Said It Here

How to cover a large area with groundcover on a budget

Local nurseries often only sell expensive potted plants rather than affordable plugs, driving up the cost of covering large spaces. To get around high retail prices, landscapers note that you can sometimes ask crews on-site to take discarded plants off their hands before they get thrown away.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    pulling apart the root balls from 9cm pots into smaller chunks
  2. 2
    stretching fewer pots to cover a larger area and waiting longer for full coverage
  3. 3
    rooting cuttings in water indoors over the winter
  4. 4
    Asking landscaping crews directly while they are working
  5. 5
    Waiting by the dumpster after plants are discarded

In their words

Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.

r/Landscaping2 people · September 2026

“When the crews swap them out it's usually faster for them to just chuck everything in the truck, but plenty will let you grab a few if you ask nicely.”source ↗

“Catching them mid-job with a smile and a "hey, mind if I take those off your hands?" works way better than waiting until the pile's in the dumpster.”source ↗

Impressive_Regret930 · r/Landscaping · 2 upvotes

“i want to plant creeping phlox as a groundcover to cover about 300sqft. however, i can only find them in 9cm pots, cant find plugs anywhere near me. theyre $7.25 each, and if i place them 20" apart i will need 91 of them, so it would just be so expensive. am i able to pull apart the pots to make smaller ones to plant?”source ↗

smellycat444 · r/Landscaping · 1 upvotes

Where this came up

r/Landscapingbudgetinggardeninglandscapingplants

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