Veggies Can Bring the Wow Experience to Potential Gardeners
September 8, 2021 I give presentations here and there, and lately most of those have been done remotely. Recently, I was asked to provide a few words to a civic group in Illinois over a lunch meeting. This little chat occurred between me and about a dozen lunch-munching Rotarians. I am sure there was not a plant lover among them.
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I reminded them that there were few places where one was not surrounded by what our industry provides, whether it’s a display of flowers outside a hotel, a park with ornamental grasses and maples, shade trees along the street, or their own patio or foundation plantings. I briefly chatted about how new plants were developed, but even on Zoom, I could see the audience was dwindling quickly. When I counted but six hardy souls left, I knew I had to change tacks. So I mentioned vegetables.
This was surely not a rapt audience, but when I showed a photo of a tomato, eyes actually opened and smiles formed. Did I mention that there were no women in the audience? Obviously, I should have talked okra and peppers far sooner. In fact, when I showed a photo of a purple fruited okra, the men gasped.
I went on to explain that breeders in the garden industry were very busy developing vegetables for the consumer as well as pretty flowers. I knew I had them when I showed a hanging basket of Profusion tomato from Syngenta’s breeding program and followed that up with the wonderfully ornamental eggplants from PanAmerican Seed.
When I showed them the herb program from Ernst Benary of America, with all sorts of fragrant and useful herbs such as rosemary, basil, and sage, they thought that was almost as good as the tomato. Time was running out, so it was time to go for the jugular. I was going to make darn sure that those who remained had something to take home to their wives as well. I went in for the veggie kill.
When I showed the sweet pepper called ‘Peppi Cornissimo’ from PanAmerican Seed that was truly seedless, they were stunned (or as stunned as Zoomers can get). They even put their dessert down and started writing. They were hooked. I finally threw up a three-pointer at the buzzer by showing PanAmerican’s Kitchen Minis program, with mini-veggies like tomatoes and peppers designed for indoor picking and cooking. My last waning shot was telling them that the Kitchen Minis program was so special it had won a prestigious Greenhouse Grower Medal Of Excellence award at Cultivate’21.
Time was up, and I was exhausted. But I believe I found a few converts among the Rotarians. I hope the moral of this story is evident; veggies are more than racks of tomatoes at the box store, and people love to hear about what’s new in veggies just as much as ornamentals, especially men.
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