The past couple of years I’ve frequently complained about the fact that many times the seeds that I buy are not the seeds that I wanted. often bags are filled with a completely different variety. Vegetables and flowers that I get are a completely different sizes, colors, or even completely different types.
The same thing is happening with seedlings. I’m already used to the fact that when we buy summer seedlings we have no idea what variety they are. Tomatoes are sold with names “round”, “for cooking”, “heart”, peppers are sold by their color and cabbages by their type (summer/fall). There’s no way to know the exact variety they are, even if you manage to get a name there are big chances the name is wrong. But recently this started happening even with plants.
In spring I bought a bunch of flowers and I ordered a Spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum). Since the order was placed over the Facebook page I wrote Latin name, Croatian name, and wrote number under which photo in the album the plant was written.
Instead of Spider plant, I got Tradescantia fluminensis.
Sure it’s a pretty plant and a great plant to have in the hanging basket. But it is a completely different plant that has nothing to do with the plant that I ordered.
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| Spider plant I bought last week and Tradescantia |
I really can’t believe that someone that grows and sows plants doesn’t know the difference and is able to wrongly label the plant. Even more, because the Tradescantia is a very common plant here and every single house has it.
I finally managed to buy Spider plant last week from a nursery that actually knows what they are selling.
The plant was in excellent shape with big and healthy roots.
The same thing happened to my hubby a week ago. He went to a store to buy me Aloe vera for my birthday. He came home with what he thought was Aloe vera and happily gave it to me.
To be honest, I didn’t even notice it wasn’t Aloe vera, I honestly thought it was. Even more, because I got a paper with instructions on how to care for the plant and when to start harvesting leaves. I placed a photo on Instagram and in the comments, I found out it was actually Haworthia limifoila.
A beautiful plant, but again not what we were looking for.
This makes me seriously doubt what I’m buying and how should I know something is wrong labeled if I’m not familiar with the variety.
I guess we’ll have to be very careful about what we buy in the future.
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