Pot Bound, is there a cure?

My current problem is that a local (ten minutes away) garden centre does a lunch on Tuesdays for the over sixties for £5.49 (with members discount). For this you get a main meal, a sweet and a filter coffee. Extremely good value in a spotless cafeteria.
It's become a regular Tuesday trip. Of course to reach the restaurant, you have to walk through practically the whole garden centre. No amount of hurrying will get my wife through the place. Yesterday it cost me £25 for two acer palmatums, an "orange dream" and an "emerald lace." A "special offer" to members, instead of £36. It's a good selling technique.
Previously I tried to limit our visits to Bent's garden centre down the East Lancs road, to once every few months as lunch there, a main meal for two, a Peroni and an an orange juice comes to around £27. Then "after a look round" I've rarely got out of there for much under £100.
This "new arrangement" is likely to work out more expensive.

I've got to admit our sort of gardening is expensive as I haven't the time or interest in "bringing on or propogating."

I'm a bit of a "budget freak" (old work habits die hard) in that I plan out and monitor my income and expenditure for each year on Excel spread sheets (I've already done the budget for 2011 and included anticipated increases for the usual costs). There's always a "contingency" to account for any of my wife's; "What I thought was..."

I also run a spread sheet for credit card spending, (I check it once a week "on-line" to make sure there aren't any "rogue debits") broken down into various columns. "Garden" is by far and away the highest.

Still, you can't take it with you, can you?

 

Hello D R: travelled up from Surrey watch the last game at St Helens Rugby League ground via Eat Lancs Road (your message reminded me). I think the 'pot' or should it be 'pots' garden looks great and the plants look particularly healthy. Do you use standard compost with added nutrients or other?

On budget matters agree with the 'can't take it with you' approach with more 'ski days' (spend kids inheritance).

 

Hi barnaby.

We've special fertilizer that came with the orange and lemon trees and the also for the olive. They all are in a mixture of John Innes and soil.
Apart from the fruit trees I give the others a weak solution of "Miracle Grow" every week.
We've just filled the last empty pot with the Bougainvillea which arrived today..

We're lucky, we've three kids who've done very well for themselves all have good jobs and are now better off than we are! But they all have a different attitude to money than people of our generation.

They encourage us not to save and "spend, spend, spend," but it's a habit I just can't drop. With my company and state pensions plus my annuity, we're "quite comfortable." and I can always afford any of my wife's "What I thought was's." But I feel I have to save "something" each month. We've lived through periods of 15% inflation, so you never know what's round the corner. I occasionally look at new cars as our latest "soft roader" is now five years old, but it's only done 27,000 miles so I think it'd be a waste of money to change (and learn where another lot of switches and levers are).

 

This is hopefully the last pot on the patio. The bougainvillea arrived from "Garden Bargains" yesterday.
I'm not over impressed, I've said as much in an e-mail to them. They are very good, they've twice replaced plants with which I wasn't too happy. In both cases the original ones ending up doing as well as the new ones. That's why we've four Loropetalum chinensis black pearls, two in each pot. They also replaced the orange and lemon trees which didn't survive the winter.
But it is late in the year and it was only a tenner. It'll be the first to go in the rabbit shed once it starts to get cold.

 

I have the same problem DH, our back garden is paved so nearly everthing is in pots. I did take some to work to make the garden look less cluttered when the house was up for sale (the bungalow we wanted sold before ours so it's off the market now). I bought an Acacia Baileyana Purpurea last may at 1metre high and repotted it immediately, it is now 3meters high and has to be tied to the fence as like the previous Acacia which grew to nearly 4metres in it's pot, they always blow over.

 

The pots are mainly to improve the view from the french windows for my wife, who has MS. The rest of the garden is beyound our koi pool, so it's a bit of an effort for her to get down there. As most of the plants are on pot movers we can ring the changes. We've several roses in pots and she likes to get out there occasionally and pick a few for vases indoors.

The plants do get a bit blown about when it's windy, if I forget to close the side door in the fence between the house and the garage!

 

I presume the Bougie will winter under cover or something. -3c is their limit for survival and in my experience if they get through a mild winter they usually don't get going till June or even later.