we have them at Home Depot too. I feel so bad, for the people that think it is time to plant... just because we sell....

and I can't even tell them not to buy them, cause I could loose my job....

On the other hand, we get calls for all kinds of plants that are better planted in May or June...

Moni

Moni,
It is like the greenhouse owners I talked to 2 weeks said. They used to never start tomatoes, peppers, ect early as it was too early. The people would call and then go somewhere else and buy them. So now they start some early for those that feel they have to plant too early. And today I received an email update from a large greenhouse owner in Amarillo stating that is was too early for many of the flowers found now in the box stores around there and even up this way. He said you could plant pansies violas, stock, dianthus and snapdragons if you want early color but it was too early for marigolds, impatiens, petunias and many of the others found now. But they do it because many will buy even though it is too early. And I say all of this and I'm heading out in a few minutes to do some finish up planting. I have most of my tomatoes and potatoes planted. Will start some potatoes from seed tonight along with the final flat of grafting rootstock and what will probably be the final tomatoes unless I lose some or something. This is earlier than I usually plant my early ones. I will also pot up some tonight and graft my first real rootstock and scion plants tonight. I plan on having some spares to keep back for a while in case the a freeze or something else gets some. I have several large pots I plan on potting up too and holding some as long as possible. I will pot up a some early plants tonight that are a ft tall or taller. Jay

As long as people buy the plants early, the stores will have them early.

I haven't been in our Wal-Mart since Sunday, but the only warm-season edible crops they had then were tomatoes and peppers. They had tons and tons of cool-season crops though.

This was the first week I saw warm-season flowers like marigolds in stores instead of just the cool-season flowers.

It isn't spring yet, but it is getting closer every day, and I am ready.

Dawn it is probably close to time for your area for some of the flowers ect. Here it is way too early. But have heard of some stores having some like I posted above. But as long as someone buys them they will continue to put them out.

You could be mean like I was once. We lived in a neighborhood of newer homes and younger people that could not wait to get out and plant flowers early every year. I saves some flowers that were thrown a way at a cemetery, some still looked very nice, they were artificial flowers. About the time they were planting all their pretty flowers I dug around in the box where I had mine stored and fixed them in the flower bed. Of course they were not the same type of flowers but most of the people that walked around the neighbor hood in the evening did not know one flower from the other.

My flowers did not grow very fast, but in a couple of weeks we had a very cold spell and all their flowers were dead and mine still looked very nice. Some that came up to check my flowers did not think it was as funny as I did.

Larry

Leslie, Strawberies tolerate lots of cool weather and I think they'd be fine to buy and transplant now. I've planted them as early as January. They have had them in the stores here since January and that's when they get them in every yaer. Just last week I was in a Wal-Mart that had some gorgeous huge strawberry plants in gallon pots.

Jay, Who knows what in the heck to plant here? We are on a roller coaster ride with nights as cold as 23 degrees last week, and a forecast high around 80 for tomorrow. I'm pretending the cold has ended and am running full-steam ahead with warm-season stuff now. Of course, I wouldn't be doing that if I didn't have 5,000 s.f. of floating row cover in my garage. Having that kind of protective material allows me to take some risks with plants that I otherwise would not take.

One of my Red Beefsteak tomato plants in a big container has a huge megabloom that consists of three fused flowers. I have just thumped that thing to death the last two days trying to ensure it pollinates/fertilizes. Think of the fun I'd be missing if Home Depot didn't carry the big tomato plants in 5" peat pots in February. That's one plant I don't mind seeing in stores early.

Larry, That is too funny. I have a friend who keeps plastic or silk flowers in urns on her shady front porch all the time. They are far and away the prettiest flowers you'll see as you drive down her road. She does a really good job with them--she switches them out to match the seasons and holidays, and they always look realistic--nothing like blue sunflowers or something that you'd never see in nature.

Dawn

I was wondering when I saw tomatoes in the stores around here. That is not right that stores do that.

I am ready to get out there though and start planting some stuff!

It is hard enough trying to outguess this OK weather, without stores pushing us to plant earlier. I am totally confused over how to plant this year.
I have potatoes and onions in the ground, with the idea that I will replace them if needed, but I really wonder if this might be a warm year that will get too hot too fast if I wait too long to continue planting. So, for now, I am concentrating on preparing pea and greens plots and repotting earlier seedlings.
I do keep backups and potted plants that can be transported inside and out, but do not want to get left behind if freezing weather is over.
Ron

Ezzirah,

It isn't right but the stores do it and they always have to some extent in the last couple of decades, although I think it has been much worse the last 5 or 10 years than it used to be.

Gardeners often are impulse buyers---getting excited and all ready to start the season too early, buying plants or seeds merely because of outrageous claims that cannot be verified and that sound too good to be true, buying herbicides, fertilizers or pesticides that promise dream results, etc. Retailers take advantage of that. As gardeners, it is our responsibility to ignore the hype and to educate ourselves before we spend money on plants, seed and products.

Last year I saw 6-packs of sugar snap peas (fresh shipments, not old ones) on the shelves at some local stores in late May and early June. How many new, unsuspecting gardeners bought them and took them home only to have the heat and disease kill the cool-season plants 2 or 3 weeks after they were purchased when the warm-season was well under way? It is just as wrong for the stores to sell cool-season plants in latest spring or early summer as it is for them to sell cool-season plants a month, 2 or 3 before their correct planting time. Will it ever change? Only if educated gardeners stop buying the plants too early, having them freeze and then replacing them. (That's a win-win situation for the stores 'cause they sell twice as many plants.)

Stores are going to give gardeners what they want, and if people are requesting warm-season plants in January and February, the commercial growers and the retail stores are going to do their best to fulfill those requests because they know if they don't have the plants people want when they want them, those people will take their business elsewhere. That is just how things are now, and unfortunately it puts nursery growers in an awkward position where they are growing and selling plants too early, even though they know better.

Back in the olden days when I was a kid in the 1960s, you didn't even have to know what to plant when because the nurseries didn't get the plants in too early. So, if you walked into a store and saw onion plants or bundles of cabbage plants (they were young plants sold in bare root bundles that you had to take home and plant right away), etc., you knew it was time to buy them, take them home and plant them. The local stores wouldn't have tomato plants in the stores until maybe a week or 10-days before your local recommended planting times. It made it easy for inexperienced gardeners to learn the order in which plants went into the ground since it wasn't possible to buy plants too early, plant them too early and lose them to frost. Nowadays, in the stores, pretty much anything goes, and that can cost inexperienced gardeners a lot of money. Also back in the olden days of the 1960s through as late as the 1980s, most plants bought in stores were very small. My dad used to buy tomato plants in little pots that were maybe 1.5" x 1.5" in the 1960s and 1970s and when I started buying tomato plants on my own in the 1980s, they were available in either small six-packs or 2" x 2" pots. The larger plants in 3", 4" or even 5" or 6" pots slowly became available beginning in the 1990s. Now, in the 2000s, people can walk into stores and, if they are willing to spend $20.00 or more, they can buy tomato plants in 3 to 5 gallon pots in about May and those plants will be in full bloom and have half-grown fruit on them. I'm thinking that people willing to pay that much for one tomato plant will be eating some mightly expensive home-grown tomatoes!

Retail has turned into a very regimented, calendar-oriented industry that puts product of all kinds in stores well before we should be buying them. Who needs to buy a bathing suit in January or kids pool toys in February? Do we really need to buy Easter candy the day after Valentine's Day? How about school supplies being in stores around the Fourth of July? Christmas decorations in September? I hate the way the stores rush the seasons in all areas, not just in gardening.

Dawn

Ron, I feel the same way. I have onions, potatoes and peas planted, and have lettuce, spinach, carrots and radishes seeded, etc. I wonder if they all will get a chance to grow properly and mature at the "normal" time and produce a good crop, of if the heat will arrive to say too early and mess them up.

I have fairly large tomato plants in containers where they will grow their entire lives, and two of them are in bloom and several others are getting close. It seems ridiculous to have fruit setting in March, but I like it because that means we could harvest the first tomatoes in late April or early May. They are in containers, though, so I can control their weather exposure to a large extent.

I have warm-season plants ready to go into the ground and am going to start putting some of them into the ground today, along with broccoli and cabbage plants I've raised from seed. After last year's early onset of heat, I've done everything I can---from starting seeds much earlier indoors to prewarming raised beds by covering them with plastic, to ensure I can plant warm-season crops early in order to beat the heat. I feel like, if ever there was a year to jump the gun a bit and plant early, this is it.

Like you, I do keep a significant amount of back-up plants handy in case of a late freeze, and I have frost blanket-weight floating row covers and other materials that can be used to protect plants from late freezes.

It does make planting confusing when it is warm enough to plant warm-season crops while finishing up the planting of cool-season crops.

In the very late 1990s and earliest 2000s, we kept having early springs here in Love County that made the cool-season plants bolt before they could produce a crop. For several years I just stopped planting cool-season crops because the heat kept getting them before they could produce enough of a crop to make growing them worthwhile. Then, around 2005 or 2006, it started staying cooler longer and I could harvest cool-season crops before the heat ruint their ability to produce. Now, last year and possibly this year remind me of the early 2000s again.

Who knows what in the world to do? I am just planting a bit of everything in the hopes that I'll get good production from everything before it gets too hot. Last year it was mostly too hot. Maybe this year we'll get a break and it won't get quite as hot quite as early. If today's heat is in indicator of what's coming, the cool-season crops may be short-lived.

Dawn

Boy I hope that is not the case..I have a bunch that I am thinking I will set out to start hardening off since I am home sick anyway.

Dawn - I hear ya on the rushing the seasons. I swear, I hate seeing Christmas decorations in August! I don't think I even saw thanksgiving this year, it went straight from Halloween to Christmas in the stores. It is just a damn shame they are doing that to gardening stuff as well.

Regarding Moni's comment way up above about not being able to tell customers not to buy plants: I was buying a tomato plant and the guy who checked me out actually asked me if I had a way to protect it if it got too cold outside. I didn't need the warning, but I really appreciated it. I hope he doesn't get in trouble for doing that because I don't think it would deter most people anyway. If Wal-mart would stock frost blankets, it would actually create more business!

I think I have seen frost blankets in Wal-Mart; maybe it was Sam's. It isn't just Wal-Mart; I was in a garden center yesterday and it was bursting with new stuff. They had plugs of marigolds, begonias, impatients etc. but they were ones they were going to pot up for the greenhouse. It would actually be good business for beginners and non gardeners to have success with their plants, so warning about frost and the proper time to plant might help future sales. There are people who mistakenly think they have a brown thumb because they have been sold plants unsuitable for the time and area.

Ezzirah, I have noticed Thanksgiving getting lost in the shuffle nowadays too. It seems like Thanksgiving has faded into the background, at least as far as the media is concerned, and all the attention is going to the stupid Black Friday sales. You couldn't pay me to step foot into a store on the day after Thanksgiving!

Leslie, Some Wal-Mart's do sell floating row covers. Sometimes they are sold folded and in flat-paks instead of on rolls. I also have seen them in the last week in Lowe's and Home Depot. One thing that puzzled me for years was that the stores themselves weren't covering up their own plants (which clearly were in the garden center way too early) with frost blankets. Instead, they just let them die if they had a frost or a snowstorm. This year, when I went into my favorite Lowe's and Home Depot in the D-FW metro area looking for early tomato plants for my big containers, they actually had hoops up over their tables of plants in the garden center and the frost blankets were still over the hoops at noon. Good for them! Ironically that store didn't have any frost blankets for sale at that same time. I think they were missing a huge marketing opportunity, but they had an off-brand of Wall O Waters so at least they had something for plant protection.

When I buy the early tomato plants, someone in the Garden Center invariably asks me if I am actually going to put them in the ground "right now". I always tell them no, that they are going into larger containers I can carry inside at night. This year I abbreviated the explanation even more by just saying "they are going into the greenhouse" which is, in fact, where I kept them for their first couple of days. I do appreciate that they are looking out for unsuspecting gardeners who might not realize they are buying warm-season plants while it is still too cold.

On a funnier note, we were looking in that store the week before the tomato plants came in. Now, I am not stupid. If I don't see them, I don't ask for them because it is clear they don't have them. However, when a clerk said "are you looking for something?" my non-gardening spouse said we were looking for tomato plants, and we had to listen to the technically-correct explanation that it was too cold to set out tomato plants and that they wouldn't have tomato plants for a long, long time yet. I skipped the long reply that I always put them in containers that can go inside in cold weather. The kicker? They had tomato plants in the store a mere 4 days later! That clerk knew her planting dates and likely was a gardener herself, but I knew their store's routine better than she did. lol

Helen, I agree with everything you said. Can you imagine how many people think they cannot grow things when the real issue is that they just are planting at the wrong time.

Every year a total stranger or two will stop by my garden in mid-May thru mid-June when the veggie garden generally looks about as good as it ever looks, and we'll chit chat and they will tell me they are getting ready to plant a garden of their own. That's when the conversation becomes less fun because they don't understand that they have missed the planting season for most crops, and when you tell them that, they really don't want to hear it either. Sometimes people just have to learn for themselves.

I am just dying to plant warm-season flowers. I was so flower-starved last year with the long drought. However, even though it was 83 degrees here yesterday, it is still often in the 30s at night, so the warm season flowers remain a dream at this point. We have been so warm for so long that it is hard to believe it is early March---the fields are green and many trees are leafing out and it makes it feel more like April.

Last night, something was buzzing and humming in the woods--it sounded like the typical summer racket made by grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, tree frogs, etc. Now that the cold front has roared through, I bet the woods are dead silent tonight.

Dawn