Best Performing Plants at the 2024 Mast Young Plants Trial Garden: Michigan Garden Plant Tour
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EmailDecember 18, 2024
Brian Weesies, Mast Young Plants, describes the outstanding performers from their 2024 trial garden from the 2024 Michigan Garden Plant Tour.
Our ‘living catalog’ trial garden features all the varieties MYP offers from over 25 breeders in our liner program. Displays are located in sun and shade areas, and varieties are clearly labeled and variously sorted by genera and color. Enjoy the unique opportunity of comparing the size, color, and vigor of your favorite varieties alongside exciting 2025 introductions. The 2024 trial garden features more than 1,500 varieties in raised landscape beds, hanging baskets, deco pots, saddle planters, and window planters as well as 500 unique, custom-designed combination planters.
Presentation was live at Greenhouse Grower Expo 2024. Produced and edited by MSU Extension Educator, Heidi Lindberg.
Video Transcript
I will definitely make a plug for the Michigan Garden Plant Tour. I'm terrible as one of the host sites. We're terrible about getting out and seeing the other ones. Anyway, we'll kick this off. So yeah, these were we let customers vote on topics every year. And again, when I say customers, I've had people ask me to clarify that. This is breeders. It's you guys as growers who came, but we also had a retailer night this year where just homeowners came. So this vote is from anyone who likes plants who came to our garden. It's not specific to any one area. So this coleus, again, like Christie said, slides don't always do things justice. This color was great. I see it if you go to the flipping book and look at it, you'll see it. Everyone's always wanting pinks and coleus this one really it's a dark burgundy with some hot pink in it. But I love about this flame thrower series is just that I call it one of those coleus you don't have to pinch. It's not that avicly dominant coleus where you're constantly pinching it. It just keeps growing like a big ball. I'm sure we never pinch that plant once. By the end of the summer, I mean, the top of the plant was three feet wide. So adobo pink is new for next year, and was a variety that got a lot of votes at our trial. You know, I always like to say, whenever we say new, some plants like AdoblePink are new to the industry. So like this one are just new to our catalog, so we put it out there as a new. So GumprinaPink pong purple's been around for a while from cicada. The reason we brought it into our catalog is we've been selling more cut flowers recently. And we said, Oh, let's put that in there. So we had it in the garden, and believe it or not, this was the number one vote getter in the garden of all plants. So it's a seeded plant. It's not even brand new. But it holds up all summer. It just keeps blooming. Those flowers last. Whether you use it for a tough flower, what we'll do next year with this now that we know a little more about it is we do a lot of combination planters and this will end up being a thriller or one of that main central piece in the combo to just try to give you that all season color with some good height or whatever. Yeah. PingPong purple from cata did very well. You're going to see some duplication in my talk and what Christie said, which I think is good for you guys because it helps you see that, hey, this wasn't just one person's opinion of what did good. This one here is outstanding. Like she said, this infinity double yellow. Yeah, it just goes crazy. Blooms and blooms. Lots of people liked it. I agree in ground, backup bed type plant. You can see it here. It's in a 14 inch pot. That steak is 36 " tall. It's in a little bit. So say that thing is 30 " tall. You can make it a standalone container. I should have put in here. We had a pot of this right by our office door that the pot is probably almost four feet around the top of the pot. It's this tall. We had that in there, and it just was awesome. It was great all summer. So definitely check this one out. With the vegetative sunflowers, sometimes you'll get mildew toward the end of the season, and that's a negative thing. Nobody likes that. They tell me this one has some tolerance to that. I would say we pull our garden out every year on October 1. I could find a little mildew on October 1, but that's pretty late in the season, and it did not ruin this plant by any means. So good variety. This is one of the plants where you say, is it really popular or do people vote on it? Because it's different. This is an angelonia. They call it Angel flare black. You can see in that close up with a good camera. It's purple. It's super dark purple. But people get drawn to this. This might have got the votes from the homeowners that were there because they were like, Oh my goodness, a black flower. But I think with fall combinations or Angelonia's going to go well all summer long. This is something that you could work in with oranges and yellows and things like that. I can see LantanasOange LantanasRd Lantanas really looking nice with that. Again, this is what the people voted. I love it when we get something again kind of different, you know, a new red petunia, a deeper yellow petunia. We have a lot of that. We hear about it every year. This one was a surprise to me. Dan zinger has a whole foliage program. You look through the catalog. It's different Bacchias and it's Pathos, and you say, okay, that's cool. Foliage plants. This one, we sell a lot of just the old regular bridal wheel. People keep buying it. They're planting baskets of it. We're like, Oh, wow, a purple one. Let's try it. It performed very well in our garden. What I loved about this plant is the picture of the plant on the left there is actually under our shade area. We had it in the shade thinking, Oh, it's a foliage plant. Let's protect it. But we also grew it out in full sun. It didn't harm it in any way. And honestly, it didn't make it better or worse either place. So the beauty of that is you can use it under some shade. I'm not talking you know, no sun. I was talking to shake cloth, so you're knocking 40% of the light out. But I think this plant can work in multiple places. Next year, again, we didn't know this that well. It's new in the garden. I'm going to work this into combos like you would work ipomea. Ipomea can take things over. Let's see what this purple can do mixing in place of that, if you will. And a lot less expensive than poma to be honest with you, ecom is an expensive plant. Expensive cuttings, it's hard for us to produce as liner growers. So this is an interesting alternative. This is another one where photos don't do it justice. When you see it on the website, you'll say, Oh, wow, that is really purple, but pretty. This is a pretty cool plant. Whether you say pet cola or Pachoa, the super coals just seem like they're getting more and more traction. I always say, I believe in today's age of consumers that we have shopping, it's a little different than you know, if we go back 20, 30 years ago, we had true gardeners who knew how to care for plants and were working hard, deadheading geraniums and all those things. We have garden shoppers today who are looking for just plants that do well all summer long that are tough that don't need tons of maintenance. The super cows kind of fit into that. This new rostr has a nice little bicolory tone to the flower. You can see the habit in our garden. It was a nice round ball. It did very well. Rbena they voted on this, not me. I don't love verbena in the summer. The breeders of this, Dan zinger, they're not here. I can say this. They will always say, we've read our verbena to not cycle. We looked at all the clones we had and we looked at counted flowers per day, all summer long. Bnas are tricky, you dry them out, they're going to cycle. This one held up pretty well. The Vanessa Series is newer breeding, if you will, in the verbena world. I like Vanessas but yeah, typically not one that wins customer voting because the bulk of our people are coming, let's say, August 1 to August 20 is when the bulk of our visitors come. We usually by then, verbenas slowed down a little bit. This one definitely caught people's eye even at that late hot time of the year. All right. This is another one I didn't expect would win. But it is nice. It's pretty cool. I like the name. They called it pulse. If you look at the side of that leaf, it looks like an EKG or whatever. Just a nice variety, really dark purple. Yeah, I'm excited. We put this in our catalog. We'll see. Again, people voting this was in our shade area. Sometimes I always say, Well, there's less things to vote on in the shade, so it concentrates the votes a little bit. But it performed great all summer long. Here's another duplicate that you saw from Christie's. Again, this Vinca Nirvana, we haven't been pushing or selling. We've backed away from that. They're doing a relaunch of this series. So I always like to tell people this just because I think it's funny. They like to call this habit Sprowding or trying to make a new term spreading, mounding. So if you hear people say sprowding, you can say, I've heard that before. But oh, they used to have vinca and Nirvana cascade and they were trailers and then they had upright ones. They want this to be that. They're not going to have two series. They want it to be that. Hey, it will kind of hang over a little bit. It's just taking some time. But yeah, this color was outstanding. I think Christie Mike has said she had this at her house. I had the other one in the series. I planted it in a bed with seed vinca with some titaniums I think, and the vegetative ones performed really well. That XDR is there Denotation that it's very tolerant to a lot of diseases that would normally kill VICA. They get that done by an independent company, it's not Syngenta doing it. I think maybe Cornell might do it for them, but again, interesting. I'm excited. These are that summer long genetics. These looks good at the end of August genetics. Another duplicate, and I like everything Christie said, I would say the same thing. Painted love. We put it up on top of our hertla. That's kind of our little, the breeders all fight over, what are you going to put? We don't take any money for any of it, but we kind of say, we're going to pick what we think is going to be really cool. And based on our initial trials in the spring, we gave this one that spot, and it didn't disappoint. A lot of people wanted to talk early on, like, Oh, color bleach is in too much sun or it's not stable. Honestly, all summer long, I looked at the top of that pergola, and I felt like it held very consistent, very, very well. The one thing I will say that maybe Christie didn't say specifically about this Friday is it's quite aggressive. So we're trying to figure out what can we mix it with that it won't overtake. It's it's a big boy, if you will. It's not a dainty little one. So trying to find something to put with it, I always think of, you know, there's a white bidins that's just super aggressive. Now, maybe that would get lost with this white, but just thinking of items that would really fight their way through with it. So very cool variety. And then I threw a couple of combos in here, and I try to be politically correct. I don't favor a breeder. I just tell you what ones really stood out, and see a few Syngenta ones here. Syngenta has some genetics that lasts all summer. These photos, I didn't put it in here, but this was probably taken, I'd say, August 20 or something. So again, they're ones that really held up. Isi petunias are a no brainer. They're just good all summer. What you will see in this combo, quite often, the Is Pink is a little bit more aggressive and it might start to take over a little bit, but you're going to have good color as long as you keep some water and feed in that basket. Another one that did well, another quick combo, again, has an itsy in it, it has another petunia that's very good from them called shortcake Blueberry. I love that variety, highly recommend it. Then it has a calbuca. This was taken the end of the summer. It does look good, but if anything's going to probably peter otitus at the homeowner, it might be the calburcoa. You still have two good strong petunias in. Real quick to wrap up my talk. We always try to Christie showed, they've already got their plans made for future trials and stuff. We always try to do something, training, teaching, whatever. So this year, we focused on the first one was a plants per pot trial. We always get asked like, how many plants do you have in that pot? And you know, I had some people yell at me for doing this and say, Oh, we're going to sell less plants because we only need three. I had other people say, Well, that's probably better for that plant if you only have three and it's not so tight and root bound. But it was interesting to see how these played out. You know, it doesn't take tons of plants if you're going to give them the time, if you're going to let them go all summer. Then we did some fertilizer trials. We did we always get accused of our garden of This is all beautiful because you guys just baby every. I guess we do. We feed it. We water it, we feed it. But we said, what happens if we do no fertilizer from the day we put them out there, some slow release, but no fertilizer in the irrigations, and then we do what we always do our daily feed. And it's just interesting how it impacted different crops. I could show you if you go to the website and look at that book, Calbacoa, you don't feed them. They're junk. They die. They're terrible. But what I like about this is for a homeowner who you know is never going to feed, sell them goonia, sell them colas. It's amazing what abuse those plants took all summer. Mm.
