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Mums grown in Cashtown PA at Musselman Greenhouses

Mum’s the Word

– Posted in: Seasonal Color

Garden mums will soon be bursting with color throughout the mid Atlantic region.  Our garden mum story begins around Mother’s Day.  Groupings of unrooted cuttings arrive to our greenhouses throughout the month of May while most people are busy planting their flower and vegetable gardens.  Once each week, we promptly stick these cuttings into small soil cells so they can form roots.

After the mums are rooted, they are given a Florel (ethylene) treatment to prevent premature budding, optimize branching, and produce a higher quality plant.  The real fun begins in early June when we start planting more than 25,000 pots of garden mums.  Pots are run through a potting machine to fill them with soil, planted, tagged, and transported to our two acre mum field.  We can plant, move, and space approximately 600 garden mums per hour.

Once the mums are in the field, the plants are initially hand watered with starter fertilizer. After the first hand watering, the plants are automatically watered with fertilizer several times each day throughout the summer.  Preventative pesticide applications and plant growth regulator treatments are applied to the garden mums so the plants are healthy and just the right size.  Shipping begins  in mid August when the earliest blooming varieties begin to peak out with color.  We grow more than 70 cultivars (cultivated varieties) of garden mums so plenty of color is available from mid August through early October.

Many factors play an important role in determining when garden mums bloom.  Mums are photoperiodic and bloom naturally as the days are shorter and the nights are longer.  Extreme heat can delay the bloom time.  Exceptionally hot conditions in the mid Atlantic region caused extreme heat delay during the 2016 garden mum season.  It was the worst heat delay Dave Musselman has experienced in 42 years of growing garden mums.

Until recent years, many consumers referred to garden mums as “hardy mums” implying that the plants were perennials.  New garden mum cultivars are bred for color, growth habit, disease resistance, and bloom time.  They are not as hardy as the older varieties so the popular name has been changed from hardy mum to garden mum.

As we move towards Fall, mum is the word for your garden!

 

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