Top Tips for Carrying Plants in Your Car Boot
Make sure that trip to the garden centre doesn’t result in hours cleaning your car and broken plants.
- Line your boot – save on the cost of a purpose made boot-liner and use a roll of binbags and masking tape.
- Protect your bumper – anchor a binbag over the lip of your boot and save on scuffs.
- Save the soil – pack your plants tightly into cardboard boxes.
- Look after the leaves – use old fruit nets from oranges etc., as a hairnet for plant foliage.
How to Survive the Garden Centre
If you don’t have an SUV or an estate car, how can you make sure your car manages the trip to the Garden Centre unscathed; without a boot-full of soil or a scuffed bumper.
Apart from the masking tape and a roll of bin-bags, everything you need to garden centre-proof your car is likely to be sat in your re-cycling; plastic bags, fruit nets and cardboard boxes.
Line Your Boot
There are absolutely masses of companies out there supplying boot-liners; universal ones, ones tailored for your specific model, ones from the manufacturer and ones from specialist boot-liner suppliers.
All of these are great, however, you can make your own using a roll of dustbin bags. It'll do just as good a job as a purpose made liner, saving you a clean-up job, as they can be popped straight in the bin, or shaken off and re-used; as well as saving you money.
Lay them out in your boot, attach to the sides with a masking tape and hey-ho, you’ve created your very own, bespoke boot liner!
Stop the Scuffs
When you’ve lined your boot, taken one bin bag off the roll and open it out to its full width; anchor it inside the lip of your boot using the roll of bin bags and then drape it out of the boot over your bumper.
You’ve got an instant scuff protector for your boot!
Save the Soil
Unless you’re quite literally packing your boot full of plants, compost etc., then you need something to keep the plants from rolling around your boot. Whilst your boot is now soil-safe with your 'bin-bag boot-liner', you don’t want your new plants traumatised before they’ve even been planted out.
This is where you need to keep cardboard boxes, large, small and all sizes in between, to allow you to pack the plants into a box, tightly, meaning they can’t fall over and shed their soil.
Before you set out to the garden centre, put a selection of different sized boxes in your boot.
Look After the Leaves
When you buy your oranges, satsumas, apples and pears, save the net bags they come in and pop them in your boot when you’re off to the garden centre.
Look after the foliage on your newly acquired plants by using your old fruit nets like a hairnet, gathering the foliage inside. It’ll help keep the leaves safe and stop them getting trapped when you close your boot.
The Perfect Car for Garden Centre Trips
If gardening is your passion and you visit a garden centre pretty much every weekend, but you don’t want an SUV or estate car, then the Honda Jazz is the car for you, as Motoring journalist, John Swift commented:
The whole point of the Jazz, and the reason why there’s simply nothing that comes even close to it for practicality, is the Magic Seat device, a brilliantly clever unit that no other car maker has for the simple reason that Honda has patented it!
With its four Magic Seat modes…
- Utility Mode - the rear seat back folds forward, as the seat base itself lowers into the rear passenger footwell, creating a long and flat floor. More space for all your garden centre booty.
- Tall mode - the front of the rear seat base rises up and back and is locked in a vertical position, creating a big floor-to-roof space. Great for transporting small trees, rose bushes, climbers, etc.
- Long mode - the front passenger seat-back folds back horizontally, as the rear seat-back folds forward, so you have virtually the entire length of the cabin to play with. No problem transporting that wicker obelisk you just had to have!
- Refresh mode - letting the backrest of the front seat recline flat to meet the base of the rear seat so you have a long settee-like space to stretch out on. Stretch out and have 40 winks after a tiring day in the garden!
