Lavender Munstead plug plants

Hi,

Recently purchase some lavender plug plants with a view to doing a long border next year.

They have been in the greenhouse for the last 2 weeks as they did seem rather delicate on arrival and the weather has been so windy and wet was a bit wary about putting them outside.

Have only ever used large potted lavenders before so not sure how to treat these plug plants. As you can see they are sending up some long shoots; wonder if I should be nipping them back to promote bushyness or do they need to keep growing up.

Cultural instructions came with the plants but were just too general to know whats right for these little lavenders.

thanks

 

Hi Ricky, I've recently received these plugs and have them growing-first time I've done plugs. Just wondering how yours have turned out?

 

Hi,

Well bit surprised you have got some plug plants so late in the season ? - assume you have some shelter /greenhouse /little bit of heating to get them growing.

The ones pictured in my post above were several weeks old and the originals were only about 40 - 50mm tall.

To answer my own question, the long spikes turned out to be flowering stems so I cut them back to concentrate on bushy growth for next year.

At the moment they are about the size of a fist and looking ok, but am keeping them in the cold, but frost free greenhouse, again to try and get some good sized plants for bedding next year.

Not mentioned in the above post, but might be of interest to you, is that the first batch I received from Van Meuwen were all amost going over - see pic below.

Seems Lavenders, a member of the herb family, are very prone to disease /fungus in the seeding stages.
Thankfully they replaced them without any hassle, the second batch was 95% ok.

However, I gave them all a good spraying of Fungus Fighter when potting up and a few weeks later to ensure nothing took hold, seems to have worked ok.

How are yours looking, a brightish green and healthy ?

 

Hi ricky, thanks for the update. Interesting as I had bought the plugs from thompson and morgan, 3 different varieties and one of the varieties (can't remember which one off the top of my head) was sloppy and no good (i must email them!)

I've got a heated greenhouse so keeping them in there ower winter...all 270 plugs i did are growing well so far-lavenders are bright green

 

Hi,

270 - wow , you must have a large garden and a large greenhouse to keep them in !

If you had a batch that failed certainly worth a mail to T&M, though a photo of the poor ones does help your case.
Seems the plug plants are mainly sold out , so perhaps they can only off a refund rather than replacement this year.

Always seems to be a bit of a gamble with mail order plants though found VM quiet good and quickly supplied replacements for any that failed to grow.
Another well advertised supplier of young plants Hayloft were very poor, ordered 3 lots of different plants from them, but many just hacked down to size to fit in their large plug postage containers, over half never survived the first week.