How Long Can You Keep a Shrub in a Pot Before Planting?
Sandy in Canton asks, ‘how long can you keep a shrub in a pot from a nursery until you decide to plant it into your growing area? It’s boxwood.’
That’s a great question, and we do get that a lot of times at the nursery. The best answer I have for you is most of the time, those plants can stay in that pot for a year or longer. Can you remember to water it every single day for a year, is my question.
I think that the bigger challenge is maintaining that plant when it’s in a container. If it’s a full sun plant, you want to keep that plant in an area where it is getting some sunlight. If it’s a shade plant, you want to keep that plant in the pot in a shaded area.
But as we warm up here, not everybody realizes this. We water everything at the nursery at least once a day if it’s in a container. Sometimes stuff has to be watered twice daily, so it just depends on the variety of plant. Boxwoods are pretty easy to maintain and keep, but it is crucial to water them on a daily basis.
That is a good question. We do get asked that a lot. Because people buy a project, and they’re doing some prep work, but they want the best selection, and the plants that they like are there now. If they’re there today, they might be gone later today. So if you find something you like, I would definitely get it and take it home. Or a lot of times we’ll have people buy stuff, and we’ll hold it in our sold section as well. So that is an option. If it’s not something you want to take care of at home, it’s something for a period of two weeks. It’s something we could care for until you’re ready for it. Now we don’t want to keep stuff for three and a half, four or five months.
We do hold plants for people because we get it. You’re working on a project. You’ve got to have this guy come out, do that. If you’re having a stump ground out or something, you’re just not ready yet.
We had a guy who was in the other day looking at climbing hydrangeas for a metal trellis. And he looked at them, and he’s like, all right, I’m going to go home and measure. I’ll be back in a little bit. When he came back, they were gone. Somebody came in and bought 10 or 12 of them, which it’s usually not how that plant goes. Usually people buy one or two at a time. Somebody came in, and they were creating a ground cover out of hydrangea. Which is beautiful. But you use a lot of them when you’re doing something like that. We did order in the hydrangeas for the guy with the trellis, though.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).