Webinar Date: July 23, 2026
Speakers: Natalie Bumgarner, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist, University of Tennessee; Celeste Scott, Commercial Horticulture Specialist for West Tennessee, UT Extension
Recorded introduction: Narrated by Bethany Harris, then Whitney Ottinger
Moderator: Gabrielle LaTora, ANR Agent, Fulton County, Georgia
Duration: 30:30
Segment: 03 of 08
Series: Cut Flower Symposium
Credit at a Glance
| CEU Categories | [PENDING] |
| Live attendance | CEU was offered at the live symposium on July 23, 2026. |
| Archive viewing | No credit is attached to this recording. |
Read the pending status literally. The categories offered at the live symposium were never supplied to the archive team, so this file cannot tell an agent which Georgia applicator categories, if any, this segment would sit under. That is a missing input rather than an oversight, and it holds across every Cut Flower Symposium segment processed so far. Ask the symposium organizers and the field gets back-filled here.
Plan on this being a non-applicator program with one qualified exception. The Cut Flower Symposium is aimed at commercial and beginning cut flower growers, florists, and county agents rather than licensed pesticide applicators. Nearly all of this segment is production research and market survey work. The exception is the chat exchange beginning at 26:38, where Scott recommends horticultural oils and insecticidal soaps for leaf-footed bugs on sunflowers, with coverage, residual, reapplication, label, and phytotoxicity conditions attached. That is one product-class recommendation in a half-hour talk, and it should not be the reason a category gets claimed.
Who This Is For
Use this one with growers who are past the enthusiasm stage and want numbers. It is three years of replicated field trial data on the crops beginning cut flower growers actually plant, run at two Tennessee sites six hours apart, and it is unusually honest about what did not work: two years of celosia data thrown out, a septic drainage field that skewed a fertility zone, and a harvest practice the researcher had to correct on herself mid-trial.
It also works with agents and growers thinking about market side questions rather than production ones. The second half is grower and consumer survey data on where flowers sell, why people buy them, and what raises willingness to pay. That half needs no horticultural background at all.
At 30:30 it is a full meeting slot on its own, or two shorter ones. The production and marketing halves split cleanly at 20:01 and neither needs the other.
What the Session Covers
Two presenters, and which one is speaking matters to what the number means. Celeste Scott ran the Jackson plots, designed the trials, delivered the cultivar takeaways, and did the sunflower spacing work. Natalie Bumgarner ran the Knoxville plots, the grower and consumer surveys, and the enterprise budgets.
The trial design. Replications in Knoxville and Jackson, six hours apart, with different soils and temperature climates. Scott grew on fabric, Bumgarner on plastic. The fertility structure comes from University of Maryland guidance, the only regional reference the team could find: low at one pound of nitrogen per thousand square feet, medium at two pounds, high at three, delivered as 20-10-20 soluble fertilizer through a Dosatron. Year one compared low against medium, year two low against high, and the current year adds a no-fertility control across all levels.
Zinnias. Knoxville stem counts per square foot trended up as fertility rose, and held at the high rate. Benary’s Giants produce fewer, larger, high quality stems. Jackson counts read lower for two identified reasons rather than a treatment effect: oversized early harvest and a brand new prepared site against Knoxville’s established organic farm ground. Zinderellas culled hardest. Queeny Limes have a narrow harvest window for color.
Celosia. The clearest fertility response was in the plume types, from Knoxville. Jackson contributed no usable celosia data for either year. Cultivar performance: Sunday Green for long thin stems against the fasciation problem, Sunday Orange for bloom but not stem standards, Flamingo Feather as a long-stemmed filler with a reliable re-bloom, Pampas Plume for quality and versatility, Kurume for a smaller coxcomb form.
Sunflowers. Fertility was dropped after year one, because every cut was a single stem and fertility was not going to change stems per plant. Spacing replaced it. Three treatments, and the flower head diameter distribution is the payoff.
Marketing. Grower survey on where flowers are sold, consumer survey on where they are bought and why, an attitudes question, a barriers question, and willingness to pay against local content. Five warm season enterprise budgets built for a quarter acre round it out.
Viewing Notes for Asynchronous Use
- Total runtime is 30:30 and it splits at 20:01. Everything before is field trial data. Everything after is grower and consumer market research and the enterprise budgets. The two halves stand alone and can be shown in separate sessions.
- The recorded introduction runs 0:00 to 0:56, narrated by Bethany Harris and then Whitney Ottinger. Unlike segment 02 it plays once. Start at 0:56 if a room already knows the speakers.
- For a production meeting on warm season annuals, use 4:11 to 19:40. Fifteen minutes: trial design, fertility structure, zinnia results, celosia results, the sunflower spacing outcome, and the cultivar takeaways for all three crops.
- For a shorter production slot, use 14:37 to 18:34. Four minutes on sunflower spacing alone. It is the most actionable stretch in the segment and it stands without any of the fertility material.
- For a marketing or business session, use 20:01 to 26:03. Six minutes: where growers sell against where consumers buy, the purchase decision figures, attitudes, barriers, willingness to pay, and the budgets.
- For a beginning grower conversation, use 28:04 to 30:30. Scott’s answer on what to plant first, and Bumgarner’s quarter-acre budget framing.
- There is a live moderated chat Q&A, two questions, both at the end. Gabrielle LaTora reads them and Scott answers both. Unlike segment 02 you get real audience questions here, which makes the last four minutes worth keeping in any excerpt.
- The slides carry the data and the talk refers to them constantly. Scott and Bumgarner walk bar charts by pointing at them. This one does not play well as audio only.
- The full chapter list and all twelve questions and answers are in the website archive version for this segment.
Pull These for Discussion
- “Warm season cut flowers are the gateway flower into cut flower production.” Scott’s framing at 4:22, echoed at 28:18 as the gateway starter. Easy from seed, a good group to get your footing with, and the reason the trials were built where they were. Good opener for any beginning grower session.
- Two plants on nine-inch centers. Highest share of sunflower heads under four inches petal to petal, lowest share at six inches and above. The single most actionable number in the segment, and it uses spacing templates growers already own.
- Zinderellas culled hardest. A trial result, not an opinion. Pair it with the Queeny Lime harvest window, since both are about which cultivar costs you labor rather than which one looks best in a catalog.
- Fasciation is a stem problem, not a bloom problem. Scott’s point on Sunday Green: you can get a beautiful bloom on a stem too thick to fit what you need it to fit. That reframes cultivar selection for anyone choosing celosia off a photograph.
- Two years of data thrown out, and why. Early planting into root bound transplants, cool night temperatures inducing early flowering, and off-target herbicide from a neighboring row crop plot. Useful with growers who assume research plots are clean, and useful for a conversation about plot siting.
- Newly prepared ground is not the same trial. The Jackson zinnia counts read lower partly because the site was brand new while Knoxville had years of organic farm soil behind it. Worth raising with any grower comparing their first-year numbers to published data.
- “Nobody needs an acre of zinnias as the beginning to start.” Bumgarner’s line at 30:04, attached to budgets built for a quarter acre across five cultivars. The single best answer to how big should I start.
- Half the consumers decided when they saw it. 50 percent knew they wanted flowers on sight, 16 percent do not recall deciding at all, and 40 percent or more called it an impulse. Bumgarner’s argument that placement beats persuasion for local cut flowers.
- Low availability, not high price, is the barrier worth working on. Both show up in the consumer survey. Bumgarner takes availability as the one growers can move, and pairs it with the finding that grocery stores still capture a large share of local cut flower buyers.
- Willingness to pay rises with local content. As the share of local flowers in a bouquet increases, consumers will pay an increasingly large amount. Good closing point for a pricing conversation.
Resources to Share
- UT enterprise budgets for five warm season annuals, on the UT website, built from grower visits and the team’s own trial data, with Tennessee growers as reviewers. Bumgarner shows a QR code at 25:36 and asks for feedback and additions. No address is spoken on the recording, so you cannot put a link on a handout from this file. Ask the symposium organizers or the UT team for it.
- Production guides from the trialing work. Described at 19:48 as being assembled for publication. Not available at the time of the talk, so treat it as forthcoming rather than as a citation.
- University of Maryland cut flower fertility guidance. The low, medium, and high structure the trials used. Named at 6:16 as the only guidance available for the region.
- UT Center for Profitable Agriculture. Source of the first grant, which funded the specialty crop scouting.
- Pick Tennessee Conference, and a Tennessee cut flower growers association described at 2:59 as in development.
Three Things to Get Right When You Use This
Say which site a number came from. Knoxville and Jackson are not interchangeable in this talk. The celosia fertility data is Knoxville only, because both Jackson years were discarded. The zinnia trend holds at both sites but the Jackson counts are lower for site reasons the speaker names. If you present a number without the site, you have made a claim the researchers did not.
Say which speaker said it. Scott and Bumgarner split the talk almost evenly and their halves do not overlap. Crediting Scott’s spacing work to Bumgarner, or the survey findings to Scott, is the mistake this segment invites.
Everything here is in-progress research. Bumgarner says so at 3:31 and again at 7:54, and Scott says the final year is still running. Three of the fertility comparisons are two-year results, and the current-year design with the no-fertility control has not reported. Present the trends as trends.
Processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Cut Flower Symposium Archives
Source: Stage 2 Archive Package, GTBOP_Archive_Summary_2026-07-23_BumgarnerScottUTResearch.md
Chain of custody: corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-23_BumgarnerScottUTResearch.srt (402 blocks), verified against Natalie and Celeste.mp4 at 1830.719 s
Scaling Note
Reference point. Segment 02 ran 16:37 and produced a 12.0 KB Extension Agent file. This segment runs 30:30.7, a factor of 1.84.
Delivered: 13.5 KB, a factor of 1.13 against a runtime factor of 1.84. Close to flat, and the closest any file in this package comes to the hub’s instruction that Stage 3 should shrink with the segment rather than grow with it.
Why it stayed flat. An agent guide is a set of decisions rather than a retelling: which audience, which excerpt, which quotes, what credit says. Those counts do not scale with runtime. This segment has more content than segment 02, so the viewing notes carry four excerpt ranges against segment 02’s three, and the discussion pulls ten against nine, but What the Session Covers is written as a five-item outline rather than the prose narrative segment 02 used, which is where the runtime difference would otherwise have landed. The full narrative already exists on the website version and does not need repeating here.
Nothing was added. Every claim traces to the Stage 2 package, which traces to the corrected SRT.