Mid-October and the pricey festive season is just around the next corner. Have you got a massive gift-buying list facing you?
It can be hard to find the dosh for plants for yourself, but in autumn, there are cheap ways to solve this…
End-of-season sales, etc.
First things first. Shops are clearing their aisles ready for Christmas stock and garden centres are no exception. Most of them have an area of bargain plants and many of them are fabulous buys. Manky-looking pots of grasses, early-flowering perennials with no blooms now, pot-bound shrubs and roses…..they can all be brought back to life with some (or a lot of) TLC.
Bare-rooted shrubs, hedging plants and trees (only available in the winter when they are dormant) are much cheaper than pot-grown ones. Car-boot sales are also often a brilliant hunting ground for cheap plants, too.
Still thinking about retail, plug plants bought online can be superb value. You just need to be prepared to grow them on yourself. Or what about sharing a pack or two with a gardening friend? Or bargain bags of bulbs? On the same tack, plant companies often offer ‘3 for 2’ type offers, which are perfect for sharing.
Seeds
Of course, seeds are wonderful value if you’re happy to do the ‘germination, pricking out, potting on’ dance. Collect seeds from seedheads in the autumn and store them cool and dry (never in plastic bags). Seedlings from named varieties are unlikely to be exactly the same as the parent plant, but those from species will. It’s lovely to gather this free bounty, but do leave some on plants like Allium, Crocosmia, Honesty, Hyelotelephium and Eryngium for the birds to feast on during the cold months.
Hardwood cuttings
Have you got a friend with a hardy shrub you’d like to have? It might be a dogwood, willow, vine, honeysuckle, jasmine, Philadelphus, Berberis, Weigela, Hydrangea, ornamental elder, flowering currant, roses………you can honestly work a magic trick with dozens and dozens of woody plants.
Ask if you can come round with a sharp pair of secateurs, and once they’ve said yes, and you’ve arrived with a nice pot of jam or something, go out to the plant in question, and cut a stem or stems of pencil thickness about 30cm long. Cut cleanly at a slant above a bud at the top, and straight across below a bud at the bottom. You can often make several from one stem. Keep reassuring your friend that you are doing absolutely no harm to their shrub – which you aren’t.
Once you’ve got them home, just stick them in the ground right way up, up to half their length, water and label them then forget about them. Or put them into deep pots of sandy compost, up to six at a time. That’s it.
You’d be very lucky if the magic works on all of your little sticks, but the chances are very good that at least some WILL develop roots by next spring. I’ve found it’s better not to be in too much of a hurry to move them – if you can leave them a year before you plant them into their growing positions, they are more likely to grow into fabulous plants. And all it cost was a nice pot of jam and a bit of your time.
This is not the right time to take softwood cuttings, but if you took some earlier and they developed roots, don’t forget to separate them and move them into their own pots to grow on and plant out in spring. It’s something I’ve just done with some Sedum kamtschaticum variegatum cuttings I took earlier – I’ll take off the flowers that they have already developed to concentrate their minds on making strong roots!
Division
Now what about herbaceous perennials? Remember that kind friend? What if they have got a lovely daylily, hardy geranium, delphinium, penstemon or agapanthus that you covet? At this time of year, it is simplicity itself to split off a vigorous outside piece of the crown with some roots and make a new plant. Perhaps you’ve got a plant that your friend would like, and you can have a swapsies? This is a brilliant way of increasing your own spread of a particular plant too. I’m using a spade in this pic, but the short perennial spades that we have in our shop are fantastically useful for this job – you never seem to see Adam Frost without his! Click on the link below to find out more.
Root cuttings
A few flowery perennials don’t take so kindly to division but come very well from root cuttings. Echinops, Acanthus, Crambe, Romneya, Anemone, Verbascum, Phlox, primroses and Oriental poppies, for instance. Even raspberries, blackberries, lilac and figs will grow from a piece of root. You don’t have to dig up the whole plant – just rootle around in the soil at the edge of it to expose some thick healthy roots. Cut some off about 5 cm long, and put them into a pot of compost right way up with the top just under the surface. Again you can put several together.
Sprinkle grit over the top of the compost.Water and leave the pot frost-free over the winter. Shoots should emerge in the spring. Separate them carefully and pot on your new plants. Piece of cake. And if you would like to see exactly how I do this, click on the link at the bottom.
Gardening shorts
- Clean your greenhouse or glasshouse before bringing in tender plants. Clean out gutters, wash the glass, and scrub out corners when fungal growths might develop and cause problems among the plants.
- Dig over veg beds that you are not using, and either sow a green manure or cover them with landscape fabric or similar to prevent weed seeds germinating over the winter.
- Divide rhubarb crowns in autumn and plant the pieces into deep rich soil to increase your clump of these delicious stalks.
- Buy garlic now to plant out and develop roots before the winter sets in for real.
- What about sowing some kale or spinach in the greenhouse for some yummy little leaves in a few weeks’ time?
I bet lots of you have money-saving ways you use to add to your plant collection. We’d love to hear about them!
We 3Growbags are ALL in action this weekend! We’re giving two talks in Sussex. Here are the details:
This is the link to the short video I made about how to propagate plants from root cuttings:
Here’s a cottage garden plant that Louise thinks no garden should be without! We’re in agreement. Find out more about it here, or click on the picture below:
Find out more about these terrific perennial spades in our shop – soooo useful for a myriad of tasks amongst the veg patches and borders:
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3 replies on “Save some cash! Grow-how tips for October”
Some excellent tips there! Also how about making some extra money by selling divided or unwanted plants on Facebook Market place and local groups. Lots of gardeners appreciate snapping a bargain locally and I’ve sold all sorts from willows I’ve grown from my pruned mother tree to vigorous originating plants cleared out of my pond.
Hi Katherine, Elaine here. Yes, that is an excellent idea, and I myself have sometimes picked up some lovely plants at local garden group meetings. You do need to know what you’re buying of course – there may be a sinister reason why someone is offloading a lot of a particular plant! I open my garden for the National Garden Scheme, and selling one’s extra plants for that wonderful charity is another very pleasing way of passing on the love. All the best and happy gardening.
Some excellent tips there! Also how about making some extra money by selling divided or unwanted plants on Facebook Market place and local groups. Lots of gardeners appreciate snapping a bargain locally and I’ve sold all sorts from willows I’ve grown from my pruned mother tree to vigorous oxygenation plants cleared out of my pond.