While I concur with some of the opinions given so far, I have to bring up a problem that most people don’t consider. I will use tomato plants as an example since I know their requirements. If you plant an oversize tomato seedling, the plant is already in reproductive phase. Production will be severely limited because the plant can’t go through normal expansion. Plant a seedling that is still in juvenile growth phase and let it grow for a few weeks, then it goes into reproductive phase and it will outproduce the larger plant by double or more. The ideal tomato plant to set out in spring is a seedling about 8 inches tall and about 6 to 8 weeks old. If you set out a larger and older tomato plant, especially one that already has flowers and/or fruit, you are shooting yourself in the foot!
Tomatoes go through a very strong transition from juvenile growth phase to adult reproductive phase. Once the plant has set the first fruit, it will no longer grow and expand like a smaller juvenile plant. You can’t force it to revert to juvenile phase because hormone changes in the plant have already occurred. A huge amount of the productive potential of a tomato plant is from the expansion phase which occurs in the 3 to 4 weeks after a seedling is planted.
One last thought which is about pecans. I’ve purchased pecan trees from 2 feet tall up to 12 feet tall and set them out. Guess which size is most likely to die? I lost very few 2 to 4 ft tall pecan trees. I purchased 20 Kalos pecan trees for which the only option was oversize plants about 8 feet tall and up to 3 inches diameter at the 4 ft mark. They were huge! After 2 years, only 3 of them were still alive. Just saying, sometimes bigger is NOT better. I replaced by grafting seedlings so I’m not missing the lost trees, but it is still disappointing to realize that larger plants are so difficult to keep alive in a hot southern summer.
There may be a very good reason for shipping small passiflora plants. Maybe it would be a good idea to withhold judgement until we find out what that reason is. Also, I wouldn’t hesitate to set those plants out in good soil well amended with compost and see how they perform.
Here’s how I separate plants growing together in a small container, it works well as long as they aren’t so old that the roots are tightly entertwined: carefully remove the plants and the rootball, use a fork or even a crafts(popcicle) stick pushed down the side to the bottom of the cell, or sometimes just squeezing the cell will do it. Then dip the rootball into a container of water and slowly plunge it up and down. The soil will dissolve off the rootball leaving mostly roots and you can usually separate them with gentle pressure pulling on each stem. You might have to shake the rootball (under water) to help the soil move off. I’ve done this many times with tomato, lettuce, and other seedlings, sometime 5 seedlings growing in a 16 ounce cup full of soil. Haven’t tried with passiflora but it should work with such a small rootball as long as the roots aren’t too tightly entertwined.
In my opinion, if a customer has an issue with a product, the first course of action is to contact the business. If the business fails to respond or denies a reasonable course of remediation, then leave a bad review.
It’s unfair to any business to not be given the opportunity to correct an error, as errors will inevitably occur for any business.
In this instance, our shipping guys pulled some plants that were undersized and shipped them.
The next thing I know there’s a bad review. We were not contacted prior to the review to try to make things right for the customer. We took the initiative to contact the customer and offer either a refund or a free replacement.
If he had contacted us immediately, we would have enacted a similar course of action to remediate the issue to the customer’s satisfaction.
This is why the old saying exists: 'If you have a good experience with our business, tell a friend. If you have a bad experience, tell us".
As a reputable nursery company, we take pains to get people awesome plants with great customer service. When that fails to happen, we make it right.
As an agriculture business owner myself I can see how it’s frustrating to have a customer leave a poor review before giving you a chance to fix it. However, as a business owner it is also your responsibility to make sure your employees know your high standards to avoid this to begin with as it cost money and waste time for everyone involved.
I appreciate the replacement. It’s nice to have an example of what people should expect when ordering your vines. To tame expectations, I’d recommend maybe posting some pictures of the seedlings people will be receiving. At $20/vine after shipping, I’m sure you can’t blame the customer for expecting a little more than 6 week old seedlings.
Correct me @chadspur but based on the picture of the first plants you received, these second vines look the same, maybe a little longer?
In my experience growing many maypops from seed, they are typically stouter with bigger leaves. These seem light-starved (and not from being in a shipping box).
Yup. They’re quite a few inches longer and the stems are slightly thicker. Here’s the three originals separated just for comparison a week later. Surprised the tiny one didn’t die getting seperated, but it’s still kicking after a week. I was questioning whether it was even a Passiflora, but it does have the extrafloral nectaries near the leaf
I have had plant plugs that have done that in the past few years. Mainly from Gurney’s. Sort fo disappointing to say the least. Makes you worry if the plants will even live.
