What are Plants Worth?
When you go plant shopping, what is important to you? Do you go looking for the cheapest place to buy your plants? If you are a long-time gardener, the answer is probably "no", but if you are relatively new at the game, you may still be relying on price as your primary consideration. After all, if you plan to plant in drifts of greater than one, you will need lots of plants and that means finding them cheaply.
The "Big Box" merchants, Home Depot, Walmart, K-Mart, etc., are the cheapest of the cheap. There is a reason for this. They use their bedding plants as loss leaders to get you into their store and they spend as little money as possible on caring for them while they are in the store. They buy plants from sometimes reluctant growers for rock-bottom prices (often less than they cost the grower to produce) and sell them below that cost as bait. It gotcha didn't it?
What's wrong with that? Nothing, if you want your plants to go the way tomatoes did when they became a major agricultural crop and not just the succulent backyard produce they had been.
The cheapest plants are those sold in the small packs of 4 to 6 plants. Customers (you and me) will not buy them until they are in bloom. The period of time between when the pack begins blooming and the point at which they are no longer a bargain at ANY price due to their quality is only a week or two. The "Big Box" guys demand better and longer pack performance - garden performance doesn't interest them. The growers demand better germination, pack performance and chemical tolerance from breeders and garden performance gets left behind again. Plants that grow naturally tall are a nightmare to hold in packs, so they are sprayed with chemicals that temporarily slow their growth. If too much is used or used at the wrong time, the plants may not grow out of the dwarfing effects all season. This makes just "cheap" look a lot different, doesn't it? I'm reminded of a quote by nineteenth century Renaissance man, John Ruskin, "There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey."
Again, the new gardener: "What do long-time gardeners know that I don't? After all, plants aren't regulated like food and medicine. Gardening is for fun, not saving my life. It isn't a necessary thing, so I don't want to put much money into it. What good does it do for my bottom line?"
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