Somehow I overlooked a very important email from early September. It was the annual announcement from Garden Media Group that their 2020 Garden Trends Report was ready to share with the world. I’ve read it over and you know what? I think each annual report gets more focused and spot-on with its predictions. Good job, GMG.

For example, remember last week I mentioned that Sherwin-Williams’ Color of the Year for 2020 is to be Naval? Well, Garden Media Group says Indigo is the trending color for next year, too. Indigo is pretty darn near blue to me, so chalk up a win for GMG in the color prediction category.

Blue hues in the garden are available with a plethora of plants, including salvias, hydrangeas, blueberries and a bunch of different bulbs. And, of course, there’s accessorizing with blue pottery, pillows and other appropriate décor. GMG’s suggestion of hosting a Blues Night with a blues band and blue décor—maybe a dyeing workshop featuring dyeing fabric with indigo—seems like a fun and engaging activity.

Fun fact: Blue was my favorite color as a kid! 

Before I jump into the comments on how Christmas professionals (i.e. folks who deal with that season 365 days a year) deal with an ever-earlier Christmas, I want to apologize to Kristen Busse, whom I mentioned in last week’s Buzz. She works at Greengate Garden Centres, not Greengoods Garden Centre. She’s the Greengoods Supervisor. See how I made that mistake? Sorry about that!

Okay, so those folks who work Christmas every day of the year—no, I did not hear from Santa himself. I heard from two companies—one that grows evergreens and one that sells them.

Shannon Kuhrt of M&M Wintergreens in Cleveland, Ohio, said that after 20-plus years in the business, she can attest that the holiday has inched earlier and earlier each year. But Mother Nature isn’t necessarily following that lead. “With our products, you can't rush Mother Nature and greens can't be harvested without a proper frost,” Shannon wrote. “What happens then is it condenses the entire season into a tighter window each year and we have had to react with strategic moves to handle those changes. When I first started in this industry, the season didn't really start until after Thanksgiving and now, we are starting to wrap up our season around that time.”

And did you know that Thanksgiving is a whole week later than it was last year? Shannon says everyone is ordering on the same schedule as last year when Turkey Day was on the 22^nd.

Vanessa Cooke-Case and her husband, Scott, of Fabulous Firs Christmas Tree Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, work their Christmas tree farm full time, so they are “ALWAYS thinking of Christmas,” she wrote. After being lax on social media, the farm began posting to Facebook in earnest last year. This year, they began posting about the upcoming season back in August!

Wrote Vanessa, “We polled our customers in August to gauge interest on opening before Thanksgiving, rather than our usual opening festival on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Mixed reviews. Many of our customers enjoy working off their turkey dinners the next day as they hunt for their perfect tree. We also get frequent requests to open late October/early November so families can come and take their annual family Christmas card photos; many others want to come the Wednesday before Thanksgiving because their children are home from college, or their grandchildren and children are in town for the holiday. This year we'll likely open Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and continue to welcome photographers and families to come by appointment to take photos on the farm.”

I LOVE that Christmas photo opportunity! Gosh, Vanessa, I hope you ask a fee or sell cider or something to make some money from your effort.

“Thinking about Christmas 365 days a year has been rewarding; it helps us each day to stay grateful, connected and encouraged. Kind of what Christmas is all about, huh?” Great insight, Vanessa.  

The petunia bloom doesn’t fall far from the plant in the Foisy family. Paige Foisy, college-aged daughter of Debbie Foisy of Deb’s Greenhouse in Alberta, Canada, has a knack for knowing what customers like when it comes to flower designs, just like her mom. And Paige is following in Mom’s entrepreneurial footsteps, too, by launching her very own planter program.

Paige came up with the Envee Kit planter program while working in the garden center one day. “The entire Envee series came about because one of our team members needed help with her shade planters and wanted lots of color, so we did the usual walkabout and I gathered foliage and blooms and that day I pieced together the Aimie Mix,” Paige explained in an email. “In the spirit of Instagram,” Paige challenged herself to create a new design every day, putting a romantic female name to each mix, A through Z. From those 26, she has chosen nine to be in the current Envee Kit offerings. Deb’s graphic designer created a recipe card for every mix. The mixes became so popular that they couldn’t keep up with kit demand and had to staff an extra person just for kit prep. “Within hours of posting one of the daily designs, customers would come in, phone in hand, asking for the kit by name.”

“I think this program fills a need by taking the guesswork out of amazing planter design, and I created every kit to have nine plants, so now we were selling more plants every time,” Paige wrote. “I pushed the limit on planter designs. I went into it like a customer would because I wanted to make these designs authentic to the customer selection and shopping experience. I didn’t look at brands or necessarily what was new, I just cherry-picked the absolute best of what was blooming for each design.”

The website with all the info about Envee Kits just launched last week and so far they’ve had lots of interest. If you’re interested in learning more and stocking some of the recipe card and such, visit the website at www.EnveeKits.com.  

What I love about the grants awarded to horticulture therapy gardens by National Garden Bureau, American Meadows and Sakata is that all three finalists are truly winners. Not only are they monetarily awarded, but they also benefit from tool donations provided Corona Tools. See? No losers in this contest.

The amount awarded in total—$5,000—is split between the winners based on the number of votes each garden’s entry video receives. After tallying up the votes, the breakdown is:

Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, winner of a $3,000 grant. The Horticultural Therapy Program at Magee improves the physical, cognitive and emotional wellness of patients recovering from devastating and disabling injuries and diseases including spinal cord injury, brain injury, stroke, amputation, severe orthopedic injury and neurological disorders. The programming occurs on the hospital’s 6^th-floor rooftop with gardens, fountains, accessible beds and a fully equipped greenhouse!

Opportunity Knocks, Knockout Farm, in Maywood, Illinois, will receive $1,000 in funding. Opportunity Knocks is for teens and young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). This grant will support the Knockout Farm (the Farm), a social enterprise urban farm that provides an experiential learning environment that incorporates wellness initiatives, supports participant-run social enterprises and creates opportunities.

Wilmot Botanical Garden in Gainesville, Florida, will receive a $1,000 grant. The Garden’s therapeutic horticulture program serves individuals with medical challenges and other special needs, as well as students, volunteers, and caregivers. The program operates on the principle that active connections with plants and nature are restorative, provide profound therapeutic benefits and enhance quality of life. The program aims to decrease psychological stress, anxiety, depressive symptomatology and mental fatigue, while increasing confidence, self-esteem, self-efficacy, social interaction and connection to community.

Want to learn more about NGB’s therapeutic garden grant program? Visit their website at www.ngb.org.  

If you are in the green industry and you just started a business, I know some folks who are offering a contest through which you could get a nice chunk of change. It’s the Farm Bureau. Yes, the Farm Bureau takes care of hort folks, too, whether you have a greenhouse operation or a retail shop or even a farm-to-table enterprise.

How much are we talking and what’s one got to do to be in the running? Officially called the Farm Bureau Ag Innovation Challenge, the business competition will have folks competing for $145,000 in startup funds.

Right?? My jaw dropped, too! Here’s how it works: They’ll announce ten semi-finalist teams on November 22, and they immediately get $10,000 each. Then, those ten will have an all-expense-paid trip to the Farm Bureau’s annual convention in Austin, Texas, in January. There, the finalists will compete to advance to the final round of four teams (and another $5,000). The final four teams compete for the titles Farm Bureau Entrepreneur of the Year and People’s Choice Award.

Intrigued, eh? Go on, apply! What do you have to lose? But apply soon—the deadline is October 14. Click HERE to find out more about the competition (like the fact that you need to be a Farm Bureau member to be in the top set of finalists).

You have just a few weeks left to fill out the Wage & Benefit Survey! There’s one for Green Profit and one for GrowerTalks—and both give you equal opportunity for winning a brand-new 128GB iPad. How cool is that? Thank Florasearch, the surveys’ sponsor, for that opportunity.

I was going to share an article about cost-cutting hacks for small businesses, but instead let’s go with something that applies directly to your small (or mid- or large-sized) garden center business. Jen Polanz picked up a few IGC-relevant pieces of info from last week’s Garden Center Group Fall Event held in Nashville.

OK, so I’m fudging there because I didn’t hear anyone say y’all once, but I did have the best fried chicken of my life at Hattie B’s, saw lots of cowboy boots/hats and heard some amazing music. Most importantly, I was able to catch up with some old friends at this year’s Garden Center Group Fall Event, as well as get the lowdown on what’s happening in garden retail right now.

You’ll be seeing more stories in Green Profit based on themes from the event, but there was some news that came out from sponsors that I wanted to pass along. Three items in particular:

• Border Concepts has a new 20,000 sq. ft. showroom opening this month in Lexington, North Carolina. It'll have a ton of stuff, including 160 lines of cool pottery! Instead of having a showroom in Atlanta at AmericasMart, the company opted to create its own space that will be open for visitors year-round. Border Concepts now has multiple distribution centers across the U.S., including one opening in Pennsylvania to complement existing Seattle and Lexington, North Carolina, centers.

• Epicor launched a new cloud-based platform at the event called Epicor Retail Cloud. The new solution is available in select retail markets and supplements its Epicor Eagle solution. It eliminates the need for software maintenance and data backups. According to Sam Kirkland, the system is designed to do the following:
•  Simplify operational processes and drive efficiency
•  Profitably price, promote and merchandise
•  Reward loyal customers to keep them coming back
•  Make smart, informed decisions quickly
•  Compete with the efficiency and speed-of-service big boxes and online brands offer
•  Reduce IT hassles and complexity

• Monrovia’s Tim Barthel provided an update on the e-commerce site shop.monrovia.com, where the company saw 25% growth. The program lets customers buy online and then pick up product at their local garden center. Tim told the audience about 75% of customers had never been to the store they picked up at, driving new visits for those retailers.

That was just news from the vendors. The (record-breaking number of) retailers in attendance spent four days pouring over P&L numbers, networking, touring garden centers and a beautifully restored estate (Cheekwood Estate & Gardens), hearing an extremely valuable HR update, and working on time management and succession planning, along with so much more. If this all sounds like something you want to jump on for 2020, visit www.thegardencentergroup.com to find out more. Next year’s Fall Event is already on the schedule for August 31-September 3 at the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware. 

Thanks, JP!  

Feels like Ball Publishing hasn’t hosted a webinar in a long while. Well, we are here to fix your jones for some horticultural learning with two—count them, two!—webinars in the month of October. Here’s what we have coming up:

Improving Nursery Weed Control with Herbicide Rotations and Production Practices

Thursday, October 3
1 p.m. Eastern/Noon Central
In this free, hour-long webinar hosted by GrowerTalks’ Chris Beytes, you’ll learn more about:

• Preemergence trial results with 25-plus herbicides and combinations, including traditional and recently released products
• Effective preemergence options for key troublesome weed species
• Selecting the best herbicides for your product mix and developing effective rotations
• Proven non-chemical strategies for herbicide-sensitive crops

Chris’ guest experts are Chris Marble, Ph.D., Assistant Professor—University of Florida, Mid-Florida Research and Education Center; and Aaron Palmateer, Ph.D., Senior Technical Services Representative for Bayer

The “A to Z” of Growing Perennials in HydraFiber
Thursday, October 17
1 p.m. Eastern/Noon Central

In this free webinar, perennial expert Paul Pilon of Perennial Solutions Consulting will share his observations of various perennial crops grown in HydraFiber and the feedback he’s received from growers across the country. You’ll also get his “keys to success,” including:

• Uniform blending
• Filling guidelines, including initial moisture content
• pH management and how to determine how much lime is needed
• Managing moisture in production
• Long-term vs. short-term crops
• Overwintering in HydraFiber

Joining Paul will be HydraFiber team member Daniel Norden, Senior R&D Manager and Technical Specialist Manager for Profile Products’ horticulture business, who will share recent Auburn University research on perennials and shrubs, plus results from several grower perennials trials.

Sign up for both webinars at www.growertalks.com/webinars. If you’re a grower-retailer, you won’t want to miss them!  

As you may know, I’m currently working on an article about beverage trends and how you can best sell them. Do you sell something you can sip? Coffee, tea, beer, smoothies, juice? If so, please drop me a line at ewells@ballpublishing.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Green Profit columnist Bill McCurry is looking for folks who are going through succession planning, or will go through it soon. Is that you? Then he wants to hear from you! Drop him a line at  wmccurry@mccurryassoc.com.