Plants for free

Having a new garden and lots of borders to plant up can be a bit of a drain on the finances. Trips to the garden centre for a few bags of compost often result in a few plants being added to the order. It's not often that I come away from a garden centre without buying at least one new plant. But there are other ways of acquiring plants. Fellow garden friends are often only too pleased to donate cuttings.  Visits to open gardens are a good source of plants, often at a reasonable price. A packet of seeds can produce many pots of plants.

A lot of the plants for our new garden have come from our old garden which now belongs to our daughter and family. Some of them were brought with us when we moved, but I didn't bring anywhere near as many as I had wanted to. I just didn't have the time with all the other preparations for moving house. Although on moving day when we loaded up the car with plants there looked to be an awful lot of them. Now it's Spring this is a good time to dig up clumps of plants and divide them and my daughter has been happy for me to go round to her garden and do this.

So for a couple of weekends I have been round to her garden with my fork, spade and a variety of plant pots and carrier bags lifting and dividing plants. Spring is the best time of year to do this with most plants. Back home I potted up the plants as there were so many I didn't have time to get them in the ground immediately.

Some of them were big clumps like this sedum which needed splitting up with a couple of forks. I thought I would get two or three plants from it but it split into seven. Some of them were quite small, but a few weeks later had grown much bigger.

The back area of our house now looks like a plant nursery with all these plants lined up waiting to be planted. There were very few plants in our new garden so we have a lot of space to fill in the borders. I can see I will be kept busy for the next week or two planting all this lot up.