Growers can take a proactive step toward reducing insect pests and install insect screening over greenhouse vent openings.
“Screening isn’t cheap, there is an initial investment. But in the long run there is a savings in the reduction of pesticide applications, cleaner plants [and a] healthier environment,” says Raymond Cloyd, an entomologist, professor and extension specialist at Kansas State University.
He adds that insect screening should be part of any IPM program and is compatible with the use of biological controls.
Insect screening can help keep out the common insects that plague a growing operation. Properly sized and fitted insect screening will also keep the beneficial insects from escaping, but more importantly it will keep flying insects out that Cloyd says “inundate the biologicals” like thrips (Thysanoptera), whiteflies (Aleyrodidae), onion or allium leafminers (Phytomyza gymnostoma Loew), and shore flies (Ephydridae).
Insect screening is particularly important in locations where greenhouses are near adjoining fields of corn, soybeans and other crops, where insects can enter the greenhouse from the fields, particularly during harvest time.
Sizing up the situation
Once a grower gets the go-ahead from procurement to invest in screening material, the next course of action is to select the right product for their greenhouse.
“The first thing I ask them to do is contact the National Greenhouse Manufacturers Association,” Cloyd says. “This association has guidelines on how to install this screening; you just can’t put screening on your vents, you’ll burn out your fans.”
Cloyd says he has worked with many growers in the installation stage of greenhouse screening. He says the first step in properly installing insect screens involves calculating the square footage of space needed for the cages or boxes that are installed on the exterior of the greenhouse. The cages provide adequate ventilation and cooling while preventing fan motors from burning out.
The other consideration is the size of the holes or pore spaces in the screening opening. Thrips, for example, are narrow and thin, and can squeeze through some of the smallest openings.
In his book “Greenhouse Pest Management,” Cloyd advises greenhouse operators to install the insect screening based on the smallest insect that needs to be excluded and says that a virus screen may also reduce the incidence of viral diseases, such as the impatiens necrotic spot and tomato spotted wilt viruses, both vectored by the western flower thrip.
Insect screening should be part of any IPM program and is compatible with the use of biological controls.
Photo by Raymond Cloyd, Kansas State University
Accordion screening
The folding, or accordion, system, is sold by Holland Gaas, a company in the Netherlands. Accordion screening can be installed over venlo vents, continuous vents, sidewall vents or butterfly vents outside a greenhouse.
“Insect [screening] has made a bunch of leaps from the beginning — from pest [screening] over padded end walls and cages — to the newest innovation, accordion netting,” says Julie Gilbert-Vijverberg, director of Batesville, Indiana-based G&V Greenhouse Solutions and U.S. representative for Holland Gaas.
Gilbert-Vijverbert says greenhouse owners should consult with manufacturers before installing accordion screening to find out the projected cubic feet per minute (CFM) of their fans and see if the openings need to be retrofitted with cages or boxes to maintain adequate air flow. Newer greenhouses may not need the boxes and cages. A greenhouse manufacturer or a greenhouse construction company can help configure the airflow reduction to have adequate airflow for growers’ greenhouse needs.
Accordion screening can be installed over venlo vents, continuous vents, sidewall vents or butterfly vents outside a greenhouse.
Photo courtesy of G&V Greenhouse Solutions
Maintaining your screening
Standard greenhouse screens can last from five to 10 years if it is maintained properly, Cloyd says.
“You’ve got to keep them clean because dirt and debris can build up,” he says. “I know growers who have used them for up to 10 years.”
Gilbert-Vijverberg recommends cleaning the screening once a year, especially if your houses are located near farm fields where farmers are plowing. The debris that is kicked up by the plowing clings to the screens, reducing ventilation. Gilbert-Vijverberg says growers can clean the surface of accordion screening by using a pressure washer set at 2,500 psi with a fan tip and lightly spraying from the inside out, or if thrips are your main problem, from the outside in. She says conventional greenhouse screening should be cleaned with a garden hose and spray gun.
The more you have invested in a crop, the more you need to protect it, and insect screening not only provides a good insect barrier but a level of security that all is well with your crop. Insect screening is another consideration for growers looking for crop protection and peace of mind.
Neil is a horticulturist and owner of Green Industry Marketing. This article first appeared in sister publication, Greenhouse Management magazine.
Red-headed flea beetle larvae can be found in container nursery plants.
Danny Lauderdale
How to handle the red-headed flea beetle
Supplement - State of the market: Insect control report
Research has provided several options to help control the red-headed flea beetle, a pest that quickly eats into nursery profits.
Red-headed flea beetle (RHFB) adults, Systena frontalis, feed on many ornamentals in container nursery production making plants unmarketable due to skeletonizing or holes in leaves.
I know of or have heard grower concerns with this insect throughout the Southeast, Northeast, and in Ohio and Michigan. It is native to the majority of the United States. I don’t know exactly when RHFB became a problem for container nursery growers. It seems to have coincided with or followed the Great Recession of December 2007 through June 2009.
Management challenges
Traditional management has consisted of repeated adult foliar sprays. In 2017 I surveyed eastern North Carolina growers and found that acephate, bifenthrin, carbaryl, and chlorpyrifos were most commonly used to manage adult populations by making applications from weekly to monthly depending on pressure. Growers indicated managing RHFB was their greatest production concern which guided me to search for more information and conduct nursery research.
Lifecycle
In nature and soil-based systems this insect has one generation per year (egg, larva, pupa, adult) and is not of concern except in North American cranberry production in the Northern U.S. and Canada and possibly in other small fruit production. In container nursery production, RHFB may have up to four generations per year. I am confident that in eastern North Carolina container nurseries there are three to four. The insect overwinters as eggs in soil and substrate. In eastern North Carolina eggs hatch and larvae emerge in container substrate around 400 GDD50 (Growing Degree Days with base temperature of 50°F) in plants overwintered outdoors (300 GDD50 for plants overwintered in structures). Plants overwintered in structures can result in first generation larvae detection as early as 240 GDD50 (Brian Kunkel, 2013). Larvae don’t seem to cause significant injury to plant root systems. Following a period of pupation, adults emerge beginning at 500 GDD50 from plants overwintered in structures (Brian Kunkel, 2013) and as late as 900-1000 GDD50 if overwintered outdoors in North Carolina. Generations seem to overlap starting with the second.
IR-4 research
Research conducted for the IR-4 program from 2012-2019 by Braman, Frank, Kunkel, and Gilrein showed that foliar applied active ingredients acetamiprid, bifenthrin, cyantraniliprole, cyclaniliprole, cyfluthrin + imidacloprid, dinotefuran, imidacloprid (granular applied exception), lambda-cyhalothrin, sulfoxaflor + spinetoram, thiamethoxam, and tolfenpyrad resulted in less RHFB damage over a 7 to 49 day period (depending on rates, varying levels of insect population and number of applications) when compared to untreated controls.
Larvae management research
Following extensive discussions with Dr. Brian Kunkel from the University of Delaware and reviewing his research targeting larvae management with drenches of entomopathogenic fungi (Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium anisopliae), several products as drenches directed at active larvae in containers (dinotefuran, imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, cyantraniliprole, azadiractin, bifenthrin), and drenches with beneficial nematodes (Steinernema carpocapsae found to be most effective), I decided to conduct my own drench research targeting larvae.
My first replicated nursery trial targeting active larvae in 2017 showed that while azadirachtin, chlorpyrifos, cyclaniliprole, Isaria fumosorosea, and tolfenpyrad provided 25-47% control, acephate applied at a mix rate of 12 oz./100 gallons and drench volume of 12 fl. oz. per 3-gallon container provided 92% control of RHFB larvae.
A 2018 replicated nursery trial targeting larvae showed acephate at 12 oz./100 gallons, chlorpyrifos at 50W at 16 lb/100 gallons (the max label rate for beetles), and Steinernema carpocapsae nematodes at 250 million nematodes/100 gallons applied at a drench volume of 8 fl. oz. per full 1 gallon container provided 100% control of RHFB larvae. Isaria fumosorosea, provided 94% control.
Another 2018 replicated nursery trial showed that many labeled neonicotinoid insecticides applied at their recommended rates prior to egg hatch/larvae emergence (212 GDD50) provided the best control (most 100%) and all other products significantly reduced numbers of larvae compared to the untreated control (UTC).
Foliar applications are often applied using air blast sprayers and hand guns. Photo courtesy of Danny Lauderdale
Foliar, drench, & potting demos
With heavy adult pressure, monthly foliar application of neonicotinoids or biweekly application (once every two weeks) of contact insecticides is not enough to maintain marketable plants (< 10% injury). Foliar contact insecticides often must be applied weekly to maintain marketable plants. The challenge is that many insecticide labels restrict number of applications a year (for example carbaryl is 6) or have a maximum total rate per growing season or generation of insect. This is an opportunity to implement insecticide rotations that work within label restrictions and prevent insect resistance.
Neonicotinoids applied as drenches at potting or to existing plants prior to RHFB egg hatch/larvae emergence (approximately 200 to 300 GDD50), as granular topdress, or by granular incorporation can provide at least 60 to 90 days of adult control with less than 10% foliar injury without using foliar insecticides (depending on rate).
It is important to note (due to concern of neonicotinoid use and pollinators) that many newly spring potted plants (like Itea virginica) do not typically flower during their first growing season. Many modified varieties of Hydrangea with double flowers or sterile sepals attract few bees (Mach, 2018). Also, spring or summer flowering plants that are potted in the fall will not be attractive to pollinators at time of application.
Large numbers of larvae can be found in container nursery plants.
Photo courtesy of Danny Lauderdale
Where are we now?
In the eastern U.S. RHFB survey (Joseph et. al., 2021), we found that 72% of growers had recurring infestations over the past 10 years and species most affected were Hydrangea paniculata, Itea virginica, Weigela florida, Ilex crenata, Ilex glabra, Rosa spp., Rhododenron spp., Osmanthus fragrans, Cornus spp. (shrub dogwoods like silky, red-twig, and yellow-twig), Sedum, and Salvia. Growers in eastern North Carolina have also reported damage on Viburnum, Loropetalum chinense, Forsythia, Lagerstroemia, Buddleija, Abelia, Gardenia, Guara, Illicium, Pyracantha, and Myrica cerifera. Growers spend an average of $662 per nursery acre per year on RHFB management. And 89% of growers apply insecticides against adults, 47% target larvae, 48% target adults and larvae, 11% were using Steinernema carpocapsae nematodes, and 2% were using entomopathogenic fungi. Among the growers surveyed, 36% use neonicotinoids, 23% carbaryl, 21% pyrethroids, 15% organophosphates, and 6% diamides. Some 54% of growers surveyed indicated they need more effective insecticides.
Itea Scarlet Beauty, 8/20/2020. Untreated (U) compared with Low (L), Medium (M), and High (H) rate of imidacloprid granular topdress. Liners potted to 3 gallons and treated on 2/28/20 (260.5 GDD50).
Photo courtesy of Danny Lauderdale
Management recommendations
Start by following growing degree days in your area based on the closest weather station or record and calculate on site. Keep a list of plant bloom at the nursery based on GGD50. This will guide scouting for first generation larvae and adults. In eastern North Carolina I start scouting containers for larvae in plants overwintered in protection structures around 200-300 GDD50 (redbuds in full bloom, when flowering dogwoods start blooms open), for larvae in plants overwintered outdoors around 350-450 GDD50 when Itea virginica flower buds start to swell, and for adults when older Itea virginica are in full bloom and Magnolia grandiflora start bloom around 800-1000 GDD50 (possibly earlier in plants overwintered in protection structures).
Scouting for larvae, adults, and keeping records will help determine application timing including:
Pre-egg hatch with neonicotinoids (drench or granular topdress available in several formulations), azadirachtin, or cyantraniliprole. Neonicotinoids provide the best control of larvae and adults and the longest protection from foliar injury if applied to rooted cuttings, liners prior to potting, are incorporated in potting substrate, or are applied as drench or topdress after potting.
After egg hatch target larvae with products like acephate, chlorpyrifos, Isaria fumosorosea or beneficial nematodes (Steinernema carpocapsae).
Make applications of adult foliar insecticides just prior to historical first-generation adult emergence or based on scouting susceptible crops closely and frequently.
Many foliar insecticides kill adults short term but don’t break the life cycle. Repeat applications are needed during the summer to control newly emerging adults. Make sure to follow label instructions related to rate and limited number of applications per acre and/or year, growing season or generation of insect. Use a rotation of products based on their IRAC (Insect Resistance Action Committee) classification to avoid resistance.
In my experience, growers with greater numbers of susceptible plants held over from year to year have the greatest problems with RHFB. Know the most susceptible plants and manage production and inventory closely. Growers will have fewer problems with RHFB (and other pests or production issues) if plants are sold long before they have a birthday at the nursery. Consider split potting crops to fill plant sales demands throughout the year. This also provides the benefit of smaller crop blocks, lower pressure, less injury, fewer holds on sales, fewer sales credits, and prevents extra labor costs to prune and flush injured plants.
Finally, consider rotating the location of commonly susceptible plant species. Growers often put all deciduous plants in the same location year after year. Rotate those with conifer production to avoid population build ups. This will also help with prevention of conifer diseases, insects, and mites.
About the author
Danny Lauderdale (B.S. Horticulture/Landscape Design, and M.S. Horticulture/Urban Forestry minor from Auburn University) is the Eastern Region Area Specialized Agent for Nursery & Greenhouse with NC State Extension. For more details on this research, contact Lauderdale at dmlauder@ncsu.edu.
Letter from the Sponsor
Supplement - State of the market: Insect control report
Innovations to help protect and grow your business
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Belmont Nursery, located in Fresno, California, is a unique business because it includes nursery production, greenhouse production and a retail garden center. Jon Reelhorn is the owner, and he runs the place. A Californian through-and-through, he was born in Stockton where he developed a love of baseball. He’s 6’5” and lean, and when you hear he used to be a pretty good pitcher, you believe it. He was drafted by the San Francisco Giants right out of high school, but he chose to go to Fresno State University on a baseball scholarship. He was drafted again by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980 and chased his boyhood dream for four years before putting that plant sciences degree to work.
Belmont Nursery is located in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural hotbed that gets quite literally hot. Temperatures routinely hit the triple digits and stay there for weeks. However, it cools off into the 70s and high 60s at night.
“We like to think of it as nice in the morning and nice in the evening,” Jon says.
It works for growing Belmont’s mix of annuals, perennials, shrubs, trees, houseplants and succulents. Yes, it’s hot in the afternoon, but you get used to it. Or you work around the worst of it. During the summer, Jon’s field crew starts work at 6 a.m. and goes home between 2 and 2:30 p.m.
“If it’s 98 (degrees), that’s a breeze,” he says. “If it’s 102, that’s no big deal. If it’s 105, yeah, they’ll want to work in the shade in the afternoon.”
Still, Jon wouldn’t trade it. He loves the natural beauty of Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks. He enjoys the fact that he can leave work and be hiking with his yellow lab, Crash, among the giant sequoias in less than an hour. Crash, you might guess, is named partially for Crash Davis, a character in the 1988 film Bull Durham, which chronicled the travails of a minor league baseball team.
An unorthodox succession plan
After playing a few years of minor league ball, Jon got his start as a salesman with a bit of production knowledge. He worked for Alameda Gardens, a Southern California wholesale grower that has since gone out of business, selling mainly to independent garden centers. He traveled through the Central Valley making sales calls between Bakersfield and Modesto.
“Nobody else wanted that territory; they thought it was the armpit of California,” Reelhorn says. “I thought it was great because it was small.”
Fresno is almost directly in the middle of that 200-mile Bakersfield-to-Modesto drive. That’s where he first visited Belmont Nursery and met the second-generation owners, Jerry and Varrel Palmer.
The Palmer family had run Belmont Nursery for 50 years over two generations. Vic and Ruby Palmer passed it on to Jerry and Varrel Palmer, but there were no viable third generation owners. Jon had been in the industry for about 15 years at this point, and he occasionally sold plants to the Palmers. One day, he asked Jerry what he planned to do about the nursery. When Jerry told him he wanted to retire but he didn’t have anyone willing to take over, Jon said, “I’d be interested.” Jerry’s eyes lit up and a huge smile creased his face as he almost incredulously said, “You would?”
Jerry, who became a mentor and father figure to Jon, was thrilled to have someone show interest in buying the nursery.
Two weeks later, Jon called on the nursery again and Jerry gauged how serious Jon was about the proposition. After some negotiations, about a year later Jon was brought on as general manager. He worked with Jerry for about a year as a transition, “to make sure I knew what I was doing,” Jon says. After that, he sold Jon the nursery.
Jerry is happily retired now, but he still brings the mail in and gets a cup of coffee every morning, because he lives in a house on the property.
Even though Jerry sold the nursery to Jon, he said he wasn’t quite ready to quit working. So Jon asked him what he’d like to do. Jerry said he wanted to be a truck driver. He’d always liked driving tractor trailers, and he likes to talk to the customers while unloading their plants. He wouldn’t tell them he was the previous owner, though, Jon says with a laugh.
Changing the mix
When Jon took over, about 95% of Belmont Nursery’s customers were landscapers.
As he knew the garden center market well, he tried to change the product mix at Belmont to offer more of what garden centers want. Instead of only landscape shrubs, he’d add 1-gallon geraniums, for example. He chased that market for years, and it was largely successful.
But the turning point for the business came when Jon signed up for the Executive Academy for Growth and Leadership (EAGL) program.
EAGL is an executive ‘mini-MBA’ curriculum tailored to the nursery and greenhouse industry, developed in collaboration with Dr. Charlie Hall, Ellison Chair for International Floriculture at Texas A&M University.
This University-recognized certificate program has been designed particularly with the challenges of contemporary wholesale growing businesses in mind.
For nine months, Jon was able to focus and collaborate with his peers and work to improve his company’s competitive position and profitability. Dr. Hall and the other EAGL faculty helped him narrow down his business’ scope and focus on where they were making money. And for Belmont Nursery, it was retail garden centers.
“We were trying to serve too many masters,” Jon says. “When we focus and say, ‘This is what we do well, and this is who we should be serving because we have a competitive advantage in that area.’ Well, that was selling to retail garden centers. They liked us, so they ordered week after week, which just tickles me. And then it's the same product we could sell at retail.”
In a matter of 5-7 years, Belmont’s customer base changed from about 5% retail to about 50% retail.
“Sure, there are some challenges in that,” Jon says, “but guess what? I'm not selling a $3 geranium anymore. Now I'm selling an $8 or $9 geranium. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that it's better to sell the same plant for more.”
Belmont’s target customer is the homeowner with a project. They position themselves with branding as “Experts to the Experts”, touting their expertise as the go-to plant supplier for landscape professionals and retail garden centers. They back it up with eight California Certified Nursery Professionals on staff. However, that direct-to-customer business tends to dry up in the hottest parts of summer in the valley, when local homeowners aren’t planting because it’s too hot. That’s why selling their Belmont-grown items to retail garden centers is crucial to Belmont’s business plan. In the dog days of August, when it’s 100 degrees in the Central Valley but it’s only 80 degrees in the Bay area, customers there are still buying and selling. Those garden center customers are eager to buy plants from Belmont and sell them to their customers.
Jon also expanded the company’s shipping range past Northern and Central California into the Pacific Northwest.
On the growing side of the business, Belmont uses its climate to its advantage in several ways.
“It's hot here in summer, but some of the best growing conditions in the world are here between Feb. 15 and June 1,” he says. “And then in the fall between Sept. 15 and about Nov. 1 or Thanksgiving.”
Because of those excellent conditions, warm enough but not humid, plenty of sun and long days, Belmont is able to send a rose in bloom to its Pacific Northwest customers even long before Mother’s Day.
Jon has no desire to grow Belmont any larger than it is. The nursery will always be a regional supplier.
“We don’t want to get bigger; we just want to get better,” he says.
California challenges
Labor is certainly one of the biggest challenges for a nursery, whether it’s in Ohio or California. Federal and state regulations make it difficult to do business properly, Jon says.
“I tell people I grow flowers for a living, but what I really do is workman's compensation and water quality testing for nitrites and crazy stuff like that, which I don't need a degree in plant science to do,” he says.
The Central Valley is not as densely populated as the cities along the coast of California, but as urban sprawl continues and the town grows closer to the nursery, will the grower still be able to spray crops or will they have to find a new way?
California residents are typically under water use restrictions due to the state’s widespread drought. The state’s water board determines best practices for monitoring water use for homeowners, agricultural and horticultural producers.
The board has discussed putting together a plant palette, telling the growers what they can grow and what they can’t grow. For instance, a flower that takes more than their allotted amount of water to grow might be banned. The fact that people making those decisions don’t know the amount of water needed to keep a plant alive – or don’t deem plants important enough to adjust their plans -- is a scary thought for a nursery owner. It’s another reason Jon believes it’s imperative for growers to get involved in politics. They need to help their elected officials and representatives understand the fuller picture. They need to talk to the water board members, help them see that draconian restrictions might drastically reduce water consumption, but at the cost of not allocating enough water for homeowners to have plants in their front yard.
“If we’re not on the ball, if we’re not talking to our legislators and watching what’s coming down, if you’re not involved in Plant California Alliance or your farm bureau, you’re riding somebody else’s coattails and saying, ‘I’m not going to participate,’ well, then somebody else predicts your future,” he says.
“And that happens an awful lot. There's an awful lot of people that don't participate. They don't want to pay their dues, or they don't want to get involved. And so now the legislator doesn't understand how limiting the amount of water that a homeowner can use can decimate our industry.”
Stepping up
It frustrates him that horticulture, which is a $3 billion industry in California, is so fragmented and that it doesn’t have a stronger voice in government. He appreciates AmericanHort’s unified voice for the industry, especially the work senior vice president for public policy and government relations Craig Regelbrugge does to ensure the concerns of the grower are heard on a national level.
Work like that is what caused nurseries to be deemed essential businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being able to stay open and sell when so many other businesses were forced to close was the key factor in many growers and garden centers having tremendously successful years. It’s $295 for a basic AmericanHort membership, and Reelhorn says every green industry business got their money’s worth last year.
“You won’t pay $300 to be able to stay open during the pandemic? How much was that worth, right?” he asks.
The pandemic itself was a boon for Belmont’s business, like many other growers and retailers in the industry. And although there is a pervading feeling of luck that the nursery industry was able to thrive when many others were unable to even survive, Jon knows that even if he feels lucky to be where he is, he owes it all to hard work by a talented group.
“It's certainly not luck because, without Craig Regelbrugge and without the people representing us in either Washington D.C. or Sacramento and convincing the people that are making the decisions that were essential, we could have just gone away,” he says. “We were ready to just fold up and say, ‘Okay, we can just keep many people on as it takes to keep the plants alive, but otherwise who knows what's going to happen?’ You lay a few people off and then two weeks later you're hiring them back and two years later we're still running. So, we feel pretty fortunate about just being in that position because there was an awful lot of people that weren't.”
Reelhorn is currently vice chairman of the AmericanHort board and has held leadership positions with the American Nursery and Landscape Association and the Horticultural Research Institute before that.
Now that he’s one of the “old guard” he tries to maintain that inclusivity that helped him feel at home when he was the new kid on the block. He first got involved with ANLA when he bought Belmont Nursery in 2001.
That year, he was looking for support as a new business owner who knew plants and sales but needed help with managing his company. So, he traveled across the country to the ANLA Management Clinic, a move he says “took a lot of guts.”
He still remembers walking into the event in the middle of Kentucky, not knowing anybody, and meeting Louis Hillenmeyer at the check-in. The founder of Louis’ Flower Power Shop, a central Kentucky retail garden center, he was a local guy, full of personality.
“He was so kind, he introduced me to the program,” Reelhorn says. “Every time I'd walk by later in the event, he'd say hello to me. It just made you feel like you were part of the family. And you can just tell that there's something really good about this group, because even if you’re a newbie from California that didn't know anything, he treated you really good.”
