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• Annual, Decor, Garden, Houseplant, Perennial, Plant, Pots, Seed Starting, Veggies & Herbs

Behind the Scenes: Planting for Spring Crops

Spring has sprung and we are busy here at Belgian Nursery! There is so much to do before the outdoor gardening season starts, from planting and seeding to relocating and watering – and that’s just our annual and vegetable crops! Read on for a behind the scenes look at what we’ve been up to so far:

What’s Up? Hanging Baskets!
If you’ve been to Belgian Nursery in early May, you may have noticed that our annual greenhouses aisles come with their own canopy. That’s thanks to more than 6000 hanging baskets, all planted and grown on site starting in February! We fill the baskets, plant their combinations (sun or shade) and line them up in neat rows in the annual greenhouses. A few weeks of watering and fertilizing later, and they’re ready for hangers and loop price labels (complete with care instructions) before going up onto our irrigation system. It takes a special touch to place those drip lines just right inside all those flowers and foliage, and the extra effort is worth it to water hundreds of baskets all at once!

What’s Down? The Floor! And Deck Railings!
If your neck gets tired from looking up at our hanging baskets, there’s our fantastic selection of annual planters and window boxes! The several hundred pots are planted around the same time as our hanging baskets, featuring gorgeous annual combinations for sunny and shady locations. We like to keep our shady combinations in our shade greenhouses 8 through 11, while the sunny planters and window boxes will be in full sunlight on the opposite end of the 1+ acre of annual greenhouses.

Thousands and Thousands of Individual Pots!
Once the hanging baskets are up and out of the way, we can start filling the greenhouse benches – again! The 15 primary annual greenhouses are divided by shade and sun varieties (4 houses for shade, 11 for sun including 2 for vegetables and herbs) to make plant shopping easy. There are also 4 additional hoop houses for overflow plantings of petunias, tomatoes, and later our summer crop of annuals – that’s a lot of bench space to fill! Our transplant line runs non-stop from early March to the very end of April, and every week there’s something new to plant: from tiny begonias and impatiens to vibrant geraniums and petunias. By the end of April, we’ll have gone through a literal mountain of soil filling all those pots!

More Ways to Get Our Hands Dirty
Did you know that Belgian seeds nearly every vegetable variety we carry? We carefully fill our seeding trays with seeding mix before giving placing just one tiny seed into each separate segment and, depending on the variety, we use trays that hold 50, 105, or 512 seedlings! We also seed select vegetables like cucumbers and zucchinis directly into 3.5” pots – there are several crops of those to be seeded! Then there’s all the cuttings we’ve been taking from our annual mother plants (German ivy, Swedish ivy, and spider plants) which will be rooted out and ready to plant in your gardens and containers in May. And our bare root crops of perennial fruit and vegetables have already been planted and are out in the Perennial Centre! Strawberries, raspberries, asparagus, rhubarb and more are planted by hand, with each pot hand filled with soil.

Perennial Centre is Open and Filling Up!
Speaking of perennials, Belgian’s Perennial Centre opens in mid- to late March and the first of many shipments of perennials have already arrived! Along with early spring bloomers like Hellebores, English Daisies, and Moss Phlox, our own crops of Primula, Violas, and Pansies* have made their way to the Perennial benches. These early spring bloomers welcome the season with gorgeous blooms, and many varieties can handle a light frost!

*Pansies are an Annual, related to the perennial Viola – they are both located in the Perennial Centre because they are cool season crops and can handle the chill!

Indoors Tropical Houseplants and Décor for Inside and Out
Belgian gets regular shipments of tropical houseplants all year, and we’ve had some BIG trucks show up these past few weeks! We’ve been busy all month unpacking, pricing, cleaning, and watering thousands of pots of tropicals! This is also the time of year for our big shipments of garden & home décor, including metal wall art, metal birds, statues, gnomes, bird baths, bird feeders, and so much more! Then there’s the numerous skids of gardening supplies to unpack and price, including fertilizers, grow lights, gardening gloves, watering cans, bagged goods, and more. Let’s get ready to garden!