- Fruit thinning is often required to produce a commercially profitable apple crop, yet fewer chemicals are now approved for this purpose.
- Young rose plants produced for cultivation in gardens are now most commonly raised in containers and sold in spring. Customers are usually seeking compact, well-branched specimens and such plants can be produced in many different ways.
- The cost of strawberry transplants can be lowered by removing the tips of runners that hang down from tabletop production systems and rooting them in cellular trays.
- Apple growers sometimes have to use fruit-thinning agents to stop their trees producing too many small fruit.
- Nitrogen fertilisers apparently delay flowering of June-flowering strawberries if applied before flower initiation begins, yet they can promote flowering if applied after flower initiation has started.
- The horticultural industry is continually searching for novelties that could provide it with new marketing opportunities.
- The huge increase in the popularity of Phalaenopsis orchids is one of the most striking horticultural phenomena of recent years. Young orchid plants are now routinely raised in one country and then shipped to another for flowering and marketing.
- The raspberry is a very popular soft fruit for which there is increasing, year-round demand.
- Stem nematode (Ditylenchus dipsaci) is potentially the most devastating pest of daffodil crops worldwide, but has been controlled for decades by hot-water treatment (HWT) of planting stocks with formalin added to the dip.
- Plants of Hydrangea macrophylla flowered very poorly in many parts of the UK this summer even though this species usually initiates flowers in the preceding autumn and the flowers then over-winter as dormant buds.
- The bumblebee colonies that are sold commercially consist mainly of female workers and a queen.
- Although there is a widespread perception that organically grown crops are healthier than conventionally grown ones, there is little experimental evidence to support this view. However, there is evidence that conventionally grown fresh broccoli is an important source of biologically active compounds and mineral elements.
- Biennial bearing of apple trees is a problem with certain cultivars in many countries. For example, 'Summerred' is prone to produce high yields in one year followed by low yields in the next when grown in Norway.
