It’s so easy to get carried away with plug plants, says Ruth
For gardeners, it is spring rather than Christmas that is the most wonderful time of the year, because these are the weeks, so rich with optimism and promise, that we make our plans for the year ahead.
One of the items at the top of my shopping list is plug plants, those excellent little growers that sit somewhere between seedling and maturity. The range of plug plants available, both ornamental and vegetable, reminds me of a pick’n’mix sweet shop - it is hard to stop once you start filling your basket. And although many of the plants are tender varieties, such as bedding dahlias, petunias and fuchsias, I have found that if you lift them in autumn before the first frosts, they will happily sit out winter in a frostfree room or porch and can be used again the following year.
Garden centres and online retailers have them in abundance now, very often with decent discounts for the more plants you buy, and they are an excellent way of filling borders and containers with interest and colour. Someone has already done the hard graft of raising the plants from seed, so the plugs we buy are a handy halfway house. All we really need to do is move them into larger containers of compost -I use multipurpose - and continue to raise them in a greenhouse, safe from late frosts.
Keep an eye out for pests that will love their fresh, tender leaves
