April 8th, 2007 
The annuals that fill the greenhouses every May, actually began their voyage early the previous fall. The greenhouse grower, armed with seed catalogues and sales statistics from the growing season just past, begins the slow process of determining next season’s annuals crop mix There will always be geraniums, petunias and pansies to grow, that’s a given. The tricky part is selecting the colours. What is the current colour trend and what is the new one on the horizon? Has that trend exploded onto the gardening scene, or is it creeping in? The answer helps determine the number of plants of each colour required of a particular variety of annual.
While awaiting the seed order’s arrival, the amounts of pots, trays, soils, fertilizers, pesticides and growth regulators required to produce the crop is calculated and those are ordered. Hopefully they are delivered before the seeds.
Next the greenhouses and growing benches have to be cleaned and sterilized, top to bottome, before a new crop can be started.
When the seeds arrive in the fall, some will need to be started right away (geraniums), some shortly after the Holiday Season to ensure a saleable plant by the first week of May. Before the seeds can be planted, hundreds of the seeding flats must be filled with “soil”. Then they can begin planting seeds. To give you an idea of the vast quantities involved, in our greenhouses we used to plant 50,000 petunia seeds every year and the same for pansies and impatiens.
Waiting for the seedlings to reach transplant stage, all the pots and cell packs must be filled with potting mix and set into trays. By now it is the middle of winter, still cold and snowy outside, but warm and sunny inside the greenhouses. But that warmth doesn’t come cheaply. If you think your heating bills are high, think of the greenhouse operations that must spend three, or five thousand dollars or more per month on heating just to grow annuals.
When the seedlings reach the transplanting stage, all those flats of seedlings need to be potted up into their final containers. Again, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of tiny plants needing to be potted up by hand. Once that is completed, the fertilizing and pinching, applications of growth regulators and pesticides, all need to be attended to daily.
Even though it is winter and your favourite greenhouse is closed, the owners and staff are not relaxing on a warm sunny beach throughout the winter months. They are busy in their greenhouses, seven days a week growing annuals for your gardens.
In May, when you go to the greenhouses and purchase annuals, think of the many months it took to grow them. Think of the thousands of dollars and man hours already spent producing the crop. And, if the greenhouse operator has increased the retail price by a few cents, perhaps now will understand why.
