hundred careers highlighted, you and the kids in your life can explore the diverse careers, the education needed, where to study, professional groups to help, and links to scholarships and internships.

©Alinsa | adobestock

Making lifelong plant enthusiasts

Our mission to grow awareness of the power of plants and the rewards of careers working with plants seemed to be poised right where we wanted it to be. After all, with the growing interest in plants, if we do our job well, we can turn that into more interest in careers working with plants, right? We were riding high with enthusiasm and declared 2021 the Year of Plant Power.

With our awareness campaigns and projects with partners such as Scholastic launched in full force, and our movement’s volunteers full of optimism and drive, I found myself caught unprepared when a phone call challenged my thinking.

In talking with a seasoned horticulture professional, he expressed pessimism that the “green-lining” would have any long-term impact on appreciation for plants and interest in careers working with plants. He surprised me, and I admit my first reaction was one of exasperation (who wants to listen to Cassandra when you are Pollyanna?). I refrained from jumping through the phone to tell him how wrong he was. Instead, I asked questions about his perspective. He noted other times in history when he thought renewed interest in plants (e.g., Victory Gardens of the 1940s) did not translate into long-term plant-passion and plant-career interest.

I heard him. I understood his points. And I questioned, will this “green-lining” indeed be different?

By a coincidence of timing, that same week we were judging the Scholastic BLOOM! Plant Mash-Up contest submissions from students across the country. Almost 5,000 middle-schoolers identified challenges in their own community, then imagined a plant-based solution founded on the qualities of two plants they “mashed-up.” What an incredible inspiration! The students were so thoughtful and creative. Our judges had a challenging time selecting the winners. It renewed my optimism. These students get it. They are our future. But will that be enough?

Alone, it won’t be enough. But together, we can be more than enough.

We can change the trajectory. We can eliminate plant apathy. We can inspire more young people to pursue the “green-collar” careers that will make a difference in our world.

If each of us can inspire even one person to pursue a green-collar career, we can ensure a strong pipeline of future talent — talent that will take the reins and provide the technology, science, art, education and business acumen to ensure the future of our people and our planet. Together, we can turn this green-lining into a world with a bounty of green-collar professionals.

Together, we can ensure that the next generation emerges from this pandemic with a lifelong interest in plants, gardens and gardening. Let’s not miss this opportunity to share the “green-lining” and teach people how plants can indeed cure, heal, soothe and inspire.

Susan Yoder is the former executive director of Seed Your Future. Yoder retired in 2021. This information originally appeared on the Seed Your Future blog.

This article originally appeared in the July 2021 issue of sister publication Nursery Management. It has been reprinted with permission and edited for length and clarity.

Dave Gross has grown plants practically his whole life. “I’ve been working in the garden since I could walk,” he says. By age 11, he already had his first job in the industry, helping his priest start a small retail greenhouse where they grew bedding plants.

He went on to study botany and landscaping in college, where Bailey Nurseries recruited him as an intern. By the time Gross joined Bailey Nurseries full-time in 1981, although he was only 21, he already had 10 years of growing experience — making him a prime candidate to launch and lead the nursery’s bedding plant operation. In 1991, after 10 years as foreman of production and growing, Gross was promoted to his current role as production manager at Bailey’s Nord Farm facility in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The site, which covered about three acres when Gross first joined the company, now spans 22 acres under cover plus two acres of outdoor production. As his responsibilities have evolved from growing plants to cultivating a team of people, Gross developed processes along the way to streamline production and optimize his team. Here’s how he’s contributed to the operation’s growth over the last 40 years.

Simplifying the crop mix

At its peak, Nord Farm employed 240 people producing a diverse variety of crops — from bedding plants to potted Jumpstarts® liners, bareroot cuttings, flowering Bud & Bloom containers and more. Over time, Gross says, the bedding plant program alone grew to about $5 million in sales. “It got to the point that we had so many products and so many pot sizes that our supervisors were overwhelmed,” says Gross, who oversees 11 supervisors at Nord Farm. “At that point, I said, ‘This isn’t going to work. There’s got to be better crops we could grow.’”

Gross led a cross-functional team to determine the program’s fate, and they confirmed that the labor-intensive bedding plant operation wasn’t making the most efficient use of Bailey’s greenhouses. They discontinued the program in 2015, ultimately repurposing the greenhouses to increase production of Bud & Bloom hydrangeas and Jumpstart liners.

“What we’ve done is change our product mix to require less staff and [maintain] higher profit margins,” he says. “Now we’re filling the same space, and this year, we topped out at 110 people, versus 240. We’re trying to simplify by reducing SKUs, pot sizes and varieties in order to be more efficient.”

Prioritizing the process

Gross learned another important lesson in 2015, when an experienced key supervisor left the company. “I realized I didn’t know his job as well as I should have. I didn’t know his timetable of what he did, why he did it or when,” Gross says. “So, I decided to record every significant process related to production, when it began and when it ended.”

Initially, Gross started documenting these jobs — like taking cuttings and winterizing greenhouses — every week on the whiteboard. Ultimately, these timetables were transferred down on paper so the team could easily reference the schedule. Every week, he communicates constantly with his team to explain their priorities as they progress toward short- and long-term production goals.

“When I decide to retire, somebody can step in and look back since 2015 and know what happened every week of every year,” Gross says. “Communication is a critical piece of what I do because everybody needs to understand the priorities. If everyone understands what has to get done, they share the labor willingly.”

Innovating production

In addition to inventory simplification and clear communication, Gross also relies on automation to make his team more efficient. While Bailey is “not as automated as many large growers because of our diversified crops,” he says, he works closely with an in-house fabrication team to develop customized equipment that makes moving, pruning and harvesting plants easier.

For example, “Growing high-quality rooted plugs and liners requires consistent pruning, and we achieve that with multiple mowing devices,” Gross says. “We have five-wheeled mower frames that move two bagging mowers up and down the greenhouse. One person can [prune] a house in four hours. We just motorized one of them, where you can take a joystick and a remote control to run the mower without even pulling it.”

Bailey’s fabrication team similarly modified a plant lifter onto a specialized tractor to help the growing team streamline harvests. “We can harvest a hundred thousand cuttings in two hours with four people,” he says. “It’s a very efficient system.”

These process improvements help Nord Farm produce over 10 million plants per year as Gross cultivates an efficient, effective growing team.

“Over the years, I’ve been involved in [the production of] tens of millions of plants. To watch an unrooted cutting turn into a rooted plant in a larger container, and then finally to see your retail product looking good on display for the end-user to take home, that’s a great feeling,” Gross says. “It’s satisfying to grow plants, but if we can grow our people, that’s my biggest satisfaction.”

Bilyj is a freelance writer based in Cleveland, Ohio.

Light is one of the key components needed for growing plants. A rule of thumb is “1% increase in light equals 1% increase in plant growth.” How can we increase the light level, especially during the dark days of winter?

Research has shown that greenhouse film and polycarbonate lose 2% or more light transmittance each year because of ultraviolet light. Depending on where your greenhouse is located, dust, dirt and air pollutant accumulation may also cause light reduction. A 5% reduction per year is likely in some areas near large cities on the east coast, Midwest or west coast. Industrial areas also tend to have greater smog (smoky fog) concentrations.

I recently visited Freund’s Farm Market and Bakery in East Canaan, Connecticut, to do an energy audit. Theresa Freund indicated that they had replaced the 20-year-old polycarbonate on their 7,200 sq. ft. gutter-connect greenhouse. She found this resulted in having to rework the plant production schedules as the increased light reduced the plant production time in the spring by two to three weeks.

New glazing can reduCe the heating cost

A simple calculation can be made to estimate the fuel savings for the reduced time when the greenhouse is not heated. Determine the heating degree days for the year. This can be calculated from degree day data available for any location in the world on the website www.degreedays.net. Based on research at Rutgers University, select a temperature that is 50 less than the night operating temperature and let the program calculate the number of degree days. Solar energy makes up the 50 difference. Divide the estimated gallons of oil or propane or ccf of natural gas used for that greenhouse for the year by the number of degree days to get the fuel use/degree day. From the degree day calculations, determine the number of degree days during the period when heat is not needed and multiply by the fuel use/degree day. Then multiply by the cost of the fuel to get the savings.

The Freund’s Farm greenhouse used 3,880 gallons of propane for 1,400 degree days for the year 2020, or 2.77 gallons/degree day. There were 400 degree days in the first two weeks in March when the greenhouse didn’t have to be heated, resulting in 1,108 gallons being saved. At $3/gallon propane, the savings for not having to provide heat resulted in a savings of about $3,324. This helps to offset the cost of the new glazing. There is also a savings in labor not needed to maintain the plants for two weeks.

For air inflated greenhouses, replacing the plastic yearly may be economical. During the summer, light levels are high enough that the reduction in light may not affect plant growth. It is during the late fall, winter and early spring when this is of most concern. Let’s look at an example. The cost of replacing the double layer of plastic on a 30’ x 100’ hoop house is about $1,500 ($0.50/sq ft for plastic and labor x 3,000 sq ft = $1,500). It would take an increase in production of just 0.63 lb/plant of tomatoes at a wholesale price of $3/lb to pay for the new plastic. Increased yields of one pound/plant or more are not uncommon when new plastic is installed.

Now that we have taken care of the easy upgrade to the greenhouse, let’s look at some other areas where light getting to the plants could be increased.

Inside the greenhouse

• Place water, heat pipes and conduits below ground, along the post line under the gutter or along the sidewalls.
• Install energy/shade screens that retract into a small space. When retracted, some shade systems create more than 10% shade.
• Locate overhead heaters near the north wall of the greenhouse when possible.
• Use a glazed louver system rather than motorized metal shutters.
• Remove insect screening and evaporative pads during the winter.
• Remove overhead hanging basket supports for the winter. Eight rows of 1-1/4” support pipe create more than 5% shade in a 21’ bay.
• Paint structural members, bench surfaces and walkways white to reflect light. White paint will give about 80% reflection, whereas aluminum reflects about 60% of the light that strikes it.

Outside the greenhouse

• Remove all remnants of shading and grime from the glazing before winter. Use shade remover or a power washer.
• Remove nearby trees if they create shadows on the greenhouse. Observe the shadows during January and February.
• Purchase a light meter and check your greenhouses for light transmittance. A few changes may increase light levels significantly.

Have you been feeling a little black and blue the last couple of years? Me too. So, I decided “bruised” would make a fitting garden color scheme theme for 2022. “Bruised” has always been my favorite color combo, but it feels particularly appropriate right now. Black, blue, purple and a bit of chartreuse thrown in for contrast and accuracy. As luck would have it, there are some lovely black and blue perennials hitting the retail market in 2022.

Dark times

Dark times often seem to call for dark foliage. The black foliage plant trend isn’t new, but we’ve seen a resurgence in its popularity over the last year or so, especially in the houseplant market. The Raven ZZ plant, Alocasia, Peperomia, Begonia, and jewel orchids (Ludisia discolor), sparked much of the excitement in the indoor garden. Taking your cue from indoor gardening trends, black foliage will also resonate with your outdoor gardeners.

Consumers are simply trying to find something different or unique to enhance both their living spaces and gardens. Black, or almost-black, foliage and flowers certainly deliver on distinction. Given the number of new perennial plant releases that look to encourage gardeners to grow to the dark side, I’d say black foliage is due for another moment in the sun.

I did manage to make it on one business trip scheduled over the last two years that didn’t get cancelled: AmericanHort’s Cultivate ’21 show. While it felt a bit strange (I suspect not only for me) figuring out how to navigate a crowded convention center during a pandemic, I made a few fast passes through the trade show floor; specifically, to hunt for new standout plant varieties.

The new perennial releases that caught my eye include:

Sedum ‘Back in Black’: You can definitely go to the dark side of your sun garden with this fall-bloomer. Near-black leaves will offer standout contrast in your garden most of the growing season, followed by flowers with cream petals and a bullseye red center, creating a pinkish hue across the bloom clusters. Give plants full sun to retain the rich and deep foliage color.

Hibiscus ‘Edge of Night’: While pink flowers don’t technically fit into my “bruise” color scheme, there’s no denying that the foliage of this new compact hardy hibiscus are near-black and quite stunning. The foliage is described as “jet black,” which does make a lovely contrast to the huge 8-inch rosy, pink flowers. With plants growing to only 3-3 ½ feet tall, this cultivar should make a nice container specimen as well. Full sun, of course, keeps these beauties in full flower and foliage intensity.

Got the blues?

Geranium ‘Boom Chocolatta’: As its name implies, this gorgeous Geranium pratense hybrid has deliciously dark bronze foliage with chocolatey tones. But it’s the combination with intense purple-to-blue flowers that place this plant firmly into my bruise-appropriate scheme. While I believe this cultivar first hit the market a couple of years ago, this is the first I’m seeing of it, and it is a new intro in the Proven Winners Perennials program. Now, down here where I garden in Texas, I can’t say we have a ton of luck with cultivated cranesbills due to our extreme heat and drought; but when planted here, they are best positioned in a dappled shade garden. I’m certainly willing, given its promise to be more “vigorous,” to give it a try in my tough Texas garden.

Schizachyrium scoparium ‘The Blues’: This little bluestem has earned itself the coveted Perennial Plant of the Year designation for 2022, and for good reason. This tough clumping grass sports the most ethereal ice blue foliage, accented by red stems. As fall temperatures cool, each plant takes on its own “bruised” stem, offering a mix of colors from purple to blue to orange. The beauty of this blue stunner is that it thrives in poor soil and limited water. It’s an easy-to-grow water-wise perennial in full sun locations, if you’re willing to forego any extra TLC.

Amsonia ‘String Theory’: The light blue to periwinkle flowers sported by this compact cultivar look like tiny stars sprinkled over your garden. If you’re looking for a more compact and denser alternative to Amsonia hubrichtii, with the bloom power of A. tabernaemontana ‘Storm Cloud,’ ‘String Theory’ promises to deliver. It also promises to deliver dark green foliage all season long, instead of the chlorotic foliage so often present in the standard species. At only 18-22” tall, this compact blue beauty can move to the front of the border.

Purple punch

No bruise would be complete without a punch of purple in the mix. One of my favorite finds at Cultivate ’21 was the new Cake Pops line of tuberous Verbena rigida, with purple clearly a standout color-wise. This is a species that is quite at home in my tough Texas gardening climate, but it can become a bit of a beast. So, I was excited to spot these cute round mounds of compact Cake Pops in containers in the New Varieties area of the show. The compact mounded form lends them to both the front of the border and containers — not to mention hanging baskets. Hey, a V. rigida hybrid might be one of the few things that can survive a Texas summer in a hanging basket without 24/7 irrigation. I’m here for it. OK, I realize that as far as the Zone 5 Mafia is concerned, this plant is an annual. But, for the entire southern half of the country, this species is happy to stick around year after year.

Lest you worry I’ve forgotten the disconcerting chartreuse colors that often make for a good shiner, I encourage you to check out the new and intriguing Jurassic Fern series, all of which look to offer up yellow-green to chartreuse foliage colors, perfect for bruisy contrast in the shade garden.

My advice for 2022? Just make sure to keep a few bags of frozen peas handy.