Plant pain
Every year I work on soft landscape installation projects and it’s usually very rewarding and fun. You can see changes in one or two days. But there is one associated pain: nobody makes plans for unwanted plants which get edited out of the landscape. They go on the back of the truck and eventually end up on a green waste pile.
This is why I often joke that I will put the plants up for sale on Craigslist. But it never happened. Until now.
Landscape edit
It was a simple enough task, but not easy. We had Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ sticking out of our native Salal (Gaultheria shallon) ground cover. It had been planted by the previous owner and now it had to go.
Now, digging through salal wasn’t much fun but at least I learned something. I had no idea what Crocosmia corms looked like until I dug them up. Corms are “short, vertical, swollen underground plant stems that serve as storage organs”. Some of the corms are huge.
Profit
I could have dumped the corms on the back of the truck and gone home, but I have side-hustle blog posts to compose. So, this was my chance. Armed with two buckets of perfectly good Crocosmia corms, I made a posting on Facebook marketplace. There is nothing wrong with Craigslist, of course; it’s just that Facebook was much easier.
Facebook approved my post very quickly and it took just a few hours to get messages from interested people. One day later I achieved my dream. I sold a bag of corms to a Persian housewife looking for pretty perennials. And Crocosmias are beautiful. Just make sure you have enough room for them.
We met at a nearby recreation center with masks on and I gave her more than the advertised 25 corms. Incidentally, I gave away the others to friends and soccer parents. Once they establish in your garden, the Crocosmias will put on annual shows. And the only thing you have to do is cut back the grass-like foliage in winter. You can also collect the seeds.
Conclusion
Don’t throw out perfectly good plants. Share them or sell them on Facebook marketplace or other platforms. People love plants and they will take them, especially when they’re cheap. Just visit a garden club plant sale to see the hordes of people looking to score new and cheap plants.
