Say Hello To Our Tubestock Plants!
What is a tubestock plant?
At Australian Plants Online's nursery we grow and sell what are known in the trade as tubestock plants.
These are small plants with healthy root systems ready for planting out.You can see two here in the photo; these are native lilly pilly plants.
They are the plant size used by professional landscapers, horticulturalists and revegetation gardeners.
The tubestock plants we sell are grown from a cutting, or Tissue Culture, or occasionally seed, with a healthy strong root system.
Read our blog post on How We Produce Our Plants for more info on how we do this.
Tubestock plants are not seedlings - they are much larger and far more mature than a seedling, and are usually not grown from seed.
Read our blog post Gardening Glossary for more explanation of these horticulture terms.
What will my tubestock plants look like?
Tubestock plants are young plants, usually between 5cm and 15cm tall, depending on the type of plant - creeping groundcovers may obviously be smaller than this in height; fast-growing grasses and trees can often be taller.
You can see image examples of each tubestock or plug plant in the image gallery on almost every product page. These are typical plants chosen at random, in photos taken recently on our own nursery.
Tubestock plants usually come in a square pot which measures 42mm each side at the top, and 80cm high.
Sometimes the pots are slightly larger - 50mm x 100mm - for native plants and trees which have longer faster-growing roots.
Most of our plants we propagate ourselves at the nursery; a few plants we also source from trusted specialist wholesale nurseries, to give you the widest choice; so you might see some pots are cylindrical, not square.
We also occasionally send some slower-growing indoor plants as plug plants. Plug plants are smaller than tubestock plants, with smaller root balls, and are ready to plant out or pot on as you prefer.
You can see how to do this on our How to Plant Your Tubestock page.
Sizes and photos are a guide only. We always send out the very best and biggest plants we have in stock; all are ready to plant out into the garden.
How big will my tubestock plants grow? How fast will they grow?
Tubestock plants are fantastic value plants, low cost to buy, and fast growing – so they catch up quickly to more expensive potted plants.
Tubestock plant roots are young and fresh, so they do not suffer from being ‘pot bound’ as larger potted plants can do.
You can see photos from our customers in our blog post How Fast Will My Tubestock Plants Grow?, and on some product pages' image galleries.
Please note: plants are living things, variable in nature. We give mature height and width sizes on the website as a guide. Much like people, they grow and develop at different rates.
If you have rich fertile soil, regular irrigation, and a warm sheltered garden location with good light and a mild climate year-round, your plants will grow faster and may get larger than the mature size given.
If you have poor soil, do not irrigate or feed regularly, have cold winters, or your garden is on a windy or exposed site, your plants may grow smaller, or take longer to reach mature size.