by Wendie Alexander | Oct 7, 2016 | Autumn gardening, Competitions, Expert Update, Gardening News, Gardening Posts, T&M's Giant Pumpkin
Thompson & Morgan, after giving a call out to pumpkin growers in the UK finally entrusted the world’s most expensive pumpkin seed, to experts at the Royal Horticultural Society. The pumpkin seed was bought for a whopping £1,250, and has built-in genetics to increase the chance of breaking the world record for the largest pumpkin grown. The RHS then delegated this awesome task to Matthew Oliver, their horticulturalist, at RHS Hyde Hall. He has grown the pumpkin through the summer, with a view to breaking the world record for Thompson & Morgan and the RHS.
There is lots of excitement surrounding this venture, both at Thompson & Morgan and the RHS, and today is the day Thompson & Morgan’s enormous pumpkin will be travelling to Southampton on the back of a lorry. The lorry has been designed to hold this type of unusual load, so the pumpkin will be secure, with no likelihood of it rolling overboard on the journey.
This journey will take all day and the pumpkin, and its carers, will arrive in Southampton tonight, where the pumpkin will have its own security guard who will be keeping a close eye on it. The Jubilee Sailing Trust Autumn Pumpkin Festival is on the 8th October 2016, where the weigh in is performed. At the festival there is competition from all over the UK for this fantastic accolade. Everyone at Thompson & Morgan is on tender hooks hoping that Matthew will bring home the UK crown. No-one more so than the Managing Director Paul Hansord, who was the original purchaser of the expensive pumpkin seed way back in February 2016. Good luck Matthew Oliver and Paul Hansord.
I have worked for Thompson & Morgan for nearly four years. In that time I have learnt lots about gardening, but consider myself very much a novice. I have started growing veg on a colleague’s allotment and also growing windowsill seeds such as Salad Leaves and Rocket. I love gaining more knowledge about horticulture and am lucky enough to work here.
by Kris Collins | Mar 23, 2016 | Gardening Posts
Grow with Thompson & Morgan this season for a chance to win up to £10,000!
The UK’s largest seed and plant retailer has announced a host of gardening competitions for the 2016 season, rewarding customers for their growing skills.
The highest value prizes are linked to the giant veg growing world.
Giant Pumpkin – Win up to £10,000
As sponsor of the UK’s official giant pumpkin weigh in, it is stumping up a £10,000 cash reward for a world record breaking entry, £1,000 for a new UK weight record or £500 for the largest pumpkin entered on the day if no records are broken. To take part, gardeners simply need to bring their entries to The Autumn Pumpkin Festival, Royal Victoria Park, Netley, Southampton on 8th October.
Gardeners growing Tomato ‘Gigantomo’® this season can take the fruits of their harvest to the Harrogate Autumn Flower Show (16-18 September) and take part in the National Gigantomo® Championships. Thompson & Morgan is offering £1,000 for the heaviest fruit entered. If that entry beats the current world record (7lb 12oz) the cash jackpot rises to a whopping £5,000.
Tomato ‘Gigantomo’ and Sunflower ‘Tall Timbers’
Having awarded a record £1,000 for the UK’s tallest sunflower in 2015, Thompson & Morgan is upping the ante for the season ahead. The £1,000 prize still stands, but if the grower has raised their plant with the company’s own incredibloom® fertiliser, the prize jumps to £2,000. If that entry also breaks the current world record (9.17m – 30ft 1in) the lucky entrant will receive a cheque for £4,000 (£2,000 for a world record breaker not grown in incredibloom®).
Gardeners don’t need to be growing giant specimens to take advantage of the prizes on offer. A host of smaller prizes are also up for grabs through a wide range of online competition categories. These test photographic flare as well as growing skills.
How does a £50 Thompson & Morgan voucher sound, simply for growing one of the easiest hardy annuals? If you are supporting the charity Thrive by growing the exclusive Sweet Pea ‘Eleanore Udall’ make sure to take photos of your plants in bloom, or perhaps a vase of fresh cut flowers. The five best photos entered will each receive a £50 Thompson & Morgan voucher to spend on the garden for the 2017 season.
Wildlife gardeners can win £100 of flowers to attract even more wildlife to the garden, simply by submitting their best garden wildlife shot – from butterflies and beetles to birds and badgers, Thompson & Morgan wants to see what creatures are visiting your garden this season.
Other online competitions include:
Closing date for all online competitions is 30 September 2016. For full details of these competitions, plus many more, click here. Giant Pumpkin entries must be brought to The Autumn Pumpkin Festival, Netley, Southampton on 8th October for judging.
Kris Collins works as Thompson & Morgan’s quality control manager, making sure customers new and old are kept up to date on the latest plant developments and company news via a wide range of media sources. He trained in London’s Royal Parks and has spent more than a decade writing for UK gardening publications before joining the team at Thompson & Morgan.
by Terri Overett | Oct 28, 2014 | Competitions, Gardening News, Your Stories
This is our favourite time of year, when we get to judge all the stunning entries to our competitions. However, this year we decided to do things a little differently and we asked you to help us pick the winning photos.
Michael Perry short listed each category down to his six favourites of which we then posted onto facebook. You then chose your favourite photo by hitting the like button, the one with most likes won. Simples!
Thank you to everyone who entered and big congratulations to all of our winners.
So here are you winning entries for our 2014 categories;
Indredibloom® competition (selected by Thompson & Morgan)
Lindsey Cooper – Harrogate
Lindsey used basil seeds from the same pack, same bag of compost, same size pots. However, used the Incredibloom® fertiliser in one pot. This is a wonderful reflection of our ground breaking plant feed.
Plant a portrait
Barbara Thomas – Blackpool
Wildlife competition
Kate Duckmanton – Buckingham
Begonia competition
Robert Leeke – Crewe
Basket Challenge
John Alan Sinclair – Alnwick
Beds and borders competition
John Alan Sinclair – Alnwick
Unusual fruit and veg competition
Jenny Clancy – Chelmsford
Fruit and Veg competition
Helen Crewdson – Surbiton
Patio Garden competition
Kathleen Bethell – Nottingham
Thank you to everyone who voted for their favourite photo. Don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for next years photo competition for a chance to win great prizes. You dont always have to wait for our competitions, we love to see your photos everyday so please feel free to post them on our facebook and twitter pages.
Terri works in the e-commerce marketing department assisting the busy web team. Terri manages our blog and social media pages here at Thompson & Morgan and is dedicated to providing useful advice to our gardeners. Terri is new to gardening and keen to develop her horticultural knowledge.
by Holly Taylor | Nov 5, 2013 | Michael Perry's Gardening Blog
It’s a busy time for us at Thompson & Morgan, here’s a taster of a typical week at work for me!
Monday
After a few days off, it’s back in fresh and early for a varied week of meetings, product research and catalogue preparations.
Today I meet with Sarah, our trials manager, to discuss how we can enhance our customer trials programme. This is a project we’ve been running for 3 years now, and it involves sending our products to a selected group of customers and asking them what they think of them. We get some very good, honest comments and some photography which is almost as good as our own!
Sarah and I also chat through which plants we’re going to grow to enter for Plant of the Year at Chelsea Flower Show. This is a very tricky project as the plants have to be grown out of season, which means they’ll need extra warmth and lights. We draw up a shortlist which we’ll then run past Paul Hansord, our horticultural director, as soon as we can, as we’ll soon need to start taking cuttings! In 2012, we WON Plant of the Year for our innovative Foxglove ‘Illumination Pink’. Bred by our amazing plant breeder, Charles Valin, this is a ‘futuristic foxglove’, which flowers much longer than older types and is in exotic colours never, ever seen before!
The monster pumpkin – can you guess how many seeds are in it?
Tuesday
It’s the week of Halloween, so today I make sure we’ve given our ‘count the seeds in the pumpkin’ competition the push it needs, which means updating and scheduling my social media accounts, and also setting the dates of the seed count into my diary, just so we don’t forget! I also notice that the Great British Garden Revival information is starting to leak through social media. This is a programme that was filmed at our trials site during the summer, and I should be featuring in the ‘bedding’ episode. It’s a new series, designed to make gardening a bit trendy again. We don’t have definite broadcast dates yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do.
Filming at our trials site
Wednesday
This week is one of the last weeks before the big spring plant catalogue goes to the printers, so I’m working closely with the catalogue team to make sure they have everything they need from me for the new products. There are about 70 products, so this has been a lot of work over the last few months; speaking to suppliers, assessing trials, instructing photography (with our new photographer, Helen Freeman), writing copy notes, working out the main selling points and so on. We have some EXCELLENT new products – I won’t give too much away, but imagine a ‘blue’ carnation and an azalea-flowered geranium for starters…
Thursday
Lots of catching up on e-mails today, there’s always so much going on, product development never seems to stop, and sometimes I could be talking to suppliers about products that might be 15 or 20 years away! It took us 15 years to develop the TomTato®, which you may have seen recently, it’s a plant which produces tomatoes AND potatoes. The plants are simply grafted together – it’s not a new concept, but we are the first company to make a large amount of plants and to marry up a high quality, sweet tomato with a good cropping white potato.
Friday
Some of today is spent preparing for Saturday’s QVC show. We regularly sell our plants through this shopping channel on TV, and I’m a brand ambassador for Thompson & Morgan on the show. This week it’s a gift show and we’re selling a Christmas tree! I make sure we get some good photos of me lifting it (it was heavy!), and working with Sarah Dodsworth from the QVC team, we agree on the main selling points, and also source some photos of bad Christmas trees. This will all help make the sell stronger; our Christmas tree is the no-drop, no-flop tree, one of the highest quality money can buy. I try to get to bed early, so I can get up at 5am (yuk) to travel down to Chiswick for the show.
It’s really heavy!
by Rebecca Tute | Mar 13, 2013 | Gardening News
Winners of The Alan Titchmarsh Show competition visit ITV studios
Winners of The Alan Titchmarsh Show competition
On Tuesday 12th March, the lucky winners of our Alan Titchmarsh Show competition claimed their prize and spent the afternoon watching the live show.
We first advertised the competition in our 2013 Spring Catalogue and all customers had to do to enter was order any product from The Alan Titchmarsh Plant Collection. The prize on offer was a pair of tickets to be in the audience of The Alan Titchmarsh Show and a signed copy of Alan’s popular ‘Love Your Garden’ book.
Winners Mr Frank Bradbrook and Miss Vera Mills and their guests travelled to the ITV studios in London to watch the live recording of the programme.
On the show were Henry Winkler of Happy Days fame, comedian Rufus Hound and Jilly, Best in Show winner at Crufts this year.
The winners thoroughly enjoyed their afternoon at the show and Mr Bradbrook said that it was interesting being behind the scenes and seeing how it was all done.
Your chance to win prizes
Our ever-popular photo competitions are now open! There are several categories, including Petunia ‘Purple Tower’, Your Beds and Borders and Your Patio Garden. You could win £250 in Thompson & Morgan vouchers if your photo is chosen as the winner!
Please click here for more details.
Rebecca works in the Marketing department as part of the busy web team, focusing on updating the UK news and blog pages and Thompson & Morgan’s international website. Rebecca enjoys gardening and learning about flowers and growing vegetables with her young daughter.
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