So last week I was in Middletown getting a part for my ratchet impact drill at one of the box stores when I saw something quite distressing. They were selling four tiny seed potatoes in a beautifully done package for three dollars and ninety nine cents. The potatoes couldn’t have even weighed a quarter pound all together. Besides being complete highway robbery, it is way too early to even think about getting seed potatoes. What’s worse, is that I know they will sell the majority of those beautifully packaged potatoes just because of the packaging. They had a whole variety of spring starter plants already there too. Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and grapes, all sprouted with leaves and I saw a couple of blossoms on the blueberries. Now the weather this week has been pretty nice to say the least but it is still way too early in the season for these plants. Because they are leaved out, you can’t put them outside yet as one good cold night will freeze off the leaves and probably stress the young plants to death. So now you need to keep them inside in a very sunny spot, but the small package that they come in will dry out almost every day. So now you need to re-pot the plants so that you don’t have to water once or twice a day. If you have ever tried doing this, it is easier said than done. I know people get spring fever and all, but that is a lot of unnecessary work. We don’t even get our seed potatoes in until sometime in April because once they come out of cold storage they want to sprout right away which greatly reduces their shelf life. So we get them in much closer to the time when you can put them out in the garden. Getting potatoes this early will mean you either need to put them in a cold place, approximately forty to forty-five degrees, without letting them freeze, or put them in small pots and start growing them indoors, which is a bad idea. Root crops don’t do well when started in pots. This goes for carrots, radishes and turnips as well. Root crops are best suited for planting directly in the garden when the time is right. 

  It breaks my heart to see all these plants as when I saw them it was obvious this display was just set up. The display was completely full and all the packaged boxed plants looked happy and healthy. The unfortunate thing is that these plants are in sealed packages that cannot be watered and they only have a shelf life of about one week. Unlike the potatoes that could last three or four weeks, these starter berry bushes will mostly end up in the trash. That is part of the reason for the high pricing on such small plants as the wholesaler has already figured in a fifty to seventy percent loss as the box stores only pay the wholesaler for what sells. Any plant that dies just gets sent back or thrown in the trash at no cost to the box store. It’s how they work on almost everything they sell. If you ever wondered how much theft they must suffer in a month, don’t worry they don’t pay for it the wholesalers do. But the wholesalers or manufacturers now figure that lose right into the price before they send it to the box stores. If they didn’t, they would go broke. So if you want to buy overpriced plants way too early in the season, the box stores have them. I saw these in Middletown, but I’m sure Monticello and Honesdale have them as well. Or if you want to wait until spring really gets here, we’ll have nicer plants and plain potatoes that you pick out of a fifty pound bag yourself for a lot less. Spring arrives on the calendar next Friday, but May is getting closer too.