A strong foundation

Photos courtesy of SePRO

No two days are alike for Jason Peace. As farm manager at Home Nursery’s Tennessee properties, he supervises 17 full-time staff in addition to nearly 30 seasonal employees. Some mornings might involve ensuring shrubs are getting potted at the right depths, while others are spent managing shipping and logistics.

But his favorite aspect of the job by far is the plant health and integrated pest management (IPM) work.

Peace graduated high school with plans to major in finance, but he quickly realized that was not the path for him. He took several general education classes, and it was the botany courses and the opportunity to work hands-on with plants that inspired him to pursue a degree in horticulture. The science fascinates him, and after working in the industry for more than a decade, he’s seen the way certain products can bring plants to life and change their trajectory.

“I like the challenge of it and learning about all of the new chemistries and biocontrols. I just think it’s really interesting,” Peace says. Plants are living things, and while some systems and processes can be automated at a large nursery, proper IPM and product application are both nuanced and crucial to get right, he says.

Home Nursery is headquartered in Illinois and operates two farms in McMinnville, Tennessee, with about 130 acres in production, which Peace has overseen since June 2020. One is primarily outdoors, with eight heated double plastic houses for sensitive liners and crops, and some cold frames. They are in the process of building 20 additional cold frames each year to cover the entire farm to protect its plants, primarily deciduous shrubs, from cold snaps that have been more frequent in their region. The other farm, five miles down the road, has 25 acres of greenhouses.

Trialing and experimentation are a big part of the job, so Peace was interested when one of Home Nursery’s supplier reps proposed he try Obtego — a fungicide and plant symbiont from SePRO that both protects plants from soil-borne pathogens and enhances root growth — on plants he was having trouble propagating.

“He pitched it to me and said, ‘Hey, anything you’re having problems with, will you try Obtego on it and see if you like it?’ The cost was pretty minimal, so we said sure, we’ll try it,” Peace says.

That was about a year and a half ago. After trying Obtego on one crop’s propagation cycle, they had such successful results that now Home Nursery uses the product on every plant that goes through the farm.

“We found it really, really works,” Peace says. “We went from trying it on a few crops to putting it on everything that we propagate. It revolutionized the way we are able to propagate, and now we also put Obtego on liners we bring in.”

Obtego has helped Home Nursery reduce its overage from 20% to roughly 5%. In the past, for example, if the company had an order for 10,000 plants, they’d have to stick 12,000, which the team does by hand. With Obtego, that’s cut down to 10,500, which saves on space, materials, inputs, labor and more.

Home Nursery first started using Obtego on Viburnum because it can be challenging to root, and they noticed increased success rates and stronger foundations after the first trial.

“Well, if it works on things that are hard to root, I want to see what it does on things that are easy, and you could even tell a difference on those,” Peace says he remembers thinking at the time. “Things weren’t rooting properly, and then you’d get die off from Phytophthora. … It just kills it before [the plant] has a chance to start, and Obtego will protect the plant from that. It’s definitely become an integral part of our entire process.”

SePRO products are used throughout the nursery, and Peace and the team have been impressed with the effectiveness. Hachi-Hachi has helped with whitefly control and thrips, so they are ordering more of it.

“We’re reclaiming water in our ponds, reusing the same water, and we noticed, especially this year, a lot of the water molds were just bad, and we were looking for options to fight it,” Peace says. “SePRO sent our water samples down to their big lab in North Carolina and came up with a plan with them on the most cost-effective way to fight it. I know nothing about water treatment, and they were able to answer all my questions.”

Peace said the SePRO team broke down a day-by-day guide for treating the water molds using EutroSORB WC, EutroSORB F and Cutrine Plus in the nursery pond, including reminders to take before and after pictures to track progress. Peace often reached out to his representative and would text him for help, and he would get back to him right away.

“It builds up a lot of trust with them, because you know that they’re not just trying to sell you something that might not work,” Peace says.

Peace has already noticed an improvement in ponds around the nursery. And he’s looking forward to seeing how a strong root foundation in propagation impacts plants later in their life cycle.

“I really think next year is going to show us what [Obtego] does in finished crops because it goes with it as you pot up the plant,” Peace says. “So, we’ve just now started potting some of the stuff that has been in the Obtego program, so I’m excited to see the difference it’s going to make on a finished plant.”