Chris: A relatively quiet day on the Trials trail today, Ellen: two stops and only three companies that had new and exclusive varieties for us to write about.

Ellen: Quiet except for those Blue Angels roaring above us in tight formation as we approached Salinas in the late afternoon! Wow, that came out of nowhere. Literally.

Chris: A Sunday afternoon airshow! Too bad we didn’t know about it to get into town 10 minutes earlier and see the whole thing. But, yes, a quiet day for new varieties. Not that we didn’t have great conversations with companies like Skagit Horticulture and lily specialist 2Plant. We certainly saw enough to fill our Day 3 newsletter and provide a pair of plant- and fact-filled videos. Speaking of which, Jen Zurko had time to edit and post more videos from Days 1 and 2. Click the links below to view them:

Ball FloraPlant

Evanthia

Schoneveld

Ellen: Yes, there’s way more to Spring Trials coverage than what you're seeing here. The videos, as you’ve mentioned, plus continuing “Oh, this particular plant/product caught my eye” in your Acres Online and my buZZ! and Tropical Topics e-newsletters. So keep an eye out for those.

But that’s in the future! Let’s concentrate on the right now. And right now, let’s tell our friends out there our plan for today. Do we even have a plan for today’s coverage yet?

Chris: We’ve got five content areas to fill. Let’s devote the first two to what we saw at Windmill and the last three to Dümmen Orange, who had annuals, perennials, potted plants and some technology news. You go first.

Ellen: Ack! I’m not prepared! But, okay, let’s start with the start, which for us was German breeder Kientzler. They had a new nemesia series called Fairy Kisses, which has N. fruticans blood. That means a tougher habit, better heat tolerance and more bicolors than their existing Babycake series. Three colors in the series—Vanilla Berry, Citrine and Boysenberry. Hey, Chris—is this the first time we’ve heard Citrine and Boysenberry as color names?

Chris: Those are definitely new fruit colors! Put those on our unique names list. Right down from the Fairy Kisses (which you insist upon calling Fairy Cakes) was a new white bidens called Bee White. Andreas Kientzler told us that white bidens tend to be tall and rangy; this one is as compact as their yellow and orange offerings. Now, the flowers are notably smaller and a bit gappy, but the white color is good and the habit is definitely improved.

Ellen: I liked Kientzler’s new calibrachoa series called Pocket. It’s so compact that it fits in your pocket! Well, not really, but it is compact, especially for the grower and retailer. But the good news is it fills out nicely for the end consumer. It’s a win-win for everyone. Color-wise, it has three: Yellow, Pink and Red.

Chris: How about an old variety as a new variety? Paradise Rococo New Guinea Impatiens has been around for … well, Andreas wasn’t sure. Ecke had it, but it was a Viva brand (Home Depot) exclusive. Then when Dümmen Orange bought Ecke, they had it (still a Viva exclusive). But now Kientzler has it back and is making it available to anyone who wants an interesting ruffled New Guinea. The series has five colors and an experimental orange.

Ellen: I’ll cover the last two from Kientzler, then. Petunia Compact Double—bred by the famous David Kerley—is doubling down on the success of last year’s intro, Sugar Plum, with two new colors: Rose Pink and Lavender.

And last, but not least, is a whole new verbena series, Vepita Up. It has a more upright habit than their spreading Vepita Verbena (Up stand for upright, get it?) and because it’s more upright it’s easier for growers to handle on the bench and shipping rack. Four colors—Lavender, Hot Pink, White and Burgundy.

Chris: J. Berry, that interesting plant introduction company from Texas, offered our final new varieties at the Windmill stop: a batch of new Crown Jewel Begonias. Crown Jewels are hybrid begonias noted for their wide range of foliage shapes and colors. Bred by Dr. Cecil Pounders of Innovative Plants, Crown Jewels are heat tolerant and versatile—good for indoor pots, patio containers or the landscape. They introduced four last year; they’ve got five new ones that are so new they’re not yet named … but they showed them anyway because they’re smart enough to know that new is where it’s at, at Spring Trials.

For a video of all this, and a whole lot more from the trials at Windmill Nursery, click HERE.

Okay, Ellen, take us an hour up the California coast to Edna Valley Vineyards and Dümmen Orange.

Ellen: Yes, Dümmen Orange! Always a lovely stop (and equally tasty lunch) at Edna Valley Vineyard. And the plants! It’s a colorful display, for sure. And the very first variety they showed us was colorful, which was New Guinea Impatiens Roller Coaster. It’s a fully double, curly petaled, large-flowered New Guinea. Nice dark petals, too, which helps the flowers pop. One color to start, and that would be Hot Pink. Others? More than likely.

Chris: The best part of Dümmen Orange? The freshly fried mini donuts for dessert. No, not really. I dug Roller Coaster—especially thinking about the Ohio Players’ tune.

But let me highlight a trio of calibrachoa. Bloomtastic is their most vigorous calibrachoa series; it gets two fresh colors: Cherry and Yellow. Also, there’s a new Confetti Garden called Summer Solstice that features these Bloomtastic varieties. And at the other end of the size spectrum is Aloha Nani, their smallest calibrachoa series, which gets a new color called, interestingly, Calibash. It’s sort of a rusty reddish-orange and yellow. “Why Calibash?” we asked. The explanation was that a “Calabash” is a town in North Carolina known for a type of southern fish fry or boil. Ah! So, the red color is a cooked crawdad and “calibash” is a play on calabash. We can dig that.

Ellen: Calabash, the meal, sounds as delicious as Calibash looks, for sure. But let’s move on to something else, an impatiens hybrid called SunStanding. It’s been a few years since their sun-loving impatiens debuted and this year they’ve added a couple of subseries. Spot·On (notice the dot between the two words here) is a vigorous SunStanding impatiens, a bodacious grouping of six pastel-esque colors, each with a distinctive “spot” right in its center. Consistent habit across the series, too, which helps the grower. And then there’s the other subseries, Jazzy. It’s the variegated version of SunStanding. The series has two colors—Coral and Hot Pink. And just a note: the yellowy-white stripe down the leaf is quite significant and audacious.

Chris: Bodacious and audacious in one paragraph? You must have liked them both. I noted that Jazzy is a throwback to the very earliest New Guinea series from Mikkelsen’s and Kientzler that sported lots of variegation.

But on to perennials and a collection of rock garden perennials called Fleur De Rock. These are mostly new perennial varieties suited for rock gardens, such as iberis, saxifraga, aubretia and delosperma. The last is quite impressive in the form of two series: Delosperma Rock Crystal and Solstice. Delosperma, or ice plant, features real pretty little flowers in iridescent colors. The plant is succulent and compact, and bulletproof once established. Rock Crystal is very compact, just a few inches tall; while Solstice is a bit taller, maybe 6 in. or so. Rock Crystal gets six colors, while Solstice gets four.

Ellen: Dümmen Orange has everything when it comes to plants and the one thing we haven’t mentioned yet is potted crops—in this case, it’s indoor pot mums. They have a few new intros in the Breeze series of reliable, everyday-approachable single-flower mums: Pink, Jam and—my favorite color—Fox Orange. In cushion-flowered pot mums, the “more luxurious” series Chrystal gets four new colors: Romance, Bumblebee, Bronze Bicolor and Blush. In the category of fall-appropriate pot mums they offered the orange- and yellow-striped Rainbow Circus (below) and the very “football mum-ish” incurve mum Cosmo Bordeaux.

Chris: I’ll wrap up Dümmen Orange with news about Basewell, their version of offshore-stuck cuttings. Basewell uses Visser’s AutoStix strips, with unrooted cuttings stuck into them at their Oro location in Guatemala. The difference between Basewell and anything else is that the Basewell cuttings get roots put on them before shipping, so you receive a ready-to-plant rooted cutting. Now, when we saw Basewell for the first time last year, it featured a special gel that protected the roots from drying out. They’re still perfecting that; for now, you get no gel, but they’re packaged in a way that keeps the roots from drying out.

Basewell is available in full strips for running through an AutoStix machine or as individual cartridges for hand-planting. Why would you buy these? Because they’re less expensive than rooted liners. And you can get pretty much the full line of their annual genetics in Basewell.

What about perennials? Yes, they’re now available in Basewell, too–some 120 varieties.

We did a video of Basewell (including a how-to-plant tutorial by Ellen) and all the new varieties. Click HERE to view it.

Ellen: I think that’s it for the day, Chris. And with that, we're halfway done with the 2019 California Spring Trials! Woot woot! What’s up for tomorrow? We’ve got Floricultura, Sakata, Takii and Speedling. That’s a full day.

Chris: And our only drive is to our final hotel in Morgan Hill. The next three days are spent in and around Salinas and Gilroy (the garlic capital of the world). Plenty of important companies, including Syngenta and Proven Winners, so don’t slack off now!

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See you tomorrow!