back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

Last week I bought some 60 odd perennials for my small garden. Today I received a notification that the first 40 were ready to be dispatched.

It’s my first real experiment with mass ordering from a plant seller.  I’m both excited and nervous.

I usually buy my plants from the local garden centres.  This is a pretty expensive way of buying the plants. They range in price from £5 to £20. So far I’ve used garden centre plants because they have been grown on a little and are therefore more likely to take up more space and produce more interest in the year I plant them. This has been important because the garden was paved over concrete when we bought the flat five and half years ago so I wanted to get the garden up and running quickly.

 This worked very well. MLW and I won a prize for the garden. However, in the last two years, since the Captain joined us, we’ve not been able to put as much effort in. The garden has filled out a bit but it has looked a little uncared for. This summer I’d like to put some excitement and interest back in to it.

If the experiment works I’ll have introduced many more varieties of plant into the garden and many, many more individual plants at a price of a £1 a plant rather than an average price of £10 per plant.

There are currently about 120 varieties of plant in the garden, most of which are single population shrubs. So adding 60 new plants with at least 15 new varieties is a significant expansion of the demographic in the garden.

The plants coming are small plugs. They might need some growing on once they arrive. This is a potential problem as their isn’t much space in the flat to do things like that. Certainly, not so many where the Captain can’t get to them.

What I’m hoping for is to increase the three and four dimensional elements of the garden.  I currently have a fairly uniform canopy.  There are plants of different heights but there isn’t much going on under or over the main canopy. As the garden has matured there is now room under some plants for things to grow under them or up through them.  I also want to increase the amount of interest in the garden over a period of time.  The current set up has quite a lot going on during the summer. This is probably a result of going to the garden centre and buying things that are doing interesting things. It’s less interesting during the early spring (now) and the autumn. I’d like to push out the active period of the garden. The first consideration is to make the summer as full as it can be and then fill in by weeks on either side of the summer rush.

With cheaper plants I can afford to have lots going on.

So the grand strategy is to reduce costs, correct some earlier errors and to fill in gaps in time and space.