Last time I spoke with Joche Smith, CEO of Costa Farms, he hinted that another acquisition was in the works. He’s a man of his word, as the news has just come out that Costa is buying a competing Homestead foliage grower, Green Leaf Nursery*. The deal includes inventory and customer base, but not the 50 acres of land, which Costa will lease for five years.

Founded in 1971 and owned by brothers Gus and Tom Pena, Green Leaf grows much of the same product as Costa, including Boston ferns, mandevilla and hibiscus, plus an indoor plant line. And Green Leaf sells to the same customers—Lowes and Home Depot.

“I’ve been friends with Gus for a long time, 15 years or more,” Joche told me when I called to ask about the acquisition. “This was a good fit for him and for us. We can roll their production, after this year, right into our organization.”

With a similar product line and only a five-year lease on the Pena’s land, what Costa is mainly getting in the deal is increased sales—namely into some territories that Costa doesn’t currently serve.

“One thing we think we’ll do for sure is be able to take an expanded offering into those same stores and help those stores grow more sales,” Joche says. “[We’ll] be able to bring in the Englemann product line and a few of the specialty items that we do. We’re confident we will be able to drive sales for our customers.”

Why did Green Leaf decide to sell? In part, it was an exit strategy, co-owner Gus Pena told me. He and his brother have run the family business since their dad died in 1985. Gus has one son in the business, who heads up merchandising in the Nashville market. Gus says he’s known the Costas “forever.”

“Throughout the years, we’ve always worked with Costa, whether it was developing a new container for Kmart, or shipping on racks or just trying to increase the viability of our industry overall.” He added, “They were my biggest competitor … they made us better, made us step up to the plate and do better quality and better programs. … It’s a good marriage, and the timing was perfect. I’m 61, but I still feel young and am excited about working for Costa in the future.”

Gus plans to stay on to head up a couple of retail divisions for Costa. Tom, the production manager, will decide after this season whether or not he’ll stay on. Either way, they won’t be leaving agriculture. Their 50 acres of land is inside the Homestead city limits and highly desirable for development. They also have 25 acres of land, including an avocado grove, which Tom will continue to manage. And they have a family farm in Mississippi where they share-crop corn and soybeans. Says Gus, “We’re ag. We love what we do.”

For 2018, nothing will change, however. And that’s good, because the year has started off great.

“Sales are up about 20 points over last year. Spring is breaking early in the south and the stores are cranking. We’re shipping like it’s the middle of spring right now.”

*Not to be confused with Greenleaf Nursery Company of Oklahoma, Texas and North Carolina; or Green Leaf Plants, the young plant division of Aris Horticulture.

This coming Saturday, March 3, is American Tulip Day—at least according to the folks who are going to create a “pop-up” cutting garden filled with 100,000 tulips in San Francisco’s Union Square. The public will be invited in to pick their own bunch of tulips, which should disappear in just a few hours. The flowers come from U.S. growers.

The event is the brainchild of iBulb, the promotional arm of the Dutch flower bulb sector. It’s based upon National Tulip Day in Amsterdam, an event held since 2012 on Dam Square with 200,000 tulips available for the taking.

It’s nice to see a Dutch organization promoting flowers here in the U.S.; maybe they’d be open to Tulip Day festivities in other cities. You can learn more, and contact them, at www.AmericanTulipDay.com. And HERE is a video from Amsterdam’s Tulip Day 2016. Looks like fun! And if an event like this can get the Dutch excited about bulbs, imagine what would happen here! (Then again, the Dutch are crazy enough about tulips to spend a year’s earnings on just one bulb, so … .)

I’ll be doing an iBulb-organized trip to the Netherlands in a couple weeks to spend two days visiting bulb growers and experts. It’s been 10 years since I’ve explored that market, so it will be a good opportunity to catch up on the current state of the bulb business. I’m traveling with eight or so other hort journalists from an interesting mix of countries, including Russia, China, Norway, Finland, Poland, Sweden, Japan and the Czech Republic, so that in itself will be worth reporting on.

All-America Selections has again partnered with cook, author and storyteller Jonathan Bardzik on his “#Garden2Table” cooking videos, which will feature AAS-winning vegetables. These videos help all of us in the gardening industry promote AAS Edible Winners by explaining the judging process, showcasing AAS winners and sharing five custom recipes that use more than 15 recent AAS Winners.

Jonathan’s recipes include:
- Strawberry Fennel Salad (featuring Delizz strawberries, Antares fennel, Pepitas pumpkin seeds and Dolce Fresca basil)
- Minestrone Pasta (featuring Prism kale, Mad Hatter peppers, Seychelles pole beans and Chef’s Choice Yellow tomatoes)
- Roasted Okra and Tomatoes (featuring Candle Fire okra and Candyland currant tomatoes)
- Watermelon Gazpacho (featuring Mini Love watermelon, Midnight Snack tomatoes, Chili Pie peppers and Dolce Fresca basil)
- Spicy Tomato and Cucumber Salad (featuring Patio Choice Yellow tomatoes, Persian Gherkin cucumbers, Warrior onions and Aji Rico peppers)

Okay, now I’m hungry.

Each video and corresponding recipe will be showcased as a blog post on the AAS Website over the next five weeks. Videos can be viewed, shared and embedded from YouTube.

AAS offers a few thoughts on how you can make hay with these videos, including:

- Feature the videos on your website
- Host a “Cooking with AAS Winners” Ladies Night or Couples Night at your garden center
- Conduct seminars on edible gardening and feature these videos
- Use recipe cards as free giveaways with featured AAS Winner plants or seeds
- Hold a mid-harvest recipe contest highlighting these AAS Winners

You may know Jonathan from his time with the American Nursery & Landscape Association. His first video series for AAS was in 2016, when he did a “Cooking from the Garden” series. You can see those HERE to get a feel for what the new series will be like.

When you spend $56 million to fix up a greenhouse, it must be some greenhouse! And this one is just that: It’s the “Temperate House” at Kew Gardens outside of London, and it’s the world’s largest surviving Victorian glasshouse. 

Opened to an amazed public in 1863, the structure is an impressive 52,527 sq. ft. in size. But cost-cutting and inferior materials meant the structure needed much more work that first thought. They had to replace 15,000 glass panels, restore and paint all of the original ironwork, and restore loads of decorative details, including 116 terracotta urns (which had served as the chimneys for the original boilers). The job took 400 workers, 25 miles of scaffolding, tenting big enough to house three 747 aircraft, and 1,731 days.

And then there are the plants: Some 10,000 were moved out, then back in. A few giant specimens were left in place. Some, like Encephalartos woodii, which came to Kew in 1899, are exceedingly rare—extinct in the wild and probably the only specimen in Europe. You can imagine the care the curators took with that one.

May 5 is the scheduled grand-reopening date. If it weren’t in the middle of spring, it would be great to plan a trip for that and for the Chelsea Flower Show, scheduled for May 22-26.

If you’re concerned about ethylene gas impacting your plants during shipping or at retail, you should definitely tune in to the free webinar I’m hosting Thursday, March 1, at 1 p.m. Eastern/Noon Central.

Sponsored by Floralife and Oasis Grower Solutions, this hour-long webinar will have four—yes, four—experts, each talking on a different aspect of ethylene, including:

- Economic risks and potential losses caused by ethylene
- The conditions that create ethylene, how to identify the problem and what the damage looks like
- How and when to apply Ethylbloc, and the expected outcome
- How you can get a free risk assessment by a field expert, with recommendation

Sign up now at www.growertalks.com/webinars.

Did I mention it’s free?

If you know pot, tray and seeder company Blackmore, then you know David Steiner, long-time VP of the company. Well, David dropped me a line this week to say he was retiring from The Blackmore Company, his only place of employment since September 1977, when he was a fresh-faced college graduate. (Meanwhile, I was in my senior year of high school and couldn’t even spell horticulture.)

Just for fun, David recalled some of the history and changes at Blackmore in that time:

When I started at Blackmore, fresh out of the University of Michigan, there were only five of us trying to get the [bedding plant] plug thing up and running: Skip, his dad, me, and another guy who is still here, amazingly enough. Skip made me VP in 1982; of course, I didn’t have anyone working beneath me, so I still had to do most everything.

Back then we made about 500,000 trays year. Now we make four times that a month! I remember when Jack Van de Wetering ordered 5,000 waffle trays; we were jumping up and down, we thought we had made the big time! I spent that first summer at Blackmore making 20,000 of the old 648 waffle plug trays and we shipped them all to Gavin Wilton in Adelaide, Australia.

The old Blackmore “flip-flop” seeder sowed about a tray a minute. Now the Cylinder seeder can sow one every three seconds!

David concluded his musings with this: It has been fun and rewarding to be a part of a company that has literally led the industry in helping to change the way the world grows plants. So many wonderful, smart and dedicated people.

I asked David how retired he’d be in retirement; he replied with a long list of hobbies and activities, including travel, volunteering, gardening, concerts, exercise and flying. “It will be fun to have time to do it,” he said.

When Jimmy Turner moved from the Dallas Arboretum to Sydney, Australia, to take the post of Director of Horticultural Management at the Royal Botanical Garden, he brought something uniquely Texas with him: the notion that bigger is better. Which could explain why the green wall he designed for the garden is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.

Housed in a half-round, multi-use greenhouse venue called The Calyx, the green wall is 167-ft. long, almost 20-ft. high, and holds 18,049 plants. The planting system comes from Canada’s G-Sky Systems. Plants are grown in individual pots, which sit neatly in slanted subirrigation trays. It looks like it makes for easy changeover … which is important, as the green wall theme is designed to be changed regularly. When I visited, the theme was “Pollination,” with the word spelled out in flowers and plants.

Of course, the inquiring minds out there want to know, “If this is the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere, what’s the biggest in the world?” That’s a bit hard to discern, at least from a Google search. I found one in Bogota, Colombia; a building completely covered with 85,000 plants, covering 33,368 sq. ft. That’s 10 times bigger than Jimmy’s!

But Guinness World Records says the largest vertical garden is 27,919 sq. ft. It was built by a pair of Chinese companies to camouflage a landfill.

Then there’s an installation in Singapore’s Institute of Technical Education’s College Central that covers 57,000 sq. ft., However, it looks to be a series of individual walls, not one big one.

There was a small trade show at the event I attended in Tasmania last week, so small that I didn’t expect to see anything new to write about. But I was wrong. This is a pair of very cool herbicide applicators that I was told uses up to 80% less product than regular pump-up or backpack sprayers. And it uses the chemical straight out of the bottle—no mixing or measuring required.

Made by the Germany company Mantis (not to be confused with Mantis tillers), the Mankar ULV sprayers feature a battery-driven, ultra-low-volume pump that does an amazing job atomizing the product into such small particles that you can apply it without water, yet use 50% to 80% less chemical to cover the same area. They offer hand-held, rolling and tractor-mounted systems.

A Google search reveals that it’s distributed in North America by Mankar Distributing Inc. of Woodstock, Ontario, Canada.

My friend Danny Takao of Takao Nursery in Fresno, California, sent this bit of greenhouse humor on behalf of all his fellow young plant producers. Says Danny, in explanation: “Weeks 6-10 are usually pretty tense in the young plant world.”

Thanks for the chuckle, Danny!