Where to order Tomato plug plants.

Don't mean to put a damper on it - If you plan to visit Chatsworth Gardens and the house - get a 2nd Mortage. If you also plan to visit their "farmers' shop" - it makes Waitrose look cheaper than Aldi and Lidl. BUT they have a great garden centre and nice coffee area, with no entrance fee (yet). Plenty of good B&B's and pubs as you said P.S. - no Waitrose round here, and I'm a great Lidl fan - nice variety of very low priced flower & Veg seeds - many from abroad.

 

I agree with Chatsworth. There are plenty of garden centres around here (I'm just outside Bakewell), there's a couple at Tansley I use

 

iOh yes Chesterfieldgardener, I had a fair idea that Chatsworth would be good at extracting the last penny out of your back pocket. Thanks for the warning tho!
I get the vaste majority of my veg seeds from Aldi and often pick up seed at the end of sesaon for buttons from all sorts of places. All veg seeds that I am interested in anyway is fine for maybe a couple of years apart from Parsnip, having said that a pal gave me a packet of Parsnip seed from last season and I sowed some of it in my new toy (heated propogator...bingo have good germination). Chatsworth isn't the only stately home that knows how to charge. I visited Floors Castle in the Scottish borders last year. Their garden centre/walled garden is very nice but OMG the prices. I left with nothing! I'm very fortunate as I can get just about any plants I want wholesale, so say a Rhododendron (my favourite) priced for the public at £20 I can get for about £12. I am also a great believer in doing swaps. I swapped about 20 different types of herbaceous plants with another member of GC. We both knew what a decent chunk of something looked like!!!!! and consequently I was delighted with my box of goodies and so was she with what I had sent her. Some of the things we swapped would have been really difficult to obtain and not sold in your average garden centre. Ok there was a bit of hard work involved with digging stuff up and packing it (all bare rooted) but we only spent £17 each to get our big boxes of plants shipped to each other. That works out at less than a £1 per new plant and we got way bigger plants than you get from the likes of mail order places. The snag is to find someone who is like minded. There are some on here who are only out for what they can get. I offered free, Meconopsis Lingholm seed to any GC member who wanted it. I have been very sucessful with the seed and now have maybe 100 plants. I got quite a few people wanting the seed. Some were fine and asked if they could pay the postage and said thanks when they got the seed others did not even say thanks. I won't bother to offer it again. If you maybe didn't know, Lingholm seed is fertile while many varities of Meconopsis have sterile seed and can only be increased by division. More often than not commercial seed is pretty awful and unlikely to produce much either. Only mentioning this as I see you must like them!? To me Meconopsis are the most beautiful of all the kinds of herbaceous plants that I can grow with the climate we have. Stunning blue, flower for ages, flower after the Spring bonanza and before many summer flowering herbaceous so fill a bit of a gap and don't seem to get too bashed if windy or raining..love em! The attached are some of my Lingholm grown from seed.

Thanks Ellen. I might well have a wee nosey in Tansley. Really looking forward to seeing your part of the world.

 

Plenty of places to eat & drink as well

 

The photo (4 years ago) is in fact M. baileyi a.k.a Meconopsis betonicifolia (arguments still going on about the name since reclassification in 2009). That one vanished mysteriously when it died down. So I then bought 2 Baileyis and 1 Lingholm 2 years ago, and all 3 did well 1st year. Again, 1 of the Baileyis vanished, but the other 2 are just showing leaves again this year. I did gather seeds from all 3 end of last year, and traded them in at a seed-swap. T.b.h - I'm too impatient to grow them from seed, plus have heard endless reports of them being difficult to grow to a fully fledged flowering state.
My main gardening interests are veggies, although I include a variety of shrubs and flowers where there is space.