Buy Small: Three Quart Plants Beat One Showy Five-Gallon
Okay. Nursery season is basically here, and I need to talk you out of the thing I did my first year, which is walking straight to the biggest, prettiest pot on the table and buying it because it already looks like a finished yard.
Don't do that. Buy small.
I'd rather see you go home with three quart-size penstemon than one five-gallon penstemon that cost the same amount. This is one of those opinions I'll die on. The little one will catch up. It will pass the big one in a year, maybe two, and it'll do it with a root system that actually matches the size of the plant, instead of a root system that got cramped and circled around in a black plastic pot for a whole extra growing season before somebody sold it to you.
Why the big pot is lying to you
Here's what's really going on when you see a gorgeous five-gallon plant in full bloom at the nursery. That plant has been fed, watered, and babied under exactly the conditions it's about to leave forever. It's going to come to your yard, get planted in our lousy alkaline clay, and go into what I call sulking mode. Sometimes the roots are so wound up in there they can't figure out which way is out. You plant it, it drops half its flowers, and you stand there wondering what you did wrong.
Meanwhile the quart-size plant next to it, the one that looks kind of sad and leggy, has way less to unlearn. Smaller pot, younger roots, less time being pot-bound. You put it in the ground, it settles in fast, and by its second summer it's caught up to where the five-gallon one would've been anyway. Except you paid a third of the price and you bought three of them instead of one, so now you've got a drift instead of a single lonely specimen.
The actual steps
- Go in with a list, not a mood. You already know from earlier lessons what bloom times you're missing and what your August gap looks like. Shop that list. Don't let a showy end-cap display talk you out of your plan.
- Check the tag for mature size before it goes in the cart. I've told you about my flat of twelve plants that turned into three plants by August because I didn't do this. Learn from me, not with me.
- Buy in odd numbers when you can. Three quarts of the same penstemon looks like a drift. One plant looks like an accident. This is also about the only design opinion I feel qualified to give you, so take it.
- Water it in when you plant it, then start backing off. Small plants still need that establishment period we talked about. Small doesn't mean skip watering, it means the root system is more honest about what it actually needs.
- Don't amend the hole. Same rule as always. These plants want the dirt they're going into, not a rich little pocket of Macey's garden soil that turns into a bathtub.
A word about soil pH here, since we're on the topic of giving plants what they actually want
I'll be honest with you, I still don't test my soil pH with any real confidence. I bought a cheap probe years ago, didn't trust the number it gave me, bought the paper strips instead, and trust those only slightly more. Mostly at this point I just operate on the assumption that our valley soil is alkaline and our water is hard, and I pick plants bred or native for that instead of trying to fight it with additives. Small quart plants make this easier, honestly, because you're not investing much if a spot turns out wrong. Move it. Try again six inches over. Nobody's out fifty dollars.
One real caution
If you're buying small and buying several, don't cram them in close because they look tiny right now. Go back to that mature-size tag. A penstemon that looks like nothing in a quart pot can be eighteen inches wide in two years. I learned this one the hard way with that first flat, where three thugs swallowed the other nine by the end of one summer. Give them the spacing the tag says, even though the bed looks embarrassingly empty for the first year. It won't stay empty long.
Before next time
Go look at whatever nursery run you've got planned this spring and price out what three quarts of something would cost versus one five-gallon of the same plant. Bring the numbers to class. I think you'll be as annoyed as I was.