Affordable place to buy plants?

[Suzyq16]

Hi everyone! There are so many beautiful plants I want to by but they are so expensive. I would love to plant an heirloom rose and many others! Is there a place online or anywhere that you can recommend to buy affordable plants? I’ve been to Lowe’s, Home Depot and Walmart but I was hoping there was something else out there that’s better and affordable?!

 

[nao57]

Those really are the affordable places :S

If you really want to save money you had best study how to hatch your own seedlings.

But I have to warn you there is a lot of bumps in the road in this.

Every year I get seed packets, mulch, fertilizer, and top soil. I also get styrofoam cups from walmart. Then I fill the cups with the best soil I can and put seeds in and then just grow them.

But its got failures all along the way figuring out what works.

You have to be able to invest the time trying to figure it out.

When I first started I'd used toilet paper to sprout the seeds in and then transfer them to cups. This actually really helped in helping me figure out what would work and didn't. But it can be painful when you lose stuff to errors.

Like for example, the hard parts for me where trying to get the seedlings to survive transfers to other pots or outside after sprouting them. I didn't have trouble with sprouting them, but I didn't know you had to do something called 'seedling hardening'.

If you want to really save money on seeds you have to study how to sprout them yourself. But there's more dangers doing it this way. I lose a lot of seedlings every year. You have to monitor them constantly also. And if you only check it once a day it won't work. You have to keep it damp,.

That's one thing you can try.

Another thing to try is to just look for ads of people selling them. This doesn't happen all the time either, but some people do it. In theory, its a good business. Buy 1 pound of seeds online for like 10 bucks, then get fertilizer and a hundred cups. Sprout them and then sell them on craigslist... (But a problem with this is that people are programmed to think it has to look just like what's in the stores.)

But I also have other things I'm doing also.

Try craigslist or local nurseries. But nurseries might sell them higher cost than a Walmart to be honest.

Another problem is that a lot of the stuff you buy in the store is HYBRIDS. Hybrids are basically mostly 'mules'. This means their seeds might not be any good, or even if they do sprout they might not sprout vegetables next year.

You can order online and try to get 'heirloom' seeds. These usually cost a bit more but are re-usable as long as you don't contaminate the seeds with having them cross pollinate with hybrid seeds next to them.

Now one way you can also save money is doing 'cutting propagation'. This is a cool trick and it does work. But you are trading time lost to grow the cuttings into full on plants. I've done this before and it does work and is fun. BUT you lose a lot of the growing year doing it, and one of the problems with it is by the time the cutting becomes a full plant you've lost time, and you are already late starting in the growing year right now. For cutting propagation you'd want to be starting indoor with an LED grow lamp inside with a normal plant around January or February to use the next 2 or 3 months to have time to get those cuttings growing into full plants before the spring startup so you don't lose time.

Now I have to warn you about cutting propagation. It does need to be monitored closely. It has a fail rate also. So when you do cutting propagation, you can't just do one or 2 cuttings. Because of the fail rate, you have to have like 10 or 20 cuttings and then expect maybe 40% to fail. (You can find tons of Youtube videos that go over how to do cuttings. There's simply too much to even talk about here in regards to this.)

I will tell you that cutting propagation DOES work, but its very hard for beginners to be able to do right out of the gate with no other gardening experience. But its also fun as science experimenting also.

HOWEVER, another thing about cutting propagation is that it works better with some species than others. Some have a harder time with it. And places with lower humidity I would expect to probably have a higher fail rate in.

Well, that will help you save money. Those ideas can work. But you want to really study this well and not just guess. And follow the rules, don't deviate from guides on this kind of stuff.

What state are you in? (Southern states have more growing season to work with. I sort of get a bit envious of them for this. But in return for that, they get more pests.)

My advise...you should do whats practical.

The food supply chain is a mess. Instead of roses, I'd recommend doing vegetables. But you could probably practice on some roses. Lots of people like to do cutting propagation with roses.

Here in Utah, we get really dry arid weather that makes it really hard to do much with gardening in. We fight back with other ways. And because of the mountains and late freezes we can't even start anything outdoors until about May 1st. (We try to grow stuff inside all of April and then transfer it out after the last frost of the year is gone by.)

 

[Suzyq16]

QUOTE="nao57, post: 22536493, member: 561354"]
Those really are the affordable places :S

If you really want to save money you had best study how to hatch your own seedlings.

But I have to warn you there is a lot of bumps in the road in this.

Every year I get seed packets, mulch, fertilizer, and top soil. I also get styrofoam cups from walmart. Then I fill the cups with the best soil I can and put seeds in and then just grow them.

But its got failures all along the way figuring out what works.

You have to be able to invest the time trying to figure it out.

When I first started I'd used toilet paper to sprout the seeds in and then transfer them to cups. This actually really helped in helping me figure out what would work and didn't. But it can be painful when you lose stuff to errors.

Like for example, the hard parts for me where trying to get the seedlings to survive transfers to other pots or outside after sprouting them. I didn't have trouble with sprouting them, but I didn't know you had to do something called 'seedling hardening'.

If you want to really save money on seeds you have to study how to sprout them yourself. But there's more dangers doing it this way. I lose a lot of seedlings every year. You have to monitor them constantly also. And if you only check it once a day it won't work. You have to keep it damp,.

That's one thing you can try.

Another thing to try is to just look for ads of people selling them. This doesn't happen all the time either, but some people do it. In theory, its a good business. Buy 1 pound of seeds online for like 10 bucks, then get fertilizer and a hundred cups. Sprout them and then sell them on craigslist... (But a problem with this is that people are programmed to think it has to look just like what's in the stores.)

But I also have other things I'm doing also.

Try craigslist or local nurseries. But nurseries might sell them higher cost than a Walmart to be honest.

Another problem is that a lot of the stuff you buy in the store is HYBRIDS. Hybrids are basically mostly 'mules'. This means their seeds might not be any good, or even if they do sprout they might not sprout vegetables next year.

You can order online and try to get 'heirloom' seeds. These usually cost a bit more but are re-usable as long as you don't contaminate the seeds with having them cross pollinate with hybrid seeds next to them.

Now one way you can also save money is doing 'cutting propagation'. This is a cool trick and it does work. But you are trading time lost to grow the cuttings into full on plants. I've done this before and it does work and is fun. BUT you lose a lot of the growing year doing it, and one of the problems with it is by the time the cutting becomes a full plant you've lost time, and you are already late starting in the growing year right now. For cutting propagation you'd want to be starting indoor with an LED grow lamp inside with a normal plant around January or February to use the next 2 or 3 months to have time to get those cuttings growing into full plants before the spring startup so you don't lose time.

Now I have to warn you about cutting propagation. It does need to be monitored closely. It has a fail rate also. So when you do cutting propagation, you can't just do one or 2 cuttings. Because of the fail rate, you have to have like 10 or 20 cuttings and then expect maybe 40% to fail. (You can find tons of Youtube videos that go over how to do cuttings. There's simply too much to even talk about here in regards to this.)

I will tell you that cutting propagation DOES work, but its very hard for beginners to be able to do right out of the gate with no other gardening experience. But its also fun as science experimenting also.

HOWEVER, another thing about cutting propagation is that it works better with some species than others. Some have a harder time with it. And places with lower humidity I would expect to probably have a higher fail rate in.

Well, that will help you save money. Those ideas can work. But you want to really study this well and not just guess. And follow the rules, don't deviate from guides on this kind of stuff.

What state are you in? (Southern states have more growing season to work with. I sort of get a bit envious of them for this. But in return for that, they get more pests.)

My advise...you should do whats practical.

The food supply chain is a mess. Instead of roses, I'd recommend doing vegetables. But you could probably practice on some roses. Lots of people like to do cutting propagation with roses.

Here in Utah, we get really dry arid weather that makes it really hard to do much with gardening in. We fight back with other ways. And because of the mountains and late freezes we can't even start anything outdoors until about May 1st. (We try to grow stuff inside all of April and then transfer it out after the last frost of the year is gone by.)
[/QUOTE]
Wow! That’s amazing info! Thank you so much for sharing that with me, I will definitely try all of those! How do you do cutting propagation? Where is a good place to buy seeds? I’m from SC so it’s really warm here. I love Itah though. I haven’t been there for years but I absolutely love skiing there. I really do appreciate all of you advice. I’m new to gardening and I don’t have the slightest idea of gardening!!

 

[nao57]

Wow. Thanks for your kind comments.

I really like the southern beekeeping culture. A lot of places in the south have great gardening culture also. So we do have a lot more in common than you'd guess.

For cutting propagation...I wish I could explain it. its a trial and error thing where you want to have several experiments going at once, expecting that not all of them will make it. This part they may not emphasize in videos.

To try it, I'd go online to Youtube and just pull up videos on it. I wouldn't trust any one particular video though, because you get a lot of people on there that mix in wrong information or overly granicize their successes and not their headaches because of the idea of 'getting paid for advertising on youtube'. And sometimes someone might mention one thing and another something else.

Its still neat and has a lot of great stuff, but just means not all the experts there are really experts. A lot of them won't show you their headaches also, and anyone real will have had headaches also.

This is why I'd emphasize watching maybe 2 or 3 videos on it, and then getting spare jars and cups and trying tons of cuttings, just to prove yourself that you can make some of them work. If even any of them work, you'll feel like you can try to improve your success rate on it. And the cool part is cuttings work for a lot of things. (Keep fresh water in the jars daily.)

There's still stuff I don't know. Like is there a particular time of the year that's best for cuttings? (That might have to do with which times of the year have less stress and less radical temperature changes in a given day.)

After getting an idea of how cuttings work, I'd make sure you have lots of samples and jars (or cheap cups) and try to experiment with many. I can't emphasize this enough, because if even a few of them work you'll feel like you can go on. But if nothing works you'll feel deflated and not sure you want to go through it again.

For containers I'd use anything available. I'm even using spare soda pop 2 liter bottles. I cut the tops off and use them for seed starters, and propagation both.

For seeds, I like to use anywhere that sells 'heirloom' brands. I wouldn't bother with anything with a hybrid name honestly, because they are technically plant mules. Anyone that has heirlooms, I'd stick to. This means next years seed could be free if you save some seeds from the stuff you grew this year. Even online you can find those. A lot of people are are starting like this new Baker Creek brand (not the cheapest but focuses on heirloom specifically). You could try bypassing stores to go the wholesalers directly; Burpee, etc. Burpee is the actual brand maker of the seed.

One trick I like is to not use all my seed at once, in case something goes wrong, then I won't have nothing. So I'll prefer buying a larger seed packet like 100 seeds and then doing spurts of 10 or 20 so I can have more experience with different batches. (You might like this trick because if you are just learning about it, its really easy for stuff to go wrong!)

When you transfer seedlings to the garden you want to slow down a bit and make sure you research 'seed hardening'. I've lost whole batches my first few years from putting weak seedlings out too fast from indoors that weren't ready for it. (We all get headaches.)

Anyway, gardening is fun. Its just a patience game.

OH, I forgot. If you've got the space for it potatoes are fun to start with. Not too hard, good learning curve, space efficient also. But they do use a lot of soil nutrients.

 

[rosemarythyme]

But nurseries might sell them higher cost than a Walmart to be honest.

Yeah a lot of nurseries are noticeably more expensive... I know because I'm the sucker that frequents them, as I like the higher end nurseries with big assortments that come with the price tag to match.

Other inexpensive places to try: mom & pop local hardware stores, grocery stores (some have pretty impressive selections!), or around my area home gardeners sell started plants from their own backyard greenhouses.

If you're completely new to gardening I'd stick with more readily available plants, and once you feel pretty comfortable with what you're doing, then maybe treat yourself to a rare plant or two.

I do buy seeds, mostly for vegetables, as that's most economical. I have a harder time starting most flowers from seed, but some are much easier.

I know with all the restrictions right now this is a tough time to do it, but if you have a local Master Gardener's program, those would be good people to talk to about what specific plants might work best in your zone and microclimate.

 

[Suzyq16]

Wow. Thanks for your kind comments.

I really like the southern beekeeping culture. A lot of places in the south have great gardening culture also. So we do have a lot more in common than you'd guess.

For cutting propagation...I wish I could explain it. its a trial and error thing where you want to have several experiments going at once, expecting that not all of them will make it. This part they may not emphasize in videos.

To try it, I'd go online to Youtube and just pull up videos on it. I wouldn't trust any one particular video though, because you get a lot of people on there that mix in wrong information or overly granicize their successes and not their headaches because of the idea of 'getting paid for advertising on youtube'. And sometimes someone might mention one thing and another something else.

Its still neat and has a lot of great stuff, but just means not all the experts there are really experts. A lot of them won't show you their headaches also, and anyone real will have had headaches also.

This is why I'd emphasize watching maybe 2 or 3 videos on it, and then getting spare jars and cups and trying tons of cuttings, just to prove yourself that you can make some of them work. If even any of them work, you'll feel like you can try to improve your success rate on it. And the cool part is cuttings work for a lot of things. (Keep fresh water in the jars daily.)

There's still stuff I don't know. Like is there a particular time of the year that's best for cuttings? (That might have to do with which times of the year have less stress and less radical temperature changes in a given day.)

After getting an idea of how cuttings work, I'd make sure you have lots of samples and jars (or cheap cups) and try to experiment with many. I can't emphasize this enough, because if even a few of them work you'll feel like you can go on. But if nothing works you'll feel deflated and not sure you want to go through it again.

For containers I'd use anything available. I'm even using spare soda pop 2 liter bottles. I cut the tops off and use them for seed starters, and propagation both.

For seeds, I like to use anywhere that sells 'heirloom' brands. I wouldn't bother with anything with a hybrid name honestly, because they are technically plant mules. Anyone that has heirlooms, I'd stick to. This means next years seed could be free if you save some seeds from the stuff you grew this year. Even online you can find those. A lot of people are are starting like this new Baker Creek brand (not the cheapest but focuses on heirloom specifically). You could try bypassing stores to go the wholesalers directly; Burpee, etc. Burpee is the actual brand maker of the seed.

One trick I like is to not use all my seed at once, in case something goes wrong, then I won't have nothing. So I'll prefer buying a larger seed packet like 100 seeds and then doing spurts of 10 or 20 so I can have more experience with different batches. (You might like this trick because if you are just learning about it, its really easy for stuff to go wrong!)

When you transfer seedlings to the garden you want to slow down a bit and make sure you research 'seed hardening'. I've lost whole batches my first few years from putting weak seedlings out too fast from indoors that weren't ready for it. (We all get headaches.)

Anyway, gardening is fun. Its just a patience game.

OH, I forgot. If you've got the space for it potatoes are fun to start with. Not too hard, good learning curve, space efficient also. But they do use a lot of soil nutrients.

Yeah a lot of nurseries are noticeably more expensive... I know because I'm the sucker that frequents them, as I like the higher end nurseries with big assortments that come with the price tag to match.

Other inexpensive places to try: mom & pop local hardware stores, grocery stores (some have pretty impressive selections!), or around my area home gardeners sell started plants from their own backyard greenhouses.

If you're completely new to gardening I'd stick with more readily available plants, and once you feel pretty comfortable with what you're doing, then maybe treat yourself to a rare plant or two.

I do buy seeds, mostly for vegetables, as that's most economical. I have a harder time starting most flowers from seed, but some are much easier.

I know with all the restrictions right now this is a tough time to do it, but if you have a local Master Gardener's program, those would be good people to talk to about what specific plants might work best in your zone and microclimate.

Thanks so much for the info!! I’ll have to check out my grocery store! I’ve never even looked there!