Last week and this week mark a busy time for the Mast Young Plants trial gardens. These are the two weeks that all of our varieties that have been carefully cultivated and organized in our greenhouses for weeks on end finally make their way out to the gardens! It is a ton of work for a large number of people from many of our departments including maintenance, growing, innovating (R&D), purchasing, production, and inventory; but in the end it is always fulfilling to see the young plants take off in their new, spacious setting.
In addition to our display garden (our living catalog), we also feature a blind comparison trial every year featuring one or two genera for you to view and compare. This is our fourth year doing the blind trial, and we have chosen to focus on breeder-designed combinations this year; including Dummen Confetti Garden and Garden Party, Selecta’s Trixi, Ball’s Mix Masters, Danziger’s Mixis, Syngenta’s Kwik Kombos, Westflower’s Passion Combos, and several new combo offerings from Suntory. Our goal with this trial is that you will get some valuable information from this trial as to which combos you not only prefer from an aesthetic standpoint, but which ones have the ultimate summer garden performance. The trial will be unmarked during the garden tour weeks (hence the name blind trial), but we will send out a report at the end of the season so you can compare your favorites with the key!
Another component of our trial grounds in our All-America Selections trial garden, where our resident AAS judge does evaluations on some of the newest seed and vegetative ornamental genetics to help determine which plants make the cut as being worth of the prestigious AAS award.
