What makes Plantables plants different from the ones at your local big box store?

 

With growing season well and truly upon us, you’re probably starting to think about filling your garden with lots of lovely green plants of both the edible (and non-edible) kind.

(We know we are.)

But if you’ve ever been to a big box store, you’ll know that their plants aren’t always… erm… the best.

In fact, in a New York Times article with the headline Great Plants Don’t Always Come in Big Boxes, reporter Ken Druse said:

Anyone who has ever visited the chain stores will agree that the plants are often treated like so many dry goods.

Laura Cadwallader is a life-long gardener who moved to San Antonio with her husband when he retired. Although she shops at local nurseries, she also goes to the big chains even though ”it hurts to see plants suffering.” When she asked a sales clerk to water a dying plant at one of the big stores, the clerk asked if she wanted a job.

In the Home Depot in Rockaway, N.J., I saw warm-zone camellias and tropical hibiscus among the shrubs for outdoor planting. At another of the chain’s stores, in San Antonio, I found perennials and fruit trees that might not be able to tolerate the heat.

☝️ That right there is the reason that we started Plantables.

The idea for Plantables sprouted from a quick trip that our founders — Adrian and Jodi Roelands — took to a big box store with their children.

Pushing the cart around and seeing rows and rows of neglected, dried-out plants with very little chance of producing fruit, Adrian and Jodi realised how difficult it must be for beginner gardeners to start growing their own fruits and vegetables at home.

That’s when they came up with the idea to make premium quality, garden-ready fruits and vegetable plants available to the public.

Quick bit of backstory: Adrian and Jodi run Roelands Plant Farms, a greenhouse facility that grows the fruit and vegetables for commercial farmers across North America. (In other words, the fruits and veggies they grow are the ones that you buy in your local supermarket.)

But they didn’t want to just grow plants and ship them out, they wanted to completely change the veggie-growing game.

Too often, the plants you pick up in the big box store aren’t grown to be healthy or particularly high-yielding, nor are they right for your grow zone. Nor are they organically grown.

They’re simply grown as quickly and as cheaply as possible to sit on the shelves and make the most amount of money.

We didn’t want to be like that.

We decided to flip the script and make sure that every plant that arrives on your doorstep is of the highest quality and primed to grow you healthy, tasty produce like crazy.

So we don’t cut corners or rush the process.

We do things like grafting together the roots and stems of different breeds of plants to make them hardy and high-yielding.

By lovingly growing your plants from seeds into seedlings and shipping them to arrive at your doors exactly when they need to be planted, we know that you’ll be able to grow ‘brag-worthy fruits and vegetables’ every time, even if you’re new to world of gardening or are too busy to handle the tricky seedling stage.

We do the hard bits — the tricky seedling stage and the grafting — and ship them to you ready to put in the ground (or on your balcony or window sill!) and start growing you the tastiest, healthiest and organic-est fruits and veggies you’ve ever seen.

That way, you don’t have to choose between sad big box plants or no garden ever again. You can go online, choose from 35+ organically grown varieties of fruits and veggies and have them arrive on your doorstep when you need them.

And that’s not all!

When you order from Plantables you can also:

  • Choose from different varieties of your favourite fruits and veggies (including some rare and super-tasty varieties)
  • Mix and match what you’d like to order by filling a box of your favourite plants, one-by-one
  • Get access to the highest-quality fruits and veggies available to the public
  • Select your growing zone at the checkout to see exactly when your plants will thrive in your location
  • Choose from a huge range of rarer and tastier plants, all hand-selected for their tastiness and hardiness by our team of expert gardeners.

And, if you’re still unsure whether our plants beat the big box stores, just check out Steph’s garden full of organically grown Plantables plants:

 

“Amazing idea! The box arrived before the expected delivery date. Plants looked good. Great customer service! I will most definitely use Plantables in the future and recommend them to friends!”

 

 

To fill your garden full of tasty, healthy produce, just like Steph did — or just to check out our awesome collection of tasty, easy-to-grow organically grow plants — head to the Grow Your Own Way section of our site and have a nose around! 

Happy Planting!