Are You Ready for Spring?

As a gardener, you have two forms of payment: your money and your time. At different points in life, you’ll have more of one than the other. The trick is knowing when to spend which.

🌿 After working 30 years in a garden center, I’ve noticed the stereotypes tend often to be true:

• Most men want the biggest plant available.

• Most women pick whatever has the most blooms.

• For every “whatever it costs” buyer, nine others are price-conscious.

No matter your budget or patience level, I can help you spend wisely when it comes to plants. Some plants are worth buying big, while others will grow just as fast starting small. (and I will save you years but probably not millions)

💡 How Plant Pricing Works

Plant prices are based on:
1️⃣ Time – How long it took to grow.
2️⃣ Supply & Demand – Popularity + availability.
3️⃣ Ease of Buying – (Mentioned last week!) A plant you can order online costs 3X more than one at a garden center. But the selection is wider, so some people are willing to overpay for more options and ease of home delivery

Here are 8 plants that will save you time, money,

🌳 Buy These BIG (Slow Growers & Worth the Investment)

📌 Paperbark Maple (1.5"–2" Caliper)

🌟 One of the most stunning winter barks—think a coppery birch tree, but with a fiery red glow in winter.
🕰️ It’s one of the slowest-growing trees I’ve ever seen. Customers often think it’s dead in spring because it’s the last tree to leaf out.
💰 A good specimen is over $500, but here’s why: it takes 7-10 years to reach 2” caliper from a seedling. That’s nearly a decade of growing time wrapped into a single purchase.
✅ Transplants well in spring—just make sure it has a proper root ball.

💡 Verdict: If there’s any tree worth buying as big as you can afford, it’s this one. The time trade-off makes it worth every penny.

📌 Grafted Wisteria

🌸 You may have heard the old gardener’s myth that to make wisteria bloom, you should beat it with a baseball bat or stress it out. Not true!
⏳ The real reason wisteria won’t bloom? Seed-grown wisteria takes 5-10 years to flower. That’s why people resort to "tough love."
✅ Grafted wisteria blooms in its first year—no waiting, no stress.
🎨 Another bonus? Grafted plants are true to color—no surprises when it blooms.

💡 Verdict: Pay a little extra for grafted and enjoy fragrant, beautiful blooms right away.

📌 Boxwood

🐌 Dwarf boxwoods grow painfully slow—about 1” per year. Even with great conditions and timely trimming, a “growth spurt” is 2-3” at best in a good season.
📏I’ve grown boxwoods for 3 decades. It can take 3-5 years just to go from a one-gallon plant to a three-gallon.
🏡 Landscaping Tip: Boxwoods set the structure of a garden. If everything else is bigger than them at planting, your yard will look unbalanced for years.

💡 Verdict: Start as big as you can afford to keep things in scale. Everything else in your yard will catch up.

🔥 Winter Tip: In cold climates, spray with WiltProof (anti-desiccant) in late fall. It forms a protective wax layer to prevent winter burn.

📌 Bonus Add: Slow-Growing Shade Trees

🌳 The anchors of your landscape, but let’s be honest—you’ll probably move before they provide shade if you start too small.
⏳ Trees like oaks, beech, and ginkgo take decades to mature. Buying a bigger tree up front means enjoying some shade sooner rather than later.
💰 Bigger trees are more expensive, but if you plant small, you may never see the benefits.

💡 Verdict: Buy as big as your budget allows—it’s worth it in the long run.

🌿 Buy These SMALL (Fast Growers & Easy Savings)

📌 Tomatoes 🍅

🌱 One of the fastest germinating seeds—sprouting in 5-10 days.
💰 Buying larger tomato plants is unnecessary unless you're running late in the season.
⏳ Patience! If you can wait a week for a new episode of White Lotus, you can wait a week for tomatoes.

💡 Verdict: Grow from seed or buy six-packs—there's no reason to splurge.

📌 Spirea, Red Twig Dogwood & Forsythia

🚀 These shrubs grow like weeds—there’s no need to spend on big sizes.
📏 The mental challenge: A newly planted landscape looks too sparse, and people tend to overplant. But in a few years, per, overcrowding will become a trimming nightmare.
✂️ Pro Tip: Trim right after they flower to get another bloom cycle and more growth. After a bloom is almost always the best time to trim

💡 Verdict: Buy in 1- or 2-gallon sizes. They’ll catch up fast!

📌 DIY Hanging Baskets

💰 Store-bought hanging baskets = $40-$60 each (ouch!).
🛠 DIY cost = $15 or less—and they fill in just as well.
💦 Store-bought baskets are packed too tightly to look perfect in early May. Trust me I was the one overplanting so you would but them. By July, they’re root-bound and impossible to keep watered.

💡 Verdict: Make your own! You’ll get the same look with half the plants, better watering, and more savings.

📌 Whips or Lightly Branched Fruit Trees

🌳 A common misconception: A more branched-out tree means it will fruit faster. Not true!
⏳ Here’s the real timeline for common fruit trees:

• 🍏 Apple: 2-5 years

• 🍑 Peach: 2-4 years

• 🍐 Pear: 3-7 years

• 🍒 Cherry: 3-5 years

💰 Nurseries price trees by age & branching. You can often find a great deal on a lightly branched tree—just prune and train it yourself.

💡 Verdict: Look for small nubs or lightly branched trees—they’ll fruit just as fast.

🚫 Just Buy It at the Store: Celery

🥬 Celery is a test, not a crop.
💭 Have you ever heard someone say, “You have to try fresh garden celery!”?
❌ Probably not. It’s stringy, slow-growing, and a hassle.
🐜 You’ll end up with more ants than ‘ants on a log’.

💡 Verdict: Save the space—just buy it at the store.

Final Thought: Smart Spending in the Garden

🌳 Buy your slow growers BIG so they don’t lag behind your landscape.
🌱 Start fast growers SMALL because they’ll catch up in no time.

If you have any “Buy this big, buy this small I’d love to hear them, good fodder for my next newsletter

This keeps your detailed insights while making them more engaging and conversational. Let me know if you want any final tweaks! 🚀

🌿 3 New Must Add Plants for 2025: 🌸🎉

The hot trend this year will be Nativars. Native plants that are improved for home gardens. All the toughness of the native but no invasive spreading or better blooms and foliage. The best of both worlds. Today I picked a few perennials that deserve a prime spot in your landscape. An Iris, a very cool geum and pollinator-packed Nativar of ironweed.

🌟 ‘Eye Liner’ Pseudata Iris (Iris x pseudata)

🌞 Full sun | ❄️ Zones 4-9 | 📏 34-38 in. tall, 28-33 in. wide

💜 Why you’ll love it: This iris stunner extends your bloom season into early summer! Its large, pearlescent petals are highlighted by a striking yellow “eye” surrounded by violet veining—like nature’s most delicate calligraphy. I thought it was going to be one of those AI plants when I first saw it. Guarantee people will stop and look at this one

🌊 Bonus: While it’s more drought-tolerant than its water-loving parents, it thrives best with consistent watering. A perfect statement plant for adding height and elegance to borders!

🛠️ Introduced by Walters Gardens

🎃 ‘Orange Pumpkin’ Geum (Geum coccineum)

☀️ Full sun to part shade | ❄️ Zones 5-9 | 📏 16-20 in. tall, 12 in. wide

🔥 Brighten up your garden with these fiery blooms! ‘Orange Pumpkin’ geum produces charming double orange flowers in early summer that practically glow in the landscape. Plant it along paths or in borders for a burst of warm color. Looks like an annual but only have to plant once

✂️ Pro tip: Deadhead spent blooms for a light rebloom later in the season!

🌿 Introduced by Growing Colors™

🦋 ‘Prairie Princess’ Ironweed (Vernonia ‘Prairie Princess’)

🌞 Full sun | ❄️ Zones 4-9 | 📏 2-3 ft. tall, 2.5-3 ft. wide

👑 A royal choice for pollinators! This compact ironweed brings a tidy, sturdy form to your garden while attracting butterflies in droves. The rosy-purple flowers bloom from late summer through fall, offering a nectar-rich feast for pollinators when other flowers start to fade.

🌱 Tough as nails:
✅ Thrives in clay soil
✅ Tolerates juglone (great for planting near black walnut trees!)
✅ Resistant to rabbits, deer, and powdery mildew

🌼 Great companions: Pair with Black-eyed Susans, tall phlox, or sedum for a dazzling late-season display. A fantastic alternative to invasive butterfly bush!

📸 Introduced by Walters Gardens, Inc.

Product of the Week

The Parting Story

Like all kids of nurserymen, your spring break isn't about going to Florida or the beach. In the nursery business, spring is a busy time—preparing for harvest and plant production. It means unloading trucks all day, and the only sand you'll see is the sand in your shoes that falls from the root balls of plants grown in sandy soil. The upside? A lot of people think you did go to the beach because you get plenty of sun on your face from working in the fields all day. There's a reason they call it a farmer's tan.

When the other kids came back glowing and relaxed, I came back exhausted—unloading semis all day for five or six days straight. I remember one truck vividly. I was told it was just me and one other guy unloading it. If you've ever unloaded a truck, you know it’s easy at first because the plants on the tail are right there, ready to pull off. But as you unload, the plants get farther and farther away, and you have to drag them to the front. Some nurseries have docks where you can drive equipment in to unload, but not this one. This was climb up, drag, and unload—over and over.

This load was burning bush, probably three feet tall. They were stacked on their sides, six feet high, 38 feet long. Thousands of them. If I carried one at a time, I had a zero percent chance of getting that truck unloaded that day. I was 15, but I still had to get it done so the driver could get home. It's one thing to have the boss mad. It's another to hold up a truck driver from picking up his next load. So—two at a time, no breaks, just a quick lunch in the truck. We got it done but as you can tell I still think about it 40 years later.

To me, this is what shapes a young person—working hard while others are playing and making your own money so you can play later in the year. Eventually, you’ll get to take a spring break or go to the beach, and it’ll feel that much sweeter.

My daughter worked all her spring breaks in high school. Her Dad couldn’t leave, so she figured she might as well work, get some sun, and make a little money. She could get some of the stories like I told above. When she finally got the chance to go on spring break with her friends, she called to tell me she wasn’t coming home to work that year. I completely expected her to go on vacation with her teammates—they had worked hard in school and deserved some fun. But I also knew she understood what hard work looked like.

You don’t have to have a car that breaks down to know how to take care of it, but you do have to physically work hard to know what hard work feels like. Some will say it teaches kids that if you don’t get a good education, this is what you’ll have to do your whole life. To me, it teaches them that it’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with physical labor when you’re young or able—it’s often your most valuable asset.

Your goal is to not have to unload trucks your whole life, but you should never demean the person who has to. Now you understand how hard it is and appreciate the people who do that kind of work for a living. What it really teaches your kid is appreciation for hard work—and that will last a lifetime.

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