eBay Bounty: Cultivate Your Garden’s Beauty with Plant Plug Discoveries

Over the years, I have fine-tuned our Spring/Summer flower gardening program. Someone else handles the seed germination these days. Ebay is my go-to for starter plants. After the holidays — when the winter winds are in full swing — I review my notes from the past growing season, peruse inspirational photos from mail-order gardening catalogues, and binge watch our favorite gardener — Laura LeBoutillier of @gardenanswer — to develop each new season’s flower gardening plans. When a color theme is chosen, the mail-order catalogues are pitched and the online searching, bidding and buying process goes into full swing.

For me, live plant auctions on Ebay begin in January each year. With the benefit of a greenhouse in the yard and additional grow lights on racks in the basement, I’m able to order plant plugs early when the opening bids and selection are good, but the number of aggressive bidders is minimal. Several cases of seedlings arrive at a time, well-packaged from the grower to withstand the freezing temps, and eager to be transplanted from their starter containers into pots. Within a few days of receipt, the plant plugs are repotted into 3 or 4 inch pots, placed on greenhouse racks or under grow lights, and ready to take off on their growing journey.

As you might expect, gardening using the Ebay resource can be addictive. So, it should not be surprising that I repeat this selection and auction process several times until I have everything on our list to populate dozens of large pots and the flowering beds located around the Truitt House property.

Newly received plant plugs are well-rooted starter plants ready for repotting.

To prepare for each annual flower gardening project, I first soak the prior season’s leftover plastic pots in a bucket of water mixed with an organic insecticide/fungicide to control any overwintered pests and diseases, and then spray the greenhouse racks and panels using the same solution. Next, I reorder new plastic pots and trays sufficient to transplant the expected plant plugs; purchase multiple bags of the best available potting soil, confirm the grow lights are working properly, and then set aside a day to transplant the plugs within a day or two of their arrival. Throughout the next 8 weeks or so, I will regularly water the plants at the soil level (to avoid watering the foliage), rotate the plant trays between the top racks to lower racks (to avoid sun scalding), monitor the electric heater and oscillating fan (to keep the greenhouse warm with air circulating), and prune back the plants (to address leggy or inconsistent growth). By late March or early April, the plants will be healthy, hardy, fully-rooted and ready to move into large garden pots and annual beds.

Maturing seedlings in the greenhouse, 4 weeks.

We are early in February at this writing and the greenhouse is now filled up with many hundreds of rapidly growing young plants; and vines and other flowering annuals pulled from pots this past Fall; sectioned into multiple plants, repotted and overwintered. That’s a good thing because we will have vibrant and well-rooted flowering plants ready to reintroduce into the garden in early Spring.

Over many years of using plugs rather than seed germination or retail purchase, I learned how to mimic the fine gardening magazines’ depiction of mass plantings and artful pots, but to do so at a small fraction of the cost.

I have it on good authority from an infamous ground hog’s shadow that Spring is coming early this year. We always have more plants than we need and enjoy sharing them with friends and neighbors. We will be ready. Will you?

The Koi Pond Garden 2023.