This extended the harvest season by 6 months or more, and allowed much larger plants to be harvested and shipped. The development of mechanical harvesting equipment has greatly reduced the amount of labor required to handle plants. In addition, the development of plastic pots and soil-free growing media has allowed many nurseries to extend the harvest season to 12 months a year. These developments have also made many more plant varieties available on the market, such as plants which cannot be dug and shipped easily. Another way technology has changed the industry is in the area of propagation.
Propagation is when plants are reproduced and more plants are made.
Traditionally, plants were grown from seeds and sometimes the parts of one plant were grafted or budded onto another. The most recent development in plant propagation is micropropagation or tissue culture. This is where plants are cloned or made to be identical to one another in a laboratory. This allows tens of thousands of plants to be propogated from a single parent plant in a short period of time. The development of new varieties has given landscapers and homeowners a much larger selection of plants to choose from.