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Published:3/1/2008

Making Plants High Tech

(from the March 2008 issue of GrowerTalks)

The present stress of the spring season is apparent to everyone. The continued compression of our market into a fall poinsettia season and a spring garden season is probably the most significant factor in the added stress I observe.

The year-round flowering potted plant market of 20 year ago has almost completely disappeared. This loss has affected every single segment of our industry from cutting/plug producers to the retail segment. We gear up for a large peak, followed by a large valley. This becomes significant in our industry because we can’t store our products in warehouses or grain elevators to meet these peak demands. I often wonder why and how we let this change happen. Did we do anything as an industry to respond to the loss of the year-round market? Even if we'd responded, could we have done anything to change consumer attitudes towards our year-round flowering plants?

I raise these questions not because I think we must live in the past but because we must pay attention to the past and use our past experiences to plan the future. As I look at both the present poinsettia market and the spring market, I feel we're again losing our consumers. As an industry, we cannot afford to sit by idly and let this happen.

For older consumers of our products, we've recognized changing trends and have responded by offering ready-made mixed containers. However, this response had done little to expand our markets. At best, it has maintained the market.

I think we've done almost nothing to respond to the younger generation of potential consumers. I'm convinced most young consumers are scared to death of purchasing our products. They have no idea how to care for the plants, and in most cases we provide little help or few instructions on plant care. We've also given them little reason to purchase plants. The young consumer is very much into technology. I-Pods, GPS, video games, high definition TV, e-mail and text messaging are our competition for their attention. What have we done to entice them through showing them the technology plants? I think with advertising and education we can excite young consumers with plants.

The green movement should be about our consumers. We should be telling the young consumer about the importance of plants in our world. Reinventing the idea that people can grow plants that provide beauty and health to our environment will do much to reconnect them to our products. We need to give them a reason to purchase our products. I may be naïve, but I really believe we can make plants as important as the I-Pod to the young consumer. As an industry we certainly have very little to lose, and the potential gain is huge.

I also think we need to use technology to reinvent plants and gardening for both the present generation of customers and the new young buyer. There are consumer systems for drip irrigation for hanging baskets and container plants, but it isn't something most consumers understand or even know about. How many consumers know about self-watering containers? Someone recently said to me they were amazed that the poinsettias in their office wilted between weekly watering by the plant maintenance company visits. There are containers that could easily fix this problem. Research has also shown that applying a wetting agent to the root medium when the plant leaves the greenhouse will also help the water-holding capacity of the root medium in the post-harvest environment. Some will quickly argue we cannot afford to add such costs to our plants. I think we can, and we certainly will never know until we try. On the other hand, how many consumers fill the pot cover with water by overwatering? Do we provide any instructions on how to water the plants we sell? "Keep the soil moist" means absolutely nothing to most consumers. Offering a high-tech self-watering foolproof container, which you simply set the 6.5-in. green plastic potted flowering plant in, may do more to increase sales of poinsettias and other flowering plants than all the new cultivars we can develop in the next 20 years. Every retailer selling plants should have drip-irrigated mixed containers in a prominent display to demonstrate such a system.

We must rethink our approach of selling plants in our new high-tech society. Business as usual simply is not working.

--P. Allen Hammer