If there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is almost no such thing as a free plant. Volunteers that self-sow in situ come closest, but even then they require some care and thought in terms of weeding and maintenance. If the parent plant is over-enthusiastic with its progeny you'll have to spend some time editing the results, while if you are too enthusiastic with the hoe or insist on smothering your garden with weed-suppressing landscape fabric you won't get much in the way of self-sown additions.
Sowing seeds can yield an astonishing quantity of plants relative to the outlay in materials, not to mention home saved seed and the packets that come enclosed with magazines, and taking cuttings can produce a similar bonanza. The big cost is your time. I love propagating. Making more plants is all part of the fun of gardening, quite as much as buying new plants. I was always surprised by how few of the customers at the plant centre seemed to have any notion of growing their own plants, to judge from their lack of enthusiasm if I told them how they could increase their purchases, and equally surprised at how many of the amateur run gardens opening under the Yellow Book scheme don't seem to have a greenhouse or any kind of facilities for propagation. If you are keen enough to open your garden to the general public then surely you would enjoy working your way through some of the marvellous seed catalogues that are out there at the click of a mouse, not to mention having the facility to bulk up what you've already got. Apparently not.
It does take time, I admit that. Maybe it's one reason why Yellow Book owners don't always run their own mini plant factory on the side. Perhaps they need all their available time to maintain their gardens to Yellow Book standards. I, meanwhile, have my own Erythrina crista-galli germinating in the heated propagator. It's a thrill to see the shoot emerge and the leaves unfold, and I'll save at least a tenner compared to buying a grown plant if I manage to bring one through to the planting-out stage, but I also have lawn edges that are untrimmed, and borders that are still only partially mulched as we get into April.
Today was definitely a day for hiding in the greenhouse rather than trying to spread mulch or cut the edges of the lawn to neat curves. It blew, and it was cold. I'm glad I moved the outdoor dining chairs away from the conservatory windows, given that the teak bench on the terrace (or patio) has blown backwards into the Eleagnus hedge. The top of the hedge, meanwhile, has sagged out over the drive under the force of the wind, and once things calm down I am going to have to get the ladder, or probably the Henchman, and cut back the now overhanging portions. We learn some lessons in life too late, and now I know that I should have planted yew.
There is no such thing as a free plant (only £5.95 for postage) in a magazine readers' offer either. I belatedly noticed that Amateur Gardening magazine was offering two dozen each of the lavenders 'Hidcote' and 'Munstead' courtesy of Thompson and Morgan, the offer still valid until 7th April. They would only be tiny little plugs, but plugs grow fast enough and £5.95 is a very good price for forty-eight lavenders. I considered the space I wanted to cover by the blue shed, and the number of rooted cuttings and box plants I'd accumulated, and the fact that lavender does quite well on the light soil in the front garden, and would fit in nicely with my vague Nicole de Vesian rip-off plan (or if not Nicole de Vesian then about half the Chelsea show gardens you have seen over the past decade), and decided that it would be £5.95 well spent.
Thompson and Morgan's website was not working properly. It was not obviously not working, and let me input everything up to and including my credit card details, then nothing happened when I pressed Submit Order. I reflected that 7th April was quite close with Easter in the way, and decided I'd better ring them and see if the order had gone through. I got a recorded message that said something about how they were aware that they had problems with their website, and that my call was progressing forward in the queue, in between scratchy fragments of Vaughan Williams. When eventually I got through the person I spoke to said she could not tell me whether my order had reached them, though it probably hadn't, and my best bet was to leave it and try again tomorrow.
Is the wrong answer. A customer is trying to buy something from you. They have spent fifteen minutes on the phone waiting to speak to a human being because your website is not working. If when they get through to an actual person that person can't tell them anything about the website problem then put that in the recorded message and spare us the bad Vaughan Williams. Something along the lines of We are aware that you may have experienced problems with our website. We will not be able to help you further at this time so don't bother holding. The readers' offer was limited to one per customer, so I thought that if my website order had gone through, which it probably hadn't, as the lavenders were not due to be sent out until the end of the month Thompson and Morgan would probably be able to sort it out in the next four weeks if I somehow managed to place two orders, and I was buggered if I was spending any more time in their queue. So I placed another order.
The phone operator told me that I must quote the Offer Code. There was nothing in the magazine labelled Offer Code, so I tried the code from the order form I'd have used if I'd got round to the question of cheap lavenders in time to order by post. She told me that was not the Offer Code, without telling me what format an Offer Code would be in. Eventually I worked out which part of the quite small print in the ad I was supposed to read out to her. Once she'd told me everything had gone through and rung off I realised that she hadn't given me any kind of reference number in case of further problems.
I admit that only going for the cheap offer and not adding other items to it is not in the spirit of Readers' Offers from T&M's point of view. They haven't even added a new customer to their mailing list because I've bought seeds from them in the past and they already know I exist. But as customer experiences go that gets about two out of ten.
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