Big Grower April 2023 - 9

COVER STORY
Headstart Nursery provides ornamental plug
varieties that work best for West Coast growers.
A successful first season resulted in more pepper
orders and projects. Steve's brother Randy soon
joined the company, and together they built
more greenhouses, then a few more in the years
following to keep up with the increase in orders.
They quickly added cauliflower to the production
schedule to fill in around pepper season and
branched out into specialty flower crops soon
after. In the early 1980s, California cut flower
growers had a demand for snapdragons, lisianthus
and asters, but the seed was difficult to germinate,
so Headstart Nursery began providing them with a
better start with plugs.
" Some of our local farmers that did some of
the peppers had these side projects, " says Mel
Wark, customer service manager at Headstart
Nursery. " They would ask, 'Hey, would you
be interested in growing some lisianthus and
delphinium and snaps and aster seed in your
greenhouses and try it out that way, doing the
same method of this plug transplant?' We said
yes, and that was a huge hit. "
So, they began working with local brokers in the
early '80s to grow ornamentals and it expanded
into a huge production. " We had houses and
houses, hundreds of thousands of snapdragons
here, " Wark says.
They soon became an industry leader in specialty
cut flower plugs and have continued to build their
ornamental offerings over the years.
Headstart became a player in the organic
world in 1993, gaining organic certification by
the CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers)
and becoming one of the first growers to provide
organic vegetable transplants. Now, this accounts
for about 25% of overall business - with
production around 300 million certified organic
transplants per year.
PRODUCTION
Pepper and watermelon continue to be a staple
in the business and by dollar value are Headstart
Nursery's biggest crops. " We're big in the pepper
and watermelon game, and we send out over
a billion plants a year of all crops, for sure, "
Wark says. They also provide a large variety of
other vegetable transplants like Brussels sprout,
artichoke, celery and cauliflower; with the latter two
APRIL 2023 9

Big Grower April 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Big Grower April 2023

Big Grower April 2023 - 1
Big Grower April 2023 - 2
Big Grower April 2023 - 3
Big Grower April 2023 - 4
Big Grower April 2023 - 5
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