Pan American Seed

This is another year of great year of intros for PAS. Even though it looks like I posted a lot more pics of this visit than others previous, there is even more to see than below.


Petunia Pretty Grande and Petunia Pretty Flora
Both of these new series follow in the footsteps of the Hem Limbo/Mambo series of no/low PGR bedding flat petunias, but there are significant improvements over the former(uniformity,tight flowering window,PAS seed quality, and very good red). Their tight habit, with great low structural branching allows for a short shipable/sellable plant for the grower. The benefit of the good lower branching is seen later in the summer when the plants do not crack open as much as your standard petunias.




Vinca Jams n Jelly Blackberry
This is almost as dark as this picture shows, just knock it down a couple shades in real life. Still there's no comparison out there. Very cool!




Vinca Jams n Jelly American Pie Mix
Now you have a true heat tolerant red/white/blue mix to sell for the 4th of July.




Petunia Sophistica Blackberry
We all knew that Black Velvet grew like a standard upright petunia from seed... Now we have a black petunia from seed. While Blackberry is a shade off of black, PAS says it will darken in the summer sun.




PAS is putting a large focus on breeding of new vegetables. Ellen Leue, who brought us many of the Super Elfin Impatiens, Luna Hibiscus and Serena Angelonia, is now leading the new breeding program for vegetables. This season they are introducing a hanging basket tomato that holds on to it's fruit much better, an etching resistant jalepeno and a few others.

Zucchini Easy Pick
A green and yellow zucchini have been bred for spineless petioles. Which means no scratches on your hand when you pick your zucchini.




Salvia Lighthouse Purple
I like big flowering plants like Lighthouse Salvia, so I was excited to see a purple companion to the Red.




Cool Wave Pansy
This was a soft launch this year due to a late introduction in the fall. Dr. T has done a fantastic job in this series. Compared to the competition: Freefall and Wonderfall, the flower size is bigger and the trailing habit is larger. In our area I would only recommend these for early spring baskets right now(3ppp 10"), however I was interested to hear the idea of growing it along side with an outdoor mum program in a large patio pot.





You can see how big this can grow. I think this is a 10" pot and you can see that is almost down to the bottom of the pot.

Burpee Home Gardens

Burpee vegetables.
This retail program had significant sales growth in 2012, and that was lead by the new 'Boost' program (varieties selected for high anti-oxidants). It is a fantastic marketing program, but the varieties taste good too.
They added 3 new varieties to the boost program including the pepper Health Kick and the Tomato Tasty Lee. Both have good name recognition already and now the have the Boost program to support it even more.




Bumper Crop grafted tomatoes.
This is not a new product as last year Plug Connection rolled out their Mighty Mato program. The concept is you take the heirloom that people love because of their unique flavor and/or color, and graft it on a select rootstock that is resistant to late blight and tolerant to leaf spot. The special rootstock also increases harvest, Plug Connection trials show a 30% increase.
Last year I was very skeptical of viability of this program due to the high cost of the liner ~$2+ for a 102 liner. I am not usually a sucker for packaging but this pot and tag looked sharp and high end and the signage is great too. The picture below is a 102 liner grown for 4 weeks after transplant. I really believe that if you grow this for 5-6 weeks for a bulkier plant than below, it would sell for $10-12 at retail. The signage is key, the customer must be aware of the added value they are receiving.



Burpee Flowers
This will be year two for the flower program. Burpee heard the feedback of needing more exclusives for this program and came with two brand new flowering exclusives: one a very cool and bright begonia and the other a petunia that I like, but I want to see how the flower pattern looks throughout the summer.

Begonia Sparks will Fly- begonias are hot right now and this orange is deep and vibrant against a chocolate leaf. We have seen in the past that the chocolate bonfires were a bit less vigorous to their green counterparts, but this dark leaf seems to have a decent habit.




Petunia Blue a Fuse- this was described to us as 'having lots of drama in the flowers' and the flower pattern as 'stably unstable'.

Proven Winners

Proven Winners is always a very aesthetically pleasing stop with the rolling hills and nicely designed gardens. This year is no different. It seemed like there focus on flowers was a bit smaller this year as they devoted only 1 of their four stations to new varieties.

They also had an excellent presentation on the future of marketing and customer interaction due to the Internet and social media... A bit inspiring and a bit scary. Follow this link to see this video and you will be amazed how much our world has been transformed by this new technology.

Social Media Video Link

Calibrachoa Superbells Lemon Slice
This was one of the cooler calibrachoas I have seen. It is a great yellow and white star pattern. Unfortunately Lemon Slice has the same problem has the same problem as Pretty Much Picasso, from five feet away the star pattern blends away and it just a yellow flower then. I still think this will be great seller at retail.






They also had a new cleome and a lavender match to the Snow Princess.

In their shrub area the displayed are-blooming Wiegelia to complement their rebooting Lilac.

Suntory

Suntory is the third and final breeder at the Plug Connection stop.... Guess what... Another new Begonia!!! Not trying to be sarcastic because each one has had its own unique quality to make it cool. But where are the new petunias?
Crackling Fire Begonias
This new series is very compact and has a place in 10" mixed combo pots. I don't think i would recommend this in large monoculture pots, but we will see how it looks this summer. The picture below doesn't do justice as the pink was a hot rose/pink color. Very stricking.




They also have a pure white in the series.



Million Bells Wine Calibrachoa
Very nice soft lavender/purple color, and it seems to have good mounded trailing habit too.

Benary

The Benary stop was located up the hill at the Plug Connection facility. At first glance walking in to their event nothing really stood out, but when their speakers started presenting their products... it got interesting.
I have a strong feeling that 2013 is the year of the 'Begonia'. Every stop today has had a prominent new trailing basket begonia they are promoting. We probably will see a lot more beginias on this trip too. Bonfires and Million Kisses type trailing angel wing begonia have skyrocketed in sales in the last few years and you can see that all breeding programs are focused on developing new intros for that class.
Santa Cruz Begonia bolivinesus(sp?)
Very exciting.. First from seed! Very self branching and no risk of blind (non-branching) plants. I did feel the plant vigor was good but the flower size and stem caliper seemed bit smaller than the traditional vegetative types . I don't think that it is a big issue, but something to point out.
This 10" hanging basket is 3ppp 8 weeks planted from a 288 plug.... No pinching needed either.



A new blue ageratum for flats! No name yet, but that should come soon. Benary is the breeder/producer of Hawaii Blue, but they didn't exactly say what the fate of would be of that variety would be. Jim Nau said he will be watching his summer trials at Ball trials and report how this compares. I have to think they are introducing this due to the yearly seed production issues with Hawaii. No extra colors yet, but hopefully in the future. I would love to get the old assortment back from the Hawaii series of past.
Food: Tort au Choux (French pork & cabbage puff pastry), cheese quiche, fresh strawberry shortcake.

Plug Connection

This is always a nice stop because Plug Connection is always taking chances to bring new and interesting products from the fringe to the mainstream. They told me we will be getting a full catalog for this next year, which will be great as they carry a full product line plus many unique items to fill the box with.
Oxalis Allure
Saw these at the MSU garden in Lansing this past summer and they looked really nice, but I didn't know where we could source them from. They look and perform exactly the same if not a bit better than the PW Charmed series, plus it is a less expensive input too.







Mighty-Mato
Grafted Heirloom Tomato. We were told that this program was in today's issue of the Wall Street Journal... Not to shabby. I am starting to buy the hype. This is a really expensive input at $2+ for a 102 liner. But this gives you all the heirloom varieties with unmatched size, vigor and yield.




PC promised me that they are not using Umpa-Lumpa labor to do these tiny grafts, but I have no clue how anybody could be this delicate. I struggle buttoning the cuffs on my shirts.




Make sure you plant the graft above the soil line!!! Or the scion will send out stem roots and the benefit of the special root stock will be eliminated.
These gallon pots are 5 weeks planted from a 102 liner. With a good marketing message this should be a $12 retail gallon.



Landscape Gerbera Everglades
Not a huge market, but caught my eye.



That's my hand. These flowers are huge!



Food: Blueberry Nutrigrain Bar

Ecke

Our first stop on our first day. Ecke met us with a great assortment of of breakfast treats and big smiles. They changed the layout of their event and focused on lifestyle settings of plantings and it worked very nicely.
In the past two years I haven't got too excited at this stop, but their new Arcadia begonia series was quite impressive. This vegetative series is bred by Benary and looks to be a different take on their Illumination begonia series from seed. The new Arcadia has much larger and more doubled blooms and they seem to be more evenly dispersed throughout the plant as well. The other change is that while it still has a trailing habit, it seems to be better branched and at least at this age of plant growth, not as trailing. This is a good feature as Illuminations are almost impossible to ship on racks, and a bugger for customers to bring home in their car without breaking them either.











The other interesting new item was a coleus with a compact habit called Tempest.



Food: Strawberry Yogurt Parfait, Banana Nut Muffin