Ebay plug plants or roots ?

[Marie99]

Hi

Just wondering if either buying plug plants or bare roots from ebay is worth it?
Im after some pineapple mint and chocolate mint poss some strawberry mint which I havnt found on sale at the places I have been to in my area and want to start them off as soon as I can to get a decent size plant in the summer.

OR

Should I just wait to see if and local places end up selling them so I can see the plant im buying?

Thanks

[Kristen]

eBay has some good'uns and some wrong'uns of course ... Caveat Emptor and all that.

If you find a keen hobbyist shifting some spare plants then i think 99% of the time you would be very happy with the result - you will probably get bigger / better plants than a garden centre. Packing can sometime be "wanting" from such sellers. Even if totally OTT sometimes it is done without skill and knowledge and thus can suffer more in transit than the Pros who have tried and tested systems.

Only other downside is that you might be importing bugs / weeds from someone's garden too - I have sometimes potted up plants I have bought like that (same with car boot sales etc.) to quarantine them until I am sure that they are healthy.

If buying from commercial people then you are likely to have good recourse if you are not happy, and perhaps choose sellers who have lots of feedback and high percentage "satisfied" values - if they have got 10,000 positive feedbacks they will be keen to look after their reputation.

[Olorin2001]

If you take a look at people feedback on eBay before buying that helps.
And eBay has transformed from being mainly private online auctions, to commercial companies only offering Buy it Now - only about 10% are private individuals offering spare plants for sale.

[Marie99]

Thanks a lot for the good advice, I will certainly look at the feed back Cheers