This is the beginning a quick two-parter to help you and your garden mum team get the crop off to a strong start.

PROBLEM: It’s the first week in June and lots of folks are starting to plant early varieties in their natural-season mum programs. While Bill and I have shared a great many mum tips over the past few weeks, I want to highlight a few to-dos that should be on everyone’s list if mum liner transplanting is imminent.

NICK’S TIP: While mums aren’t the most challenging crops to produce, small missteps early in the crop cycle can set plants back and result in less than your best possible crop. Keep these few “before-and-after” transplant BMPs in the front of your mind to get your crop started off on the right foot.

Before Transplant

Fill pots as close to transplant time as possible. Resist the urge to pre-fill your pots way ahead of time. If pots filled with growing media sit out for very long, soil can become overly dry, causing issues with rewetting when you water in your liners. If pots are sitting outside, they can accumulate weed seeds and necessitate a lot of handwork downstream to remove them.

• Ensure liners are watered before they go into finished containers.
• Ideally, water your liners the afternoon before planting. This will make it easier to pull them from trays the next morning.
• Even better—give them a shot of fertilizer like 20-10-20 at about 250–300 ppm nitrogen (N) instead of clear water. This will help “prime” the liners for rapid growth once they’re potted up.
• Decide how to handle oddball liners before they hit the transplant line.
• If one or two varieties are way taller than your other mum liners, decide whether to plant them deeper or give everything a uniform pinch once they’ve rooted in.
• Making sure your team is on the same page with how the crop will be managed from Day 1 will help to ensure uniform plant size and consistency at finish/ship.
• Get all your “support” inputs in and have them ready before transplant.
• This includes fungicides, insecticides/miticides and even mum netting (for those of you who are in the know).

There is nothing worse than trying to react quickly to an emerging issue like disease pressure in the thick of mum production and finding out you need to wait a week to get the fungicide you needed yesterday!

Next week, I’ll share the REST of the story (Garden Mums: After …)