By Tom Dayton
March brings pot filling and the distribution of Better Gro on our benches and will go on with even more cuttings to come from stock shipped in from central and South America to our geraniums “in house” stock.
The cuttings purchased are virus indexed which means they have a clean start for us and for our customers.
About five years ago though, some mottling of leaves of petunias indicated that they were infected with the tobacco mosaic virus which when the weather warms causes the collapse of the entire plant. This virus spreads by insect vectors and humans that smoke and handle the product. So anyone that smokes or vapes does not get hired at Dayton Nurseries.
Our customers are allowed to smoke outside but never in the buildings or greenhouses, which is covered by the Ohio Revised Code. Unfortunately, at Timbuk II greenhouse in Granville, Ohio that stuck cuttings of confetti liners from the company of which some contained petunias and caused them to throw out thousands of the liners that they stuck containing petunias.
I don’t know for sure but the company, I am sure, replaced the infected plants but what about the significant labor costs? Another problem that plagues geraniums is called Xanthomonas, which again causes the collapse of the plants during warmer weather. Fortunately, with virus indexing this problem is long in the past.
Also, many shrubs are virus indexed as well as small fruits such as raspberries, blackberries and blueberries of which we purposely select vendors that provide these types of plants.
A variety of the long blooming perennial called Gaillardia ‘Little Goblin’ was always popular, however, Walters Gardens was not able to remove the viruses and so cancelled it.
And unfortunately, many times insects will spread the virus to other plants from what is called insect vectors.