Organic

Grow your own bouquets from our plant starts

Nigella add lots of texture with their lacey leaves, bright blooms and geometric seed pods

Who doesn’t love a bouquet of fresh flowers brightening up their indoor living space?

Whether you’re new to growing your own cut flowers or want to expand your bloom options, Red Wagon Plants has a wide selection of flower starts for your garden! We’ve put together a list of plants available at our greenhouses this season and sorted them by function in a flower arrangement. If you’re new to growing cut flowers, I recommend starting with the ones marked for long vase life. Zinnias and Verbena bonariensis for example, are great staples that we like to grow in our display garden every year. They bloom proliferously throughout the summer and have long stalks to make bouquets of any size. They also are great attractors for pollinators!

The images above are Breadseed Poppies and a wheelbarrow full of Dahlias from Lily’s garden.

To find pictures of all the above-mentioned plants, visit our “What We Grow” page on our website.

A few top picks are described in the following guide:

Gomphrena make great dried arrangements

If you would like more inspiration and guidance on how to grow, harvest and arrange your cut flowers, below are some of our favorite resources. And as always, stop by at our greenhouses in Hinesburg and let us help you make the best selection for your garden.

This post was written by Kat Consler.

How to start your own backyard blueberry patch

Growing blueberries in your own back yard can be very rewarding. Picking the plump ripe berries make a great fresh snack for young and old!

Here are a few things to pay attention to when planning your new blueberry patch:

  • Cross-pollination: Like many other backyard fruits, you will need to plant at least two varieties to get good cross-pollination and fruit set. Following is a list of varieties that we carry or have carried in the past. Personally, my favorites are ‘Northland’ for their exceptional flavor reminiscent of wild blueberries and ‘Bluecrop’ for their large clusters that make for easy picking.

  • Your soil pH: Select a sunny site in your garden and then get your soil tested! Blueberries will only thrive in acidic soil and most garden soils will need to be amended with a soil acidifier. This is the same product you would use for hydrangeas.

  • Spacing: Give your blueberry bushes enough elbow room. Depending on the varieties chosen this will be 4-6 feet of space between the plants. Check the tag on the plants you purchase to know their mature size and recommended spacing.

  • Take your time: For the best success and least maintenance, plan ahead and prepare your planting spot in Fall, then plant in Spring as soon as the soil warms up enough to work it. Blueberry bushes can be planted any time of year but will require good watering (mulching helps!) and weeding especially in the first few seasons. As tempting as it is to let your berry bushes fruit as soon as possible, it is recommended to remove all flowers in the first year. This way your plants can put all their energy into growing a healthy root system. That will in turn give them more energy to bear more fruit the next season. Patience pays off.

For more growing and maintenance tips, please refer to this handy growing guide or come by in our greenhouses and ask one of our plant experts!

This post was written by Kat Consler.

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Behind the Scenes: Pest Management at Red Wagon Plants

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Red Wagon Plants operates as an organic agricultural business. What does this mean for pest and disease management?

Beneficials, our best friends

When visiting our greenhouses you will occasionally find a hanging basket with nothing but tall grass growing in it. Aesthetically maybe not quite pleasing enough to hang on your front porch, and you might wonder what it’s doing here! When you look more closely, you will see that the grass is covered in little black aphids. Depending on how long this ‘banker plant’ has been in use, you will likely also find aphid-sized golden balls attached to the blades of grass. Some of them have a tiny hole cut into one end.

Parasitized aphid mummies

What’s going on here? One of our best and most effective ways to control aphids is the use of parasitoid wasps. If you’re imagining a swarm of yellow jackets buzzing around in our greenhouses, let me paint a different picture: These tiny wasps are less than an ⅛ of an inch long and won’t sting us, so they are not very scary to humans. Aphids are the ones that should be afraid, though. The female wasps lay their eggs into live aphids! When the egg hatches, the larva eats the aphid from the inside, then pupates, turning the dead aphid into the golden-tan mummy out of which it emerges.

We use these beneficials as a preventative measure, so we may not have aphids in our greenhouses when we release them, but we want them to be ready as soon as we have an aphid outbreak. This is where the banker plants come in.

The banker plants - made up of some species of grain and bird cherry-oat aphids - is a nursery for the wasps to lay their eggs in. Bird cherry-oat aphids will only attack cereals and not other crops in our greenhouses, so we are not spreading one pest while trying to manage another.

There are various types of parasitoid wasps, many of which will also visit your garden and aid in your pest management. One of my favorites are the ones that lay eggs on tomato hornworms and eat them up from the inside!

Parasitoid wasps are not the only invertebrate helpers we employ here at Red Wagon Plants. There are many other beneficials that can be used as a preventative measure. Most of them specialize in eating aphids, thrips, spider mites or all of the above, as well as other tasty pests.

Lacewing larva enjoying an aphid meal

Scouting for pests and diseases

Besides beneficials, scouting is the key ingredient to good pest and disease management. This means taking a close look at one plant of each variety each week. This is a lot of work, but it keeps us up to date with what is going on in the greenhouses. As soon as a pest or disease is detected, we can intervene. Oftentimes this means squishing pests by hand, picking off diseased leaves, or moving plants to a dedicated “hospital” area for special treatment and monitoring. Knowing where the pest hotspots are, tells us the most effective place to spread our beneficials each week.

Only if all other measures fail, do we apply broad-spectrum insecticides. Even though these products are approved for organic production, they do not differentiate between friend and foe. So we use them very sparingly and in a localized manner. This is how Integrated Pest Management (IPM) differs from conventional pest control: We only spray after a certain level of pests have been detected, not on a calendar schedule. This has obvious benefits for the environment, and the health of staff and customers.

Preventative Sprays

As any gardener in Vermont knows, fungal diseases are widespread in our humid climate. To limit diseases like powdery and downy mildew, we use preventative sprays. Some of these products actively kill spores on contact by drying them out and changing the pH level. Others contain a beneficial bacterium that will compete for space with pathogens. This means that if the beneficial bacteria is there first, the mildews have less room to spread. Unfortunately every new leaf that grows will need to be treated with this beneficial, so this spray is applied on a weekly schedule as soon as conditions are conducive for mildews. So if you see me walking around at Red Wagon Plants with a Ghost-Busters backpack sprayer, that’s likely what I’m doing!

A display of healthy blooms and foliage plants

This post was written by Kat Consler, RWP’s Integrated Pest Management specialist.




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Red Wagon Herbs

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What's a greenhouse grower to do when the spring season winds down and there is still plenty of great weather for summer growing and the greenhouses are empty? Well, start a new business, that is what. We are so happy to introduce to you our new sister business, Red Wagon Herbs. We are growing Certified Organic herbs for year round harvest and selling to local stores, restaurants, and food hubs. Our focus is on the popular culinary herbs for now, but we are likely to branch out into the more unusual once we have had a chance to explore our markets and have gotten familiar with our new growing practices. This is a perfectly natural extension of our plant business since we already partner with fantastic stores and we love to grow herbs more than anything else. As a matter of fact, the plant business, in its earliest days, was just a potted herb business. In a way, we are going to back to those days and loving the continuity, evolution, and expansion.

Our herbs are grown using three different methods: in the ground for summer and fall harvest, in a new, unheated greenhouse (paid for in part by a grant from NRCS EQIP) for fall, winter and spring harvest, and in our existing, heated houses for those coldest months. We are excited to be the only Vermont farm offering organic herbs year round and hope you enjoy cooking with them as much as we enjoy growing them.

Please be on the look out for an Open House this fall so we can show you what we have been up to and give you a chance to smell, touch, taste, and see it all.

Our current line up consists of :

  • Basil (March through November only)
  • Chives
  • Cilantro 
  • Dill
  • Curly and Flat Parsley
  • Sage
  • Thyme
  • Oregano
  • Tarragon
  • Rosemary
  • Savory
  • Marjoram
  • Spearmint
  • Bouquet Garni ( a mixture of aromatic herbs for roasting, stocks, and more)