5 Tips On How To Choose Healthy Plants At A Garden Center

If you held a conversation for longer than an hour with an avid gardener, you’ve heard the scary stories of purchasing plants from a large garden center or story. Honestly, a lot of the scares are valid. But luckily all hope is not lost, 75% of my plants come from huge garden centers, I just use the following tips to make sure I choose healthy plants!

These tips apply to houseplants AND garden ready/starter plants for your edible garden. 

Avoid The Tallest

It is so tempting to want to purchase the biggest plant to get the most for your dollar, right?! That approach is ideal, but it comes with negative consequences. The tallest plants are plants who had to grow in competition with neighboring plants in tight and unlikely conditions. Therefore, they typically end up being less healthy, suffer from some type of light/nutrient deficiency, and/or weak and open to disease and pests. I recommend that you choose stronger and healthy (possibly shorter) plants that promises more productivity.

Check Color

Foliage color is a good sign of plant healthy. When your looking to choose healthy plants, checking out if the leaves are yellowing, browning, or flat out dying help indicate what you should purchase or not purchase.

Read Label

The label is your best friend when you need to find out important details about any plant. It’s a great resource for deciding if that plant is a good fit for your garden, if you can care for the plant or not, and how you can use the plant as well. I always check labels in the plant as well as outside to get an idea of how the plant should look and what to expect.

Check For Multiples

The best way to get more bang for your buck is to get more than one plant for the price of one. I found 6 pk tray of healthy cucumbers with 3-4 per pod. That’s 18-24 cucumbers for the price of 6!

Check For Pests

Pests hang out at gardening centers! Unfortunately, we bring them home to our other plants and really don’t have a clue to where they come from. Be sure to check underside of leaves and soil for creepy crawlers.

*Bonus tip: Don’t buy damaged plants. Purchasing limp, root bound plants is setting yourself up for failure and we do not want that! 

this article initially was published 3/13/18. It has since been updated.