Garden center shopping today. Over my budget for 3 and 5 gallon Magnolias.
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Inflation is not that high…Good lawdy.
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Looks like I need to start trying cuttings of magnolia trees next. Or grafting multi magnolia or multi color Camilla trees. Or both at the same time. Ha
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I didn’t go home empty handed. Got a greenhouse forced Loropetalum chinense var. rubrum “Daruma”. $39 for 3 gallon. Hardy zone 7.
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@Fusion_power and i paid around $70 each for desirable pears like bell from grandpas.
This depends on where you live. Most of the online inflation seems to have happened a few years ago. Anyone remember when you could buy a cherry tree from Raintree Nursery for 20 something dollars and 16 or 19 dollars for a blueberry from One Green World was high priced? Good times. Prices at least seem to have stagnated online for now though. I went to my local nursery last year and they wanted to charge me something like 35-55 for 3 herbs that were annuals and we got 5-7 impatient and they wanted us to pay 157 for the impatient alone. We went on over to Lowes. I remember looking at Lilac and my local nursery wanted to charge 50 and we found the same plant and company at Lowes for 15 dollars. These prices these local nursery are charging for common plants are hopefully going to put them out of business. I certainly hope people are not going to continue going to these scammers.
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Guess I will keep plying the livestock auction sales. Here you get a lot of contract planters with spare plants to sell cheap. If they do not get all of a load in the ground; a lot of farms would rather have them return with fresh out of the nursery plants. Last trip we got a mix of 10 commercial blueberries for $30.
In 2004, we drove to the other side of Ithaca to Cummins Nursery and bought some of the first apple trees for our orchard. We had a long conversation with Steve, who gave us some worthwhile advice, including pointing out that if we bought at least 10 trees, we would get a discount. Each tree would cost $11.
I got an email from Cummins today offering “A first crack at new fruit trees.” Apple trees without a discount now cost $43.50. That 400% in 21 years. However, Cummins is charging less than many other nurseries.
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Many things are inflated by 100 - 500% still from 5 years ago. I dont think it’s coming back down. I right it up to they charged us all a 400% tax. The nice thing is they are not allowed to make decisions anymore.
Eggs 50 cents. = $6.
Milk $1 gallon = $3.89
Gas $2 gallon = $3 - $7
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I was expecting to see a bicycle pump attached to a plant 
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Expensive groceries are what motivated me to do an orchard and large garden. I have found some things here that absolutely thrive and don’t cost much to get started like blackberries, sunchokes, mulberry, etc.
I can get $1000s worth of food with a small investment and some sweat. Well worth it and everything tastes much better than from the grocery store.
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I agree its a great investment right now!
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$11 fruit trees? I should have been planting an orchard instead of going to college back then, haha.
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I see more and more nurseries asking from the $65-100 range. Especially citrus.
You can still occasionally get a good deal for online trees. Stark sometimes runs an $18 tree sale with free shipping. Overall I’ve been happy with the trees. The big downside is that not all of their trees list what rootstock they are on. They often just list dwarf, semi-dwarf, or standard.
They can’t even tell you if you reach out. Seems they use a variety of semi-dwarf rootstocks, so you have no way of finding out from them.
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Yes, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $11 in 2004 should be about $19 now. … NOT chicken feed, but not 400%, either.
I think what may have happened (gone wrong) is that there is more service behind the sale nowadays than heretofore. Perhaps the nursery has been asked to indemnify costumers to a greater degree for plants that failed to prosper. Costumers seem to think they’ve got it all coming their way since the COVID Pandemic although this may just be chalked up to declining educational standards, burgeoning cultural diversity, and a dwindling Protestant Ethic.
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