Burpee has been in the seed and agriculture business since 1876. The company has morphed through the years. Buying vegetable plants online is one of their latest offerings.
The Burpee website is easy to navigate. It was useful to read the customer reviews for many of the vegetable seed and plant offerings. We selected varieties that people were enthusiastic about.
The best thing about buying plants online at Burpee is the amazing choice of vegetable plant varieties, from heirlooms to hybrids. Burpee also has exclusive plants that they have developed. You can mix-and-match. So, for example, if you have room for six tomato plants in your garden, you don’t need to buy a six-pack of one tomato variety You can instead get once plant each of six different tomato varieties.
Prices are quite a bit higher than what you would pay at a local garden center, especially with shipping costs. However, Burpee does offer discount codes and specials. For the mix-and-match veggies, at the time of writing, prices seem to range between $4 and $6 per plant, not considering discounts.
The plants will be shipped on a date that corresponds to your growing zone. So if you order a tomato plant in March, and live in zone 6, they won’t ship until May.
After leaving the greenhouse, our plants got here amazingly quickly, via UPS. They arrived within 24 hours of being shipped. Tracking shows they left Burpee at 6:20 pm on a Monday and they arrived at 11:00 am on the next day (Tuesday). We do live within a 5 hour drive of a Burpee facility, so not sure if this shipping speed can be expected for everyone.
Burpee shipping costs can be found here.
The plants came in small black plastic pots. They were packed inside clear, hard, plastic forms (seen in the first picture), which were placed into a cardboard box. The plants had some crumpled leaves, but otherwise were in good condition.
We put the little pots outside for a few days before planting, and the crumpled leaves stretched out very quickly. There are little buds on many of the plants – they came ready to flower.
We had a good experience ordering plants online from Burpee, and especially loved the variety of plant options. The main negative is the higher cost of the plants, plus having to pay shipping.
This was our second experience ordering plants online. Our first, with High Country Gardens, was also a positive experience.
