Extend your mix

Sunbeam Gardens is a wholesale grower of perennials, alpines, hardy succulents, ground covers, ornamental grasses and herbs. Located in Avon, Ohio, the wholesale nursery specializes in perennials which is 95% of the operation and services IGCs and landscapers.

After 52 years of being in the trade, Jim Brady, owner of Sunbeam Gardens, has overcome many challenges from a horrible cold spell in 1988 where they lost a lot of plant material, to a tornado that hit them years ago, to a pandemic in 2020. Through his years of experience and overcoming challenges, he knows what growing media works best for his plants.

“When peat became hard to come by, we were able to still get a supply from Lambert, which was crucial in our business,” Brady says. “If you don’t have media, you don’t have a way of surviving.”

Sunbeam has an acre of glass greenhouse that is used for growing and propagating, and most of those crops are moved outside to polyhouses. Brady has around 25 polyhouses and some ground beds. He considers himself old school and grew up feeding plant material, even perennials, which he still does today. He grows several plugs from unrooted cuttings from all over the world.

“We grow a variety of crops because I’ve always thought it's better to have a selection of something, so people can pick and choose,” Brady says. “We don’t produce a billion pots of anything. I do a little bit here and a little bit there. That’s why we buy from Lambert because they take care of us little guys, where other companies don’t want to talk to you anymore unless you’re buying 20 loads from them.”

Sunbeam Gardens uses Lambert’s EcoPeatPlus+® which is made of a course wood fiber. Brady first trialed it by growing in straight EcoPeatPlus+®, and he tried blending it with different mixes, different plants and different sized containers – quarts, one gallon, two gallons and three gallons.

“On certain plants, it did absolutely phenomenal,” Brady says. “The root growth that we saw by using it was what impressed us the most, but it just drained too quickly. So, we learned to blend the EcoPeatPlus+® with their EPM-50 High Porosity mix.

Brady smashes the EcoPeatPlus+® with his skid steer and mixes it with the EPM-50 High Porosity mix. He no longer adds lime in his containers because the mix already has the pH adjusted, and the mix has a minor watering agent. This is the standard blend that they use, supplementing with pine bark, for most of their containers.

“Any moron can grow a crop and spray it with a growth regulator to keep it small,” Brady says. “I chose a different source, and I learned this a long time ago. … Water is your best growth regulator, and with the right mix, you can learn to control how much moisture it has.”

Because EcoPeatPlus+® is packed well and stays dry, Brady stores it on a solid pallet outside and leaves it there as he uses it. He makes his soil on a concrete pad and loads it on a trailer to be hauled wherever they need it that day. Each time he makes a batch of soil, he varies how much EcoPeatPlus+® he adds depending on the container size it’s about to go in.

“When we mix EcoPeatPlus+® with a bale, you can control how much faster the water's going to pass through the mix, and it will last longer,” Brady says. “It doesn't break down like other mixes if you just use a straight bag mix. … Over the last seven years, EcoPeatPlus+® has been the perfect product for us in extending our mix, making it more usable in all the different aspects of what we grow in.”

For more: www.lambertpeatmoss.com

Check out more from this issue and find you next story to read.