Brian Bourdon

Photo courtesy of Four Star Greenhouse

Greenhouse Management: How do you approach growing young plants?

Brian Bourdon: It kind of sounds a little cliche, but it starts with good genetics. Here at Four Star, we’re known for Proven Winners, and we trial so many plants every year. Part of our trialing process with young plants in mind is that it’s something that we’re going to be able to produce consistently and well.

There have been times where we’ve had a good plant in the summer, but we can’t propagate it, so we pull it for that reason alone. So that’s what I mean by good genetics. We’re doing production trials on potential new intros to make sure we can produce it and then it all goes from there with a good cutting.

We work really closely with all of our cutting suppliers. That’s most of our business. Probably 85 to 90% of our business is from cuttings anymore. We still do seed items like tubers, begonias, things like that, but not a lot, not like the old days. When you’re dealing with cuttings, it’s going to be really important to have a healthy stock. So, it really starts with good genetics and a good cutting. After that, it’s all about giving it the right environment and making sure it has good nutrition throughout the propagation phase.

GM: Are there any certain plant characteristics that you’re especially drawn to right now?

BB: One of the biggest things is always heat tolerance, especially for the southern market. A lot of our trials and our breeding is focused on getting longer flowering in the summer, even for things that aren’t traditionally known as heat flowering items. We’re looking for items that can perform everywhere. Earliness to flower is a characteristic as well. And then we’re also looking at more of what we call accent plants, more foliage-type, attractive items.

And we’re getting into some tropical items now, like the caladiums, that just add a little bit of texture to a lot of our uprights and even basket combos instead of just being balls of color. You know, we love the petunia, verbena and calibrachoa combos, but trying to get a little bit more texture in our combos is another characteristic that we’re really looking at.

GM: What trends are you paying attention to, both right now and looking ahead?

BB: We’re trying to be more and more sustainable. One of the things that we’re really happy with is coming up with an alternative to a plastic pot. We have these Eco+ Grande containers, which are made from plant byproducts and are compostable, so they will degrade within a couple of years. It’s a really nice alternative to plastic, which is going to take hundreds of years to degrade in the landfill.

Also, this year, we’ve switched to using hydrafiber instead of perlite. We used to use a 70% peat, 30% perlite blend. Now we use a 70% peat, 30% hydrafiber blend, and we’re pushing that envelope to 60-40 at times so that we can cut our peat a little bit.