I buy one or two packs of bedding every year from b&q (usually Pelargoniums for the planters in the front garden) and they are always 'tea-bagged'. I can honestly say i've never had an issue. Roots always grow through. Plants are always in good nick and grow strongly. Only thing i would say is make sure the 'bag' is planted relatively deeply (without compromising the plant itself of course) as they can wobble around until rooted. Each to their own i guess.
Gardening. The cause of, and solution to, all of my problems.
We brought some of their pansies and violas that they were selling off really cheaply, and they have been flowering non stop in my hanging baskets. They look glorious. I do find and get so annoyed that places like Lidl's and Sainsburys have these bedding plants. And very sadly they have all been left to dry out and die off. Why do it, surely it does not take much to just give them a watering. No one wants to buy them in the state they leave them in.
Aldi are the worst offenders. They leave them outside and hope they sell by lunchtime. At least half die, and the tea bag system would prevent, or drastically reduce, that
I don't think the tea bags make any difference either way - they are no more (or less) water retaining than plastic pots or polystyrene trays and no easier to water properly. It's down to the staff. I think BandQ employ some older staff these days - people with a bit more general knowledge who might look at a trolley of plants and think 'they need a drink'. Other retail outlets seem to only employ much younger people who just don't think of it. If you've never had any sort of garden at all, I'm not sure you would have any grasp of the notion that plants need to be cared for. So it comes down to a manager remembering to tell them to do it, or making it someone's job to do it every day. I guess Aldi don't have the right 'system' for that.
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
I don't know anything about the tea bag debate, but my first gardening
buy was a Cotoneaster Cornubia sapling from B&Q. It was massively
cheaper than anywhere else I knew to look at the time, and now it is
three years old, is covered in blossom, has bees all over it and has
attracted families of blackbirds and thrushes to our communal garden.
So, I feel it's unfair to damn B&Q across the board. They're many people's first introduction to gardening, and our local one could be an awful lot worse. Maybe it does depend on the individual store management. If they're
doing something you feel is wrong then write and tell them.
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
With respect, Raisingirl, I think you're missing the point. Tea bags retain the water they start with unless the bag is squeezed, but they allow free passage of oxygen to the roots, and I'm sure you'll find this is technically quite clever. Think how a J cloth holds water but doesn't absorb it i.e. each droplet is held in a compartment in the cloth's structure. Instore watering just isn't practical. You might end up with wet floors. Shock, horror. Getting access to each plug when they're in racks? I don't think so. Plastic containers never worked, and I love to see technology be applied to everyday problems like this.
Posts
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Instore watering just isn't practical. You might end up with wet floors. Shock, horror. Getting access to each plug when they're in racks? I don't think so.
Plastic containers never worked, and I love to see technology be applied to everyday problems like this.