My local grocery stores all have lots of plants honestly. My King Soopers is full with flowers come spring to fall. During winter you can buy live trees inside as they are some kind of tropical pine tree varieties. I guess cold weather pine trees don’t do well inside. My Costco has a nursery every spring but the issue is they pull out on Mother’s Day. You don’t want to plant any annuals here until Memorial Day. Perennials can make it and rebound but annuals will not. So our Costco technically sells them but their plants are worthless due to the season they sell them. Grocery store certainly do sell plants though.
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When I worked at Home Depot I was supposed to be eventually hired into the gardening department so I got to see their training. Other department had some nice training like Kitchen and Bath or Plumbing but gardens was near worthless. Their training was annual vs perennial, read the tag and sell them on the whole project. I can see the issue as at the time we were making 11 dollars a hour and there are so many plants that you could not train them on them all. Growing an apple or pear is so different than growing a blueberry which is so different from growing a raspberry. It gets even more confusing when you go into things like catkins, perfect flowers, male or female flowers etc, self fertile et. Simply put way easier to say read the tags and if you are getting paid 11 dollars a hour you are not going out of your way to learn the job. What they did focus on was sell the entire job. It becomes very profitable to say you are buying a tree so you need the soil amendments, a blower for the leaves on the trees, pruners to prune the trees, gas for the gas blower, ear plugs to mask the sound and so fourth. That is what Home Depot teaches their employees because that is where the money is.
I have seen grocery stores selling plants but I have not seen any grocery stores selling actual fruit trees. I was talking about grocery stores selling trees, specifically fruit trees. Except that Whole Foods. I have not seen the Whole Foods store in my area selling fruit trees, so far. I pass the local Whole Foods several times a week.
My local grocery stores sells plants and also some of those little pine trees, they stay small. Usually during Christmas.
Some do. Costco does early April or March. It is generally only common name types like Granny Smith or Honeycrisp though and many will not grow locally where I live. Like my Costco was selling Fuyu persimmon in Denver zone 5 a few years ago. Walmart sells a lot of these things too. These bigger stores are slowly reaching out more and more with the things they sell and do. I have seen it through the years. Home Depot acquiring Menards, phone companies becoming only a few again, Discover is supposed to merge with someone else by the end of the year which would make them the largest credit card company in the world etc. Many think of places like Discover as a credit card company but they having CD, a checking account, savings account etc. Many think of Nestle as the chocolate milk company but they own water, baby formula and many other assets. Like I said these companies continue to grow and expand. Remember when Amazon was just a book company a few years ago and they quickly became the internet’s biggest seller of everything to be questioned and rivaled by no government official?
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Another example is Amazon owns Twitch, Abe Books, Amazon, Whole Foods etc. Twitch is Youtube’s/Google’s biggest streaming competitor, Whole Foods is likely one of the biggest organic/natural stores, Abe Books is likely one of the biggest book sellers. Many may not realize they are all operated under Amazon since they are such different things and under different company names but they are all under the same umbrella. So they either operate by getting more supplies (when I worked at Home Depot they wanted us to advertise that they have far more supplies online so if the store did not carry it they could get it via website) or they get bigger by opening different companies or buying different companies under a different name and many do not even realize it is the same company.
Well stated. I know there will always be discount plants at Lowe’s that look half dead because they are dry as a bone. I look for disease free, revivable plants at good prices. This past winter they had Alberta spruce with Christmas balls and red bows. When they didn’t sell well, they reduced the big ones to about 7 Dollars. After transplanting and some good watering, they look great today.
I think all the shrub and evergreen potted plants are Lowe’s cast offs from last year. Some are still sporting their Christmas finery.
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Now I know why those plants are so overpriced.
I have found there is 2 ways to stop rabbits or deer from munching and it has been mentioned here by Clarkinks. You can either have something over something like 6 feet high with a large diameter in the case of trees or bushes or or you protect the heck out of it with netting or caging. My stores or nursery are not doing either of these things.
Stopped by a Walmart in OH yesterday while drivining to PA. About 20% of the fruit trees were in bad shape or dead. I picked up other fruit trees and they may be soon to follow. They were light as a feather. No water at all. What a mess! It is basic stuff, really sad. Glad I bought a few trees early on as soon as they arrived.
I know, and you think they would reduce prices considering the condition. I don’t see prices lowered until the end of the season when trees are virtually unrecoverable.
I have grafted fruit trees this year in 1 gallon (a few), 2 gallon, and three gallon sizes. Any suggestion on what prices seem fair? Most are old southern, heirloom, or fairly rare varieties.