Visiting my local Home Depot yesterday I was amazed to see them selling vegetables in 4" size pot's for$2.98. We sell our 4" size peppers for $1.99. Of course they come with a bio-degradable pot, ours come in plastic pots. Other than that I cannot see why they are selling them for that price. Never the less they we're quite picked through by anxious shoppers.
The quality of plant material that they sell at our Placerville Home Depot is evident by these pictu
res. The plants arrive and put on pallets crammed together, then left that way for way to long. This is lousy horticulture, and an embarrassment I would think for the corporation?
The best looking displays at our Home Depot? The pallet after pallet of Scotts Miracle-Gro fertilizer and soils. Considering the care these plants receive it's a "miracle" they are purchased.
How does Scotts feel having their product displayed along side these quality plants?
Am I picking on Home Depot here? Sure! I have watched for years how Home Depot crushed any local competition by undercutting the prices of better run independent garden centers. The myth of Home Depot being the cheapest is just that, a myth.
I don't know what's going on in the rest of the country, but here the Home Depot Gard
en Center can do nothing but improve our business and other local garden businesses. Where are all the Home Depot Certified Nurserypeople they are 
always talking about? Does anyone care that these plants are doomed from the get go? Who grows plants for Home Depot anymore? As a grower I would be ashamed to see my plants treated this way. As a grower I should know this is what's going to happen if I do still to them.
The nursery industry has fragmented between growers of plant material shown above, and quality growers. You cannot tell me that a grower, or nursery like Home Depot is cut from the same cloth as honest horticulturalists who would cringe at what I saw. One is just in it to turn units, while the other really cares if the plant survives at your home.
We will not buy from growers that supply Home Depot. I was going to buy some citrus from a certain grower until I saw their trees stuffed into the plant gulag at The Depot. Sorry, but that indicates a business practice I just do not want part of. I know Home Depot's in other parts of the country may be better run. Isn't there something the County Agricultural Inspector should be doing here? Isn't the sale of obviously dying plants somehow wrong?
I would love to hear back from someone at Home Depot or Scotts on what they think of this.