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The Magnolia Liners team is constantly working on our protocols to ensure  the most efficient and profitable way to initiate, propagate, and finish plants. Last fall, after growing nandinas for the past 10 years in a 1 plant per pot (PPP) configuration  in our 3 gallon pots, our Container Division moved to a 3PPP configuration. This change resulted in a beautiful crop and was a huge success for us and, more importantly, our customers and us. 

Based on this success, we’re inviting you to take the challenge. 

Here’s how we got there.

A Vision for Growth

In 2023, the Magnolia Gardens Nursery leadership team began a journey to develop an updated strategy encompassing both parts of the company —Container (Nursery) and the Tissue Culture & Liner divisions — into one, unified vision.  Led by a business consultant, the strategy steering team spent 12 full days in off-site meetings throughout the year. During these meetings we tackled multiple topics, including financial goals for future years, purpose, values, vision, mission, and value proposition, among others. In some sessions the strategy team invited other internal participants from the sales and operations departments. We also welcomed  external participants, including consultants and industry experts. Some of the most insightful sessions were the ones involving our customer panels. The outcomes of these sessions have proved to be highly valuable to the point that we have adopted a “Futuristic Mindset” as a core value of our company.  

The purpose of this article is not necessarily to share everything we learned during these sessions or to convince others to engage in a similar journey, but more so to share the impact of one of the practical decisions we made after scrutinizing our product mix and creating one more aligned to our customers’ needs. It resulted in instant success, validating the time we took to carefully evaluate our business. We hope it will inspire you to do your own evaluation and planning, and give our new 3PPP Nandina protocol a try!

Reinvigorating the Nandina Program

As growers in Texas, Nandinas are a high demand product line for us. In recent years, we felt our program could perform better. The previous course of action was to  pot nandinas in 1 G containers in the late spring, sell some in the fall and then shift the rest to 3 gallons to sell in the following spring. Our spring 3 G crop would then take 39 weeks to finish and it  could have been more lush and full.  

In January of 2023, Jerrin Victor joined the company as technical director and by mid-year he became part of the core strategy team. Based on his  experience, and our learnings we made the bold decision to strengthen our nandina program. With Jerrin’s insight, we developed a new protocol that in addition to some technical improvements, specified to start by planting 3 liners per pot in the 3 gallon containers.

3PPP for 3 Gallon Nandinas

This year we are harvesting the benefits of this improved protocol and are gearing up to repeat this process for fall sales. In addition to selling out our finished product  in record time, the quality has been exceptional, our customers are happy, and we’re seeing better margins. 

We’d love for  you to experience these gains for yourselves. Here are  some more stats about the benefits of the program.  

Table 1. Benefits of growing 3G with 3PPP vs 3G with 1PPP

We are yet to measure plant growth and pot coverage to compare the 1PPP vs the 3PPP but it is easy to observe that the 3PPP produced a significantly larger and healthier looking plant that our customers loved. 

See pictures below.

Happy Customer Testimonial

This is what Luis with American Landscape Systems said about this year’s 3G-3PPP Nandinas.

“We ordered 3G Nandinas for a job and had them delivered to our yard, these Nandina’s were the best quality we have seen in a while, they were very full and beautiful. Other employees that have seen them, were also impressed with the quality.”

Take the 3G-3PPP Challenge

We are inviting growers to take the 3G-3PPP challenge! You’ll love the larger, healthier plants and the higher margins you can command as a result. 

Interested? In spring 2024 we’re offering a special promotion to help you get started. 

Pop your email in the form to download our information about this growing protocol. 

Download the Protocol datasheet and an editable ROI analysis  spreadsheet here: