The truth about growing transplants

Hansel eggplant, www.harrisseeds.com.

The spike in interest in gardening that started around 2008 continues to drive demand for vegetable transplants from qualified growers. The tumble the economy took about then is only part of the reason folks turned, or perhaps returned, to gardening. The generation that helped usher in smartphones and other instant information devices doesn’t want to wait too long for the spoils of their labors, making transplants a better option over starting vegetables from seed.

“We see a significant shift in the market towards plants,” says Carly Scaduto, vegetable communications manager for Monsanto. She says that people are looking for instant gratification, but also to be successful.

Testing new varieties
Just like the discerning coffee drinker with their morning latte, gardeners are looking at the menu of different vegetable offerings and are willing to try new flavors. There has been an increase in interest in heirloom varieties, for instance, and several different types of basil and mint. This keeps it both interesting and challenging for growers. Scaduto offers one word of caution regarding heirloom plants.

“The challenge with heirlooms is that they don’t always have the necessary disease resistance to enable home gardeners to be successful in their gardening efforts,” says Scaduto. “Our tomato breeders (at Seminis Home Garden) are working to take the great heirloom qualities like taste, shape and color and incorporate them into tomato hybrids that can withstand the diseases that heirloom varieties have little or no resistance to.”

Another way to deal with some of the shortcomings of heirlooms is to graft them on to the root stock of disease-resistant varieties. Plug Connection, out of Vista, Calif., does just that, selling grafted liners to the wholesale market that will eventually end up in the big box stores and garden centers.

“We want gardeners to be successful with heirlooms, whether they live in Albany, New York, or Albany, Georgia,” says Juan St. Amant, product development director at Plug Connection. He says their grafted tomatoes, which include 39 different varieties (including hybrid favorites), appeal to gardeners who are looking for disease resistance (particularly to late blight and nematodes) and greater production capacity.

Another trend Scaduto sees is container gardening with vegetables. Many folks simply don’t have the space to grow even a small garden, she says, but they still desire fresh vegetables.

“Container gardening has been a growing trend over the past several years. That means consumers are looking for vegetable plants and seeds that are compact in size,” says Scaduto. She says Seminis Home Garden, which doesn’t produce any GMO seeds for the home garden segment, has several compact home gardening varieties that work well in containers, including two tomato varieties, Huskey Red and Yaqui.

For northern gardeners (in zones 3 and 4), some heirloom varieties (particularly tomatoes, pumpkins and some squash types) simply won’t ripen in this short season zone. The best bet for growers to be successful in these zones is to offer heirloom varieties of cool season crops, such as broccoli, cabbage and lettuce, or heirlooms such as the Brandywine tomato that are grafted to a vigorous rootstock, which is the case with the increasingly popular Mighty ‘Matos and Might Veggies from Plug Connection.

Even with some of the exciting new varieties that are sure to please the palate, folks like to stick to vegetable transplant varieties with familiar names, such as Better Boy and Early Girl tomatoes, according to Ron Goldy, Michigan State University Extension educator, SW District, Agriculture (Vegetables).

“A lot of varieties grown for consumers are not the same varieties that are grown for commercial growers,” says Goldy, noting that some of the newer varieties that commercial growers are growing would be suitable, if not beneficial, for the home gardener.

Grafted vegetables
Perhaps the next major trend for vegetable lovers is grafted vegetables. Plug Connection’s St. Amant says their Mighty ‘Mato line of tomatoes has been well received in the last two years.

Consumers appear to be getting over the sticker shock of grafted varieties. Grafted tomatoes cost 20 to 40 percent more than non-grafted varieties, yet consumers appear willing to pay the higher cost for the benefits they receive. St. Amant says people like that they can have greater success with some of their heirloom favorites when they buy the types that have been grafted to a hardy, vigorous and disease-resistant rootstock. Plug Connection is also starting to graft and offer other vegetables. Their Mighty Veggies liners currently include four varieties of sweet peppers, two different hot peppers and three eggplant varieties.

“It’s turned into a fun project,” says St. Amant of the grafted varieties they’re sending to wholesale growers from coast to coast and directly to a few garden centers closer to home. Plug Connection is actually better known for selling perennial and annual liners.

St. Amant says that while tomatoes are the number one seller nationwide, when it comes to transplants, peppers aren’t far behind. Herbs are also gaining in popularity, which he says are best propagated by cuttings. The three most popular herbs on the market, according to St. Amant, are mint, basil and rosemary.

“Edibles are doing very, very well across the country,” he adds.

As part of its Mighty ‘Mato and Mighty Veggies program, Plug Connection offers branded containers to growers that aren’t mandatory, but the tags with the creative logo (showing the superhero tomato in a red cape ) are required.

In their 2013-14 Garden Trends Report, Garden Media Group sited a report from the international research group TrendWatching that says that health and wellness are the top reasons people select the products they buy, which will hopefully result in a good demand for vegetable transplants in the years ahead.

Neil Moran is a horticulturist and regular contributor to Produce Grower.