Tag: wholesalers

Plastic-free gardening

How to buy plants without the plastic

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I love to buy plants. What gardener doesn’t? It’s what gardening is all about: that magpie-like delight in tracking down a coveted treasure, the thrill of spotting the perfect plant for the gap you wanted to fill in a border.

Only trouble is, with every plant I buy the stack of plastic pots in my garage gets even taller. And since I plant not only my own garden, but bits and pieces of four other gardens I look after, it is already well above my head and definitely at the teetering stage.

Our addiction to plastic – or rather the horticultural industry’s dependence on it – means that whenever you buy a plant, it comes with a side order of plastic pot. It’s all very well pledging to buy no new plastic for the garden; but what about the plastic you don’t buy?

So for the last couple of seasons, this is one of the main areas where I’ve been concentrating my efforts to reduce the plastic in my garden. And I’ve come up with my own rules for buying plants without the plastic.

It does involve a certain amount of self-denial. We have become used to being able to pop into the garden centre and pick up plants whenever we feel like it, 365 days of the year, and plastic is what makes this on-demand availability possible.

Just as with supermarkets, round-the-clock availability divorces us from the natural turning of the seasons. We have lost our feel for the right season to plant and sow. And for gardeners, that’s never a good thing.

Plants you put in the ground in, say, summer need massive amounts of watering to keep them alive, let alone growing (in last year’s summer, they’d be goners). Plant in autumn, and through winter into spring, and the ground is consistently damp and occasionally fairly warm; plants are largely dormant, so they can concentrate on root systems before they need to find the extra energy for top growth.

Autumn, winter and spring are also the best times of year to strike cuttings, sow seeds and divide your existing perennials to make new plants. All requiring no plastic at all.

So I have been confining my plant acquisitions to the six months between September and March. It has taken every ounce of my willpower – I’d never noticed before quite  how many plant fairs and flower shows take place during summer, the very worst time to plant, and every last desirable plant on offer sitting in its plastic pot. But I have been  Very Good and will walk past the lot of them (well, I might stop for a moment and gaze a little wistfully).

Because from here on in I will buy plants only if they are plastic free. And – with the occasional exception, such as stumbling across Hairy Pot plants in the few nurseries and garden centres which stock them – that means no impulse buys from garden centres or nurseries or plant fairs or flower shows.

I console myself with the fact that my plants will be happier and will establish better. And I’m going to have a whole lot of fun with raising plants myself, the old-fashioned way, with all the deep, long-lasting satisfaction that comes with that achievement. And that’s something you can’t buy in any garden centre.

Here are my five ways to buy plants without the plastic:

Buy bare root: By far the best way to do it, with the easiest access to the widest range of varieties (and it’s increasing all the time). Available November to March, you can buy plants bare root from many mail order nurseries and from the wholesale nursery Howard Nurseries (based in Norfolk). Hedging, roses, fruit canes, strawberries and (for some reason that escapes me) wallflowers are all routinely sold bare root at garden centres throughout winter, too.

Buy mail order from plastic-aware nurseries: Nurseries like Bluebell Cottage Nurseries in Cheshire take plants out of their pots before sending them to you. They wrap in wax paper or newspaper, pack them carefully and they arrive without a pot for you to deal with (the original is usually re-used back at the nursery).

Divide existing perennials: Increasing your stock without accumulating extra plastic just takes a little patience. Dividing gives you the quickest results: chop clumps of perennials into two, three or four pieces in autumn or spring and replant each chunk for a new plant.

Raise from cuttings: If you have a sympathetic friend or relative with a particularly desirable plant in their garden, ask if you can take a cutting to pot up at home. You have several chances for taking cuttings throughout the year: in spring or autumn take softwood or shoot cuttings; in summer you can peel away a heeled or semi-ripe cutting; and in winter you can propagate shrubs, including roses, from hardwood cuttings, probably the easiest of the lot.

Raise from seed: The joy of persuading a seed to germinate is a very special thing. Most of us sow a few annuals and vegetables – but you can sow perennials, shrubs and trees from seed too, and it’s great fun to try. Plunder seed swaps and membership schemes like those run by the RHS and the Hardy Plant Society for sometimes quite unusual varieties to add to your collection (you get loads of plants for your money, too, so it’s a lot cheaper to stock your garden this way). Raising plants from seed gives you a connection with them you don’t have any other way, too: I currently have a huge cordyline, some 12-15ft tall and mature enough to flower and fruit, which I raised from seed myself: it would be a fairly ordinary plant bought with its pot on in a garden centre, but because I have raised it from a baby it is my pride and joy.

I will be going into each of these options in more detail in the coming months: watch this space!

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Plastic substitutes, Plastic-free gardening

The alternatives #2: Clay and coir

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Clay pots

IMG_5043Probably the one type of biodegradable plant pot we’ve all used at one time or another, clay pots have a fine pedigree: they were the go-to pot of choice for all Victorian estate gardeners, and remain the benchmark for classy gardens everywhere.

What is it:  Clay pots are made of baked clay – that’s the stuff you get out of the ground, so about as natural as it gets. As old as the hills, the ultimate in traditional gardening, they look wonderful and last for ages if you look after them. But they are heavy and clumsy gardeners will struggle to keep them in one piece.

How long do they last: Theoretically, forever; you can reuse clay pots year after year for generations. They are more robust than plastic pots, in that you can strim a clay pot without it getting shredded; but if you drop one, you’ve lost it.

How are they made: You’ve seen Ghost, right? You know the pottery scene? (of course you know the pottery scene; it’s the only one anyone remembers from that movie). That’s basically the same for plant pots. Except possibly minus Patrick Swayze. They are made, by hand, from clay, on potters’ wheels, then fired in a kiln. You can watch a rather lovely video of US master potter Guy Wolff making terracotta pots here.

Terracotta – literally ‘baked earth’ – just refers to pots made of unglazed, and therefore porous clay (as opposed to ceramics, which are glazed).

Cost: Middlingly expensive, at about £1 a pot for 11cm diameter; slightly cheaper from reclamation yards where you can get lucky and pick up boxes of second-hand clay pots relatively cheaply.

Also available as: Rhubarb forcers, plant labels, plant saucers, pot feet

Pros: Re-usable and long-lasting; heartbreakingly lovely to look at, the stuff of fantasy gardens everywhere. They age beautifully, too. Available in every possible size and shape, and readily available too; these are the one type of biodegradable pot you can be sure to find in a standard garden centre. In my experience, plants like clay pots and seem to grow better in them: I think this may be because their porous nature allows the roots to breathe a little better. They dry out quicker than plastic, but re-wet more thoroughly as the pot absorbs water as well as the plant, so you don’t get water running down between rootball and pot and draining out at the bottom without wetting the roots. There are many UK based manufacturers, so they don’t have to travel far to get to you; though watch out as the cheaper versions seem to be made by a company called Spang, based in Germany, so are imported and so have a higher environmental cost.

Cons: Heavy, and easily broken. Pricey, especially online mail order as the postage costs are high for heavy items. The firing process – 1000 degrees for 18 hours or so – means that even though they are produced locally so don’t have a high mileage, the carbon footprint of clay pots is still pretty high.

Stockists: Widely available from garden centres, reclamation yards and garden equipment suppliers online.

UK-based terracotta pot specialists include Yorkshire Flowerpots and Whichford Pottery . Both do a ‘garden essentials’ range, but expect to pay more; there’s a good reason, too, as these are superb and very beautiful pots, and a cut above your bog standard potting shed fare.

Coconut fibre (coir)

coirpots_hairypotplantcoThe second most commonly found biodegradable alternative to plastic after clay; a single-use biodegradable which the plant roots can grow through, so you plant it along with your seedlings. It’s also made from what would otherwise be a waste material. Unfortunately, because it must be imported from south Asia, it comes with quite a high environmental cost.

What is it: Coir is a by-product of the coconut industry. It’s that fibrous, hairy stuff you find on the hard shell of a coconut, a mix of lignin and cellulose, and it’s extremely useful stuff: it’s also used in ship’s rigging, matting (mainly door mats) mattresses and potato sacks. It is, unusually for biodegradable materials, relatively waterproof which is what makes it such a popular product in horticulture.

How long do they last: Up to 12 months above ground before they go ‘hairy’ and are best planted in the ground. There they take a few months to biodegrade.

How are they made: Fibres are stripped from the coconut then softened in water, then mixed with latex, the sap from rubber trees, before being moulded into pots.

Cost: 50 9cm pots for £11 (but need to buy new each year)

Also available as: Hanging basket liners

Pros: Easy to re-wet as absorbs water easily. Available in every size from Jiffy propagation modules to large pots. Can be planted out in the garden without removing from the plant, avoiding root disturbance.

Cons: Coir has a high environmental footprint as it must be shipped from coconut-producing countries like India, Sri Lanka (between them the producers of 90% of the world’s coir supplies) and the Philippines, with all the carbon emissions that entails. And because these pots are not meant to be removed from the plants but are planted out with them, you have to buy in a new supply each year. Commercially, coir pots are often sold wrapped in plastic.

Stockists: It is surprisingly difficult to find larger coir pots. Small ones – propagation modules and pots up to 8cm – are readily available and the biodegradable pots you’ll most often find in garden centres. But I don’t use 8cm pots; I jump from modules to 10cm as I’ve found they need less watering, and anything below 8cm I can make myself at home. I did however find two UK sources for larger coir pots:

Green Gardener sells coir pots in three sizes, up to 16cm diameter.

The Hairy Pot Plant Company stocks plants ready-grown in coir pots as well as the pots themselves, via The Natural Gardener.

Plastic substitutes, Plastic-free gardening

The alternatives #1: Bamboo and cardboard

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OK so you want to replace the plastic pots in your garden? Here are the first of many options available to you (I’ll be going into detail on about 10 different materials over time; once I’m done you’ll find the full list on the Plastic Substitutes page).

Prices given are for 4″ (10cm) pots, just because it’s the size I use most; any smaller, you can make yourself more easily and more kindly to the environment at home (see Plastic Free Gardening to find out how).

Bamboo

bamboopots_greentones.co.uk
Bamboo pots from http://www.greentones.co.uk

One of the most useful natural materials on the planet, bamboo is harder than oak, and doesn’t swell or shrink like other woody products. In other words; it’s a great material for making plant pots.

What is it: If you’re not keen on the whole rustic terracotta schtick this is the one for you. It looks so much like plastic it really ought to be plastic – but it’s not, it’s biodegradable bamboo masquerading as plastic, funky colours and all. Great if you want a modern, sleek look; not so great if you’re after a practical solution to your potting supplies as the range is very limited.

How long do they last: 2-3 years

How are they made: Bamboo pots are made by mashing up the bits of bamboo left over from making furniture and so on and moulded into pots using binding agents – usually resin, or cornstarch – heated and pressurised to form the final shape.

Cost: £2 per pot for the high-end of the range; more usually around £3.99 for a set of five

Also available as: Plant labels

Pros: Looks and behaves the most like conventional plastic, and comes in a range of colours. Reusable, so you get good value for money.

Cons: Exceptionally difficult to source, and the range of sizes seems to be very limited – usually either 8cm or 13cm, the exception being the hybrid bamboo/rice husks/straw Biopots which do offer a good range. Very expensive (although to counter that, bear in mind that these can be used over and over so aren’t really comparable to single-use biodégradables). There is a company in China called Ningbo Frontier Plant Fiber Products which appears to be the main wholesale supplier, suggesting these are usually imported from the other side of the world – giving them a high environmental cost.

Stockists:
Jpots specialises in bamboo pots but I’m not sure whether or not they’re still trading. If so, they also claim a minimum 4-year lifespan – a year more than most bamboo pots.

Homeleigh Cornwall/Devon based garden centre stocking bamboo fibre pots, but 8cm only.

Greentones sells plant pots made of a combination of bamboo, corn starch, and rice husks.

Biopots made from bamboo, rice husks and straw. Grower pots range in size from 2½ inches up to 8 inches. The lifespan is one year outdoors (planted) and three years indoors (planted).

Cardboard, cellulose and paper

western-pulp-tomato-gravel
Tomatoes growing in cellulose pots by http://www.westernpulp.com

I love my little home made newspaper pots; I also save cardboard loo roll inners for sowing broad beans, sweet peas and the like. So I’m already sold on the idea of cardboard and paper growing. Turns out it’s one of the most promising materials for larger pots too.

What is it: Cellulose, from which cardboard and paper is made, is basically the woody fibres you get by mashing up plants. So cardboard, paper and cellulose itself are organic, biodegradable materials which readily decompose in a compost heap. They are also rigid enough to hold plants, so an obvious choice for making pots. These are single-use biodegradables; the plants grow into and through the pots and you plant them both out together.

How long do they last: About three months once planted

How are they made: You can actually make your own cardboard pots from ordinary cardboard boxes; all you need is a template and a stapler to hold the things together. I feel a how-to coming on…. Not right now, though, that’ll have to wait till I’m feeling a bit more Blue Peter ish.

But commercially available cellulose pots are made from newspaper and cardboard that is then shredded and mushed with water into a pulpy mess. This is then mixed with adhesives – usually resins – and binders before being shaped over a mould and dried. Note that the resins and binders may be natural or synthetic – and if they’re synthetic, that means non biodegradable plastics.

Cost: £11 for 12

Also available as: Hanging basket liners, plant carrying trays

Pros: As with all single-use biodegradable pots the plants grow through the walls of the pot, so there are no problems with root disturbance or plants getting pot bound. They therefore establish much more quickly than when grown in plastic pots. Cellulose is also a readily found material which has a very low carbon footprint especially when made by recycling paper and cardboard, and is locally sourced more or less wherever you happen to live in the world. Cheaper than most biodegradable pots too.

Cons: Paper and cardboard has a mould problem. After about three months the pots turn an unappetising shade of green or white and fluffy, neither of which is particularly pleasant. I know from my own experience with toilet roll inners that they can also sport quite large mushrooms too. These don’t seem to do the plants any harm and are easily picked off, but they aren’t pleasant to deal with. This is only a difficulty above ground and normally once planted these problems disappear, but it’s the main reason you don’t find cardboard pots on plants offered for sale in garden centres. Also the binding agents used to make cardboard pots are often synthetic (i.e. plastic) – so unbiodegradable. Look out for ‘fully biodegradable’ on labelling. If you don’t make your own cardboard pots they are usually imported, so come with relatively high carbon emissions, though not as high as other types of biodegradable pot imported from China and the US, as most cardboard pots available in the UK come from mainland Europe.

Stockists:

Romberg: A German company but the only one I could find making cellulose pots readily available in the UK, mainly via Ebay and Amazon. There doesn’t seem to be a central point where you can buy these but they are quite easy to find. Available in 11cm diameter pots; 8cm diameter and smaller available from www.gardencentrekoeman.co.uk.

Look out too for the EcoExpert range of cellulose pots from Modiform, currently under development: they are aiming for the wholesale market but could find their way into garden centres too.

Not available in the UK:

Kord Fiber Grow developed using recycled paper. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to find a stockist here in the UK: they seem to be mainly US and southern America, with one stockist in Germany.

Grow Organic do pulp pots made of recycled newspapers: but again, an American company (I am beginning to think I would find this a lot easier if I lived in the States).

Western Pulp: Fibre pots in a huge range of sizes, including some quite large, available through www.greenhousemegastore.com. The larger ones however are kept rigid using asphalt emulsion, which sounds awfully like a petroleum based product to me, so not that different from plastic really.

Other products:

Ellepot is a Danish company which makes paper sleeves for commercial propagating, a bit like a Jiffy 7 but made of paper and you flll it yourself.

Next: Clay and coconut fibre (coir)

Research

Where to recycle garden plastic #2: Garden centres

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There are about 500 million plastic plant pots in circulation at any one time. Which? Gardening did a survey a few years ago and worked out that the average gardener has at least 39 (they clearly didn’t visit my shed: I’ve never exactly counted them but I must have hundreds in there).

Back in the dark ages, when I started gardening, almost every garden centre had a big box outside where you could drop off all your surplus plant pots, bedding trays and modules and if you wanted to, pick up a few you were short of to use at home.

Reusing your plastic pots, seed trays and modules is better than recycling them (because you don’t use the extra energy required to recycle old plastic into new). You make the most of a finite resource by using it until it falls apart, thus keeping it out of the wider environment and the oceans too for as long as possible.

It’s still not the whole answer: even if you do reuse plastic until it’s begging for mercy, it will eventually crack, split or get squashed by an errant wheelbarrow. So it will, inevitably, end up in the plastic waste food chain in the long run, which generally means landfill or albatross stomachs. Which is why (at the risk of repeating myself) it’s better not to have the plastic in your garden in the first place.

Still, when you can’t use all the plastic you already have, it’s good to have somewhere you can share your surplus. The only trouble is, these days almost all garden centres have stopped doing this and the big boxes full of random pots and trays have largely disappeared.

There are some notable exceptions: Haskins Garden Centres in Hampshire, Stewarts Garden Centres in Hampshire and Dorset, and Cleeve Nursery near Bristol (among others) allow customers to drop off surplus pots for other people to pick up and reuse if they want. Others, like Barton Grange in Lancashire, have struck up deals with local recycling plants.

However all the larger garden centre chains, as far as I can see, have stopped. The largest of them all, the Garden Centre Group (including Wyevales) stopped their pot recycling service in 2011. Dobbies and Notcutts were doing a ‘bring back your pots’ scheme till 2012; but these days Notcutts undertakes to recycle 75% of its waste without specifying what, and Dobbies has a stupendously vague ‘sustainability policy’ on its website which makes no mention of plastic at all.

For the Garden Centre Group, it was all about the difficulties in finding someone to take the surplus away. They recognised that the scheme was popular with customers but couldn’t find anyone to undertake the huge task of sorting the many types of plastic used to make pots before recycling them. These days, there are several options (I’ll be going into these more in part 3 of this series) – so I will ask the GCG whether they are reconsidering.

Another major group, Squires, is ‘holding discussions with suppliers’ over alternatives to plastic. That could mean anything, of course. I remember my local Squires in West Horsley, Surrey having a big box of pots outside the front, into which I would regularly skip dive for whatever I needed; I asked them why they took it away and they told me they became inundated with plastic pots nobody wanted, whereupon they were lumbered with the task of getting rid of it. You can sympathise; garden centres, after all, are meant to be selling us plants (well, mostly), not processing waste.

People do complain loudly and bitterly about the disappearance of pot recycling bins at garden centres. But the more I think about the whole idea of taking your plastic to the local garden centre, the more I think it’s not such a good thing after all. It’s easy, of course. But aren’t you just passing on the problem? There’s no guarantee that all the pots you take to the garden centre will be picked up by someone else and reused, of course.

And what happens to the ones nobody wants? Some garden centres do take great care and some considerable trouble over finding a company they know will recycle their customers’ pots: Cleeve Nursery, stand up and take a bow. Others join a service like ashortwalk which collects and repurposes rigid plastic for recycling – so again, you know it’s going to be properly recycled (this and other national pot recycling schemes will appear in more detail in the next bit of this series).

But can you really guarantee you know for sure your garden centre is recycling the pots which are left behind? I suspect this might be the reason why a lot of garden centres have now stopped collecting pots: because they are, on the whole, well run and principled places which care about the environment and don’t want to have to throw away all those pots either.

You may argue that it’s garden centres which create a lot of the plastic waste in the first place. But it isn’t, actually. It’s the suppliers who supply the garden centres: the wholesale nurseries and growers and international mass plant producers who send huge shipments of plants around the country, all in plastic pots and trays, to fill garden centre shelves. And the garden centres themselves don’t have a great deal of say in that, as there are precious few wholesalers (actually only one that I’ve found) who do supply in biodegradable pots, so if garden centres supplied only those plants they’d have very thinly stocked shelves.

The real irony is that plastics recyclers – the people who turn your plant pots into plastic garden furniture and the like – find it hard to get hold of enough rigid plastic for the products they need to make. So it’s not like there’s no demand for the things. It strikes me that the whole system needs sorting out and joining up somehow. It’s just that I don’t think garden centres are the ones who should be doing it.