How to Create Novel Plant Combinations That Translate to Sales

Hanging Basket Plantogram from Mast Young

A plant-o-gram, or simplified planting plan for your plant combinations, creates a recipe for re-creation later if the combo performs well. It also acts as a guide for your production team during planting.
Photo courtesy of Mast Young Plants

The increasing popularity of combinations in recent years is expected to continue, as more gardeners enhance their patios with colorful and unique arrangements. This poses a challenge for growers and retail garden centers: how to capitalize on this trend and translate it into sales.

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Textbook filler-spiller-thriller mixes featuring petunias, verbena, calibrachoa, and a dracaena spike will always appeal to customers seeking traditional favorites. To entice buyers looking for more creative and distinctive combination options, we’re encouraging growers to think outside the box.

Here’s three tips to help you:

1. Trial and Error

Select some of your favorite plants, ones you think would look great together, or plants that you’re curious about seeing grow together. Run your own experiments and see what stands out to you, and even to your customers. Also, attend field trials featuring combination planters, so you can copy or mimic what you like.

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We take this approach on a larger scale at our summer trial garden, where we trial breeder combinations available on the market as well as 200 custom-designed mixes. Since this is a trial, one of our goals with our custom mixes is to creatively combine plants and then evaluate how well they grow together in combination. Some of these combinations don’t end up performing well, which is an anticipated result in a novel trial and an important and ongoing element of our own learning processes. What’s exciting is when the combos do well, and a concept transforms into a stunning, eye-popping basket or container.

In our 2020 trial garden, we’re growing our usual 400 combinations, and we’re growing an additional 300 breeder combinations this year that we don’t currently offer in our young plant program. We’re doing this so we can learn more about the performance of plants in various combos, and we’re anticipating that we’ll find some exceptional combos in this group that otherwise wouldn’t have caught our attention.

Over the years of welcoming the public to our garden, we frequently receive positive feedback about the combinations. People really do appreciate seeing unique combo options. What’s particularly rewarding for us is when returning visitors tell us that one of our combos was a top seller for them.

2. Break the Mold

The second part of thinking outside the box is breaking the habit of using the same types of plants in each mix. Growers may be hesitant to mix certain varieties due to differences in vigor. While it’s true that some plants left in their natural habitat could take over and choke out neighboring plants, growers can overcome this obstacle by using plant growth regulator (PGR) liner dips when planting combinations. At Mast Young Plants, we’ve documented a process and PGR rate that safely and accurately controls those vigorous varieties in mixes. For instance, ipomoea is loved by many, but in a combination a standard variety like ‘Marguerite’ will take over a basket within four to six weeks of planting. We dip the liner trays before planting the combination in a 2 to 3 ppm Bonzi solution and then allow the trays to drip dry before planting. When we plant that ipomoea in the same pot as a calibrachoa, the PGR will keep it in check and allow the calibrachoa to establish within the combination.

3. Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan

Finally, create a planting plan. Visit trial gardens this summer, and take photos of combinations you like. At Mast Young Plants, we take a quality photo of each of the 400 combinations we grow and offer those to growers to download, and we provide a spreadsheet detailing the mix recipes as well. Use our photographs to help you make a plant-o-gram of mixes you’re interested in growing yourself, and mix-and-match our mixes to trial your own creations.

In addition to planning plant varieties for your mixes, it is also important to use the correct number of plugs and space them properly. We create a plant-o-gram for each mixed pot that we grow. This diagram helps production plant them correctly and provides us with a place to include any notes or comments.

Gain inspiration and experience by conducting and attending trials. Get creative with varieties and mixes, and carefully plan recipes and spacing. You’ll be well on your way to getting your customers’ attention with eye-catching, stunning combinations of your own.

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