Segment Title: Introduction to Cut Flowers and Cut Flower Resources
Segment: 02 of 08, 8:45 slot
Webinar Date: July 23, 2026
Speaker: Allan Armitage, Professor Emeritus of Horticulture, University of Georgia
Duration: 16:37.4 (997.418 s, measured)
Series: Cut Flower Symposium
CEU Categories: [PENDING]
Questions: 13 multiple choice
Difficulty mix: 5 Recall, 5 Application, 3 Analysis
How to Use This Quiz
Anyone who watched the segment attentively has everything needed to answer all thirteen questions. No outside cut flower knowledge is required, and none will help. Each item carries a timestamp range so a student who misses one goes straight back to the passage it came from.
Read the Build Notes at the end before editing any item. Three areas of this talk are unsafe for assessment, and the reasons are recorded there.
Question 1
Timestamp Reference: 5:31 – 6:09
Difficulty: Recall
Armitage gives one piece of advice twice and says he cannot overemphasize it. What is it?
a) Start small and expand slowly
b) Get to know your bank manager
c) Learn about equipment maintenance and structures
d) Join the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He states it at 5:31, then says “Please start small. I can’t overemphasize that” at 5:58, and returns to it at 14:13 with “I can’t overemphasize, start small.” The other three are all advice he gives, but he attaches the overemphasis only to this one.
Source in transcript: Blocks 100, 105 to 107, 282. Distractors: block 115 (bank manager), block 108 (equipment maintenance), blocks 148 to 150 (the association).
Question 2
Timestamp Reference: 6:02 – 6:09
Difficulty: Analysis
Armitage says one thing was true for everybody who talked to him about their farm. What was it?
a) They started too big and it got away from them very quickly
b) They grew more kinds of flowers than they could market
c) They waited until after planting to talk to their buyers
d) They underestimated how long it would take to turn a profit
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: At 6:02 he says, “If I got one thing that was true for everybody who said, sometimes they started too big and it got away from them very quickly.” That is the evidence behind the start small advice in Question 1. The other three options are points he makes elsewhere in the talk, but he does not present any of them as the common thread.
Source in transcript: Block 107. Distractors: blocks 265 to 266 and 281 (a finite number you can market), blocks 283 to 284 (talk to buyers first), block 127 (three years to profit).
Question 3
Timestamp Reference: 6:09 – 6:27
Difficulty: Recall
Which two failures does Armitage call a given rather than a risk?
a) The heater will fail on the coldest night, and the plastic tunnels will be blown away with the wind
b) The heater will fail on the coldest night, and the refrigerator will quit before delivery
c) The greenhouse will collapse in winter, and the plastic tunnels will be blown away with the wind
d) The bank will decline the loan, and the heater will fail on the coldest night
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He names both and then says “It’s a given” about them together, which is why he tells growers to learn how to get the heater fixed and how to put the tunnels back in. The refrigerator, the greenhouse, and the loan all come up in the talk, but he treats them as things a grower may need to buy or arrange, not as certainties.
Source in transcript: Blocks 108 to 112. Distractors: blocks 123 to 125 (the refrigerator for harvested but undelivered flowers), block 122 (a greenhouse that stands up during the winter), block 120 (loans).
Question 4
Timestamp Reference: 6:28 – 7:23
Difficulty: Application
A grower is preparing for a first meeting with a lender. Which figure from the talk should shape what she asks for?
a) At least three years before the farm actually makes any money, and that money will likely go right back to the farm
b) At least one full season, after which the farm should cover its own costs
c) At least five years, which is when he says most growers stop needing loans
d) At least ten years, the point at which he says a grower is established
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He passes on a grower’s comment at 7:09: “it’ll take at least three years before you actually make any money,” and adds at 7:21 that the money will likely go right back into the farm. That is the number to carry into a loan conversation, which is why he puts the bank manager under the heading of one of your better friends. Ten years appears in the talk only as an aside about how long some in the audience have been at it, not as a threshold.
Source in transcript: Blocks 114 to 117, 127, 131. Ten-year distractor: blocks 128 to 129.
Question 5
Timestamp Reference: 11:40 – 11:49
Difficulty: Application
A grower is cutting yarrow for a wholesale order. What does Armitage give as the harvest indicator, and what is his reason?
a) Wait until the pollen is visible before cutting, because stems cut earlier have no shelf life
b) Cut before the heads open and hold the stems in the refrigerator until delivery
c) Cut after the plants have had their cold treatment, because cold sets the stem
d) Cut early in the season, because early season crops are the most profitable
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: At 11:43 he says “the pollen must be visible before cutting. Really important, otherwise they just don’t have any shelf life.” The cold treatment and the early season market are both real points in the talk, but neither is a harvest indicator: the cold treatment is about getting yarrow to grow at all, and the early season point is about when to sell.
Source in transcript: Blocks 230 to 231. Distractors: blocks 123 to 125 (the cooler), block 244 (cold treatment), block 269 (early and late markets).
Question 6
Timestamp Reference: 12:25 – 12:32
Difficulty: Application
A grower in a mild-winter area cannot get yarrow to establish. Which point from the talk applies?
a) Yarrow needs a cold treatment; it will not grow unless it goes through the winter
b) Yarrow is a late season perennial and should be planted with the late crops
c) Yarrow should not be cut until the pollen is visible
d) The problem is selection; Moonshine and Coronation Gold are the ones he names as useful
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: At 12:25 he says “the whole thing about a cold treatment, you’re not going to get yarrow to grow unless you put them through the winter.” Option b reverses what he says at 14:06, where yarrow is one of the early perennials. Options c and d are things he says about yarrow, but neither addresses whether the plant establishes.
Source in transcript: Block 244. Distractors: block 277 (yarrow is early), block 231 (pollen visible), blocks 232 to 233 (useful selections).
Question 7
Timestamp Reference: 8:40 – 8:45
Difficulty: Recall
How large does Armitage say the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers is?
a) Over 2,500 members
b) Over 250 members
c) Over 25,000 members
d) Over 500 members
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He gives the number at 8:40 and immediately says why it matters: “So you’re not alone.” The other three values do not appear anywhere in the talk.
Source in transcript: Blocks 160 to 161.
Question 8
Timestamp Reference: 9:01 – 9:12
Difficulty: Analysis
Armitage tells growers the Cut Flowers of the Year selections are worth trusting. What is his reason?
a) The selections come out of trials, not from somebody who happens to have seed for sale
b) They are compiled from the association listserv, where growers post what worked for them
c) The lists run back to 2000, so every selection has been in the field for decades
d) They are grouped as herbaceous, woody, bulb, and foliage, so a grower can match one to a site
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: At 9:08 he draws the line himself: “these are based on trials, not just somebody who happens to have some seed for sale.” The other three options are all accurate details about the lists or the association, and none of them is the reason he gives for trusting the selections.
Source in transcript: Block 170. Distractors: blocks 156 and 162 (the listserv), block 169 (back to 2000), blocks 177 to 178 (the four categories).
Question 9
Timestamp Reference: 9:25 – 9:39
Difficulty: Recall
Cut Flowers of the Year selections are grouped into four categories. Which set does Armitage name, and where did a geranium land?
a) Herbaceous, woody, bulb, and foliage; the geranium is in foliage
b) Herbaceous, woody, bulb, and foliage; the geranium is in herbaceous
c) Herbaceous, perennial, bulb, and foliage; the geranium is in foliage
d) Herbaceous, woody, bulb, and foliage; the geranium is in bulb
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He reads the four categories twice in a row at 9:27 and 9:30, then explains the geranium at 9:34: it made the foliage category “because it’s really a variegated foliage.” Option c swaps perennial in for woody, and options b and d put the geranium in a category he does not put it in.
Source in transcript: Blocks 176 to 180.
Question 10
Timestamp Reference: 8:45 – 8:53
Difficulty: Application
A grower wants to ask other growers directly which sunflowers are worth planting. Which resource does Armitage point her to?
a) The association listserv
b) The Cut Flowers of the Year lists
c) The app, Armitage’s Great Garden Plants
d) The cut flower sowing calendar
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He calls the listserv the coolest thing about membership and gives this exact use at 8:45: “you say, hey, who’s got some decent sunflowers or what do you recommend? And it’s on there.” The other three are resources he names, but none of them puts a grower in touch with other growers.
Source in transcript: Blocks 162 to 164. Distractors: blocks 168 to 170 (Cut Flowers of the Year), block 201 (the app), block 252 (the sowing calendar).
Question 11
Timestamp Reference: 10:34 – 10:48
Difficulty: Recall
Which app does Armitage name, and what does he say it costs?
a) Armitage’s Great Garden Plants, 4.99
b) Armitage's Great Garden Plants, about ten bucks
c) The field guide to specialty cut flowers named in his introduction, 4.99
d) Armitage’s Great Garden Plants, free with the code walkabout
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He names the app at 10:34 and prices it at 10:45, adding that it is “a bad hamburger.” Ten bucks is what he charges for the sowing calendar, the field guide is a book named in his recorded introduction rather than an app, and walkabout is a discount code for free shipping on his website.
Source in transcript: Blocks 200 to 208. Distractors: block 257 (ten bucks, the sowing calendar), blocks 4 and 10 (the field guide, in the recorded introduction), block 221 (walkabout and free shipping).
Question 12
Timestamp Reference: 13:49 – 14:02
Difficulty: Analysis
Armitage says the most profitable markets are early season and late season crops. Why?
a) The market is much less in the summertime, when summer flowers are everywhere
b) Early and late crops are the ones the Cut Flowers of the Year lists favor
c) Yarrow and columbine are early, and they are the most profitable perennials
d) Summer flowers are the ones with the shortest shelf life
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: He gives the reason immediately after the claim: “For summer flowers, summer is summer. People are all over the place. The market is much less in the summertime, early and late.” It is a supply argument, not a claim about the crops themselves. Yarrow and columbine are named at 14:06 as early perennials, but he attaches no profitability to them individually, and shelf life comes up only in the yarrow harvest passage.
Source in transcript: Blocks 269 to 273. Distractors: blocks 168 to 170 (Cut Flowers of the Year), block 277 (yarrow and columbine are early), block 231 (shelf life).
Question 13
Timestamp Reference: 13:33 – 14:33
Difficulty: Application
What does Armitage tell a grower to have settled before planting a single plug or seed?
a) Who is going to buy the crop, worked out in advance with the farmer’s market, the florist, or the wholesaler
b) How much cooler space the harvest will need
c) Whether the crop has appeared on a Cut Flowers of the Year list
d) How the heater and the tunnels will be maintained through the winter
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: “Do your homework before you plant a single plug or seed” at 13:40 is followed at 14:19 by what the homework is: “Make sure you’ve already talked to the people you’re going to market plants to, whether it’s your farmer’s market or your florist or your wholesaler or whoever. Talk to them way before you ever get into this thing too much.” He frames it as a marketing limit: there is no end to what a grower can grow, but a finite number they can market, sell, and make a profit with. The other three are real concerns in the talk and none of them is what he puts before planting.
Source in transcript: Blocks 265 to 268, 283 to 284. Distractors: blocks 123 to 125 (the refrigerator), blocks 168 to 170 (Cut Flowers of the Year), blocks 108 to 112 (heater and tunnels).
Answer Key
| Q | Answer | Difficulty | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | a | Recall | Start small and expand slowly |
| 2 | a | Analysis | Why he says it: they started too big |
| 3 | a | Recall | The two equipment certainties |
| 4 | a | Application | Three years to first profit |
| 5 | a | Application | Yarrow harvest indicator |
| 6 | a | Application | Yarrow and the cold treatment |
| 7 | a | Recall | Association membership count |
| 8 | a | Analysis | Why trust Cut Flowers of the Year |
| 9 | a | Recall | The four categories, and the geranium |
| 10 | a | Application | What the listserv is for |
| 11 | a | Recall | The app and its price |
| 12 | a | Analysis | Why early and late markets pay better |
| 13 | a | Application | Settle your buyers before planting |
Option order is uniform here for review. Shuffle the options in Moodle before deploying.
Coverage across the segment
| Portion of talk | Questions |
|---|---|
| Opening and the working life, 1:00 to 5:31 | 1 |
| Advice and business realities, 5:31 to 7:23 | 1, 2, 3, 4 |
| The association and its resources, 7:40 to 9:39 | 7, 8, 9, 10 |
| Books, the app, and the yarrow entry, 9:47 to 12:59 | 5, 6, 11 |
| Markets and closing advice, 13:18 to 15:31 | 12, 13 |
Build Notes
The project template asks for 10 to 15 questions at 40 percent recall, 40 percent application, and 20 percent analysis, written for a licensed professional. Three things about this source changed how that landed, and all three are recorded here rather than left for a reader to infer.
The difficulty mix came out 5 / 5 / 3, or 38 / 38 / 23. That is within a question of the target on each band, and the reason it is not exact is that 13 does not divide cleanly. The larger point is what the bands mean here. Armitage names one production practice in sixteen minutes: harvest yarrow when the pollen is visible, and give the plants a cold treatment over winter. Everything else is business judgment, resource knowledge, and expectation setting. So Application in this quiz means putting his advice to work in a grower’s decision, a loan conversation, a failed planting, a variety question, a planting-season plan, rather than applying a threshold to a treatment decision. Analysis means recovering the reasoning behind a claim he makes quickly and moves past.
Thirteen questions, not fifteen. The Stage 2 package already drew 12 Q&A pairs out of this talk, which used most of the answerable material. Thirteen is what the source supports without either padding or asking the same thing twice. Two pairs of questions sit close together on purpose: 1 and 2 split the start small advice from the evidence he gives for it, and 5 and 6 split the two yarrow facts, which are the only production content in the segment. Nothing was added past that point.
Every distractor traces to a block. A wrong option invented from general cut flower knowledge would pass unnoticed and would still be a source-integrity failure. Each distractor here is either something Armitage says about a different item, a real value attached to the wrong thing, or a plainly wrong number in a range he names. The Source in transcript line under each question carries the block numbers for the distractors as well as the answer.
Three areas left alone
Nothing is credited to GGIA. At 8:04 Armitage says GGIA in a sentence whose surrounding twenty blocks describe the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers, which he names outright ten seconds later. The audio sweep of 2026-08-08 confirmed he did say GGIA, so it is a slip of the tongue by the speaker rather than an engine error, and the handling here is unchanged. The 2,500 members, the listserv, the seeds and plugs, the equipment, the farm visits, and Cut Flowers of the Year are attributed in this quiz only to the association he names. GGIA does not appear in any stem, answer, or distractor, including as a wrong option, because an item that offers GGIA as a plausible source of association benefits would teach the confusion instead of testing it.
No item touches yarrow flower colour. At 12:00 he says the yellow forms are much better than the coloured forms and that they last longer. At 12:41 he says the coloured ones at the bottom are some of the best for cuts. That read as a contradiction in the transcript, and the audio sweep of 2026-08-08 showed it is not one: two different slides, two different selection subsets, both statements true. Colour is still kept out of every key, because an item resting on it would test which slide a student remembers rather than what he said. Question 6’s fourth option names Moonshine and Coronation Gold as useful selections, which is his own phrasing at 11:49, and makes no claim about their colour.
No item is built on a flagged token, and all eighteen flags have since closed. When this quiz was built, eighteen [VERIFY] flags were open in the Stage 1 file, sitting on the cultivar names, author names, web addresses, and the co-author name that an assessment item would otherwise reach for. Parker’s Gold, the zinnia selection at 9:21, two of the four book authors, the association web address, his own website, and his co-author’s name were all excluded, and where a flagged item was the only route to a question, the question was dropped. The audio verification sweep of 2026-08-08 resolved every flag against the recording. The thirteen questions here are unchanged, because none of them rested on a flagged token in the first place and the resolutions did not open a question the source could not already answer. The released cultivar names went into a fourth matching exercise instead, in the companion file, which is where they assess something a quiz stem cannot.
Produced for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Cut Flower Symposium Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-23_ArmitageCutFlowerIntro.srt (333 blocks)
Reviewed 2026-08-08 in the post-pipeline correction pass. No question changed; the audio sweep resolutions touched no item in this file. Block skeleton unchanged.
Structural reference: Stage 2 Archive Package, GTBOP_Archive_Summary_2026-07-23_ArmitageCutFlowerIntro.md
Chain of custody: corrected SRT verified against Allan.mp4 at 997.418 s