Our gardening blog covers a wide variety of topics, including fruit, vegetable and tree stories. Read some of the top gardening stories right here.
Propagation, planting out and cultivation posts from writers that know their subjects well.
Thompson & Morgan donates world’s most expensive pumpkin seed to Hyde Hall vegetable grower
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.
Hello Everyone,
I hope you are all well.
These last few weeks have been really busy, April is an inspiring month. Before I set out to write this I had a quick read of my April 2015 diary and last years blog, as I was convinced that I was lagging behind in the greenhouse. However, according to my journal we had only just finished constructing the big greenhouse and we only had potatoes growing in sacks, onions and strawberry plants in the greenhouse so it turns out I’m actually a little ahead this year.
My name is Amanda and I live in Pembrokeshire with my fiancé and our garden is approximately 116 meters square. I want to share with you my love for gardening and the reasons behind it, from the good to the bad and ugly. I want to do this for my own personal pleasure. If you would like to take the journey with me then please read my blogs and share with me your gardening stories.
3 simple tips for bigger sweet peas
Left to their own devices sweet pea plants will work their way up their supports, going on to produce masses of colour and scent. However, with a few simple training tricks you can turn an every-day display into a real show-stopper!
My tips here will encourage the fastest growth and the biggest blooms on the longest stems. You can see the difference my training tricks bring about in the photo below.
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.
I provide garden care in North Norfolk and trained at Easton College, as it states in my bio below. Just because I have my Diploma it doesn’t mean I know it all. I am constantly learning new things and am intrigued by a great deal. College doesn’t teach you about our relationship and need for animals and insects in our gardens and horticulture. But, through my work, I have learned how much we rely on them and how much they rely on us – and how exploitive of us they can be too!
I’m a 23 year old female horticulturalist. I studied at Easton College for two years until June 2014 and became self employed providing garden care and design in North Norfolk. I currently care for around 20 gardens and have now achieved a few designs and a small landscaping project.
I am passionate about getting young people, especially primary schools, involved in gardening again. I have a project running to do with children’s gardening, so if you’d like to know more please get in touch! I began because of spending so much time in the garden with my granddad as a child. I was also a member of my primary school’s environment club.
I am a fan of Michael Perry and James Wong and I love finding out about edible flowers and how to live more independently from my own garden.
Shrubs are the stalwarts of the border – they last for years and years, fill gaps and offer decorative foliage AND flowers! And, what better place to start than Hydrangeas – one of the most versatile shrubs you can find. Here are five of Michael Perry’s favourite hydrangeas of all time, with compelling reasons to try them in your own garden.
Browse our comprehensive range of Hydrangea plants for more ideas.
The Thompson & Morgan horticultural team produces a wealth of content around gardening and food production. Since the first seed catalogue was published in 1855, Thompson & Morgan has grown to become one of the UK’s largest Mail Order Seed and Plant companies. Through the publication of our catalogues and the operation of our award-winning website, Thompson & Morgan is able to provide home gardeners with the very best quality products money can buy.
With the nation’s apparent obsession with gyms, healthy eating and trying to lose weight, have you considered just how much exercise that you can do carrying out the simplest of garden tasks. We all ache after a long session of hoeing, digging or weeding and that’s probably because we’ve used muscles that we don’t normally and, providing we’ve been sensible, and safe, then it has probably done us some good!
With just a few simple garden tools you can burn off the calories, tone up your body and at the same time, have a well tended, beautiful garden, be it flowers or vegetables. Here are a few ideas to get you started and all at a fraction of the price of a gym subscription!
I’ve been gardening for as long as I can remember, my first earliest memory being planting seeds in my Grandfather’s prestige flower bed and having a prize lettuce growing there, which he proudly left to show everyone.
Since then, gaining knowledge and experience from both my Grandfather and my Father, I’ve continued to garden, both as a hobby and later on as a professional gardener and landscaper for 12 years. I love all aspects of it, from the design and build, to the planting out of summer borders with plants you’ve either grown from seed or raised from plugs. Unusual varieties always catch my eye and I’m keen to try growing them, even if sometimes it means learning from my mistakes.
At last Spring is finally here! Not wanting to wish my life away, but it’s been a long underwhelming winter. I’ve been sowing seeds since February but now it’s all systems go: As one batch of seedlings needs potting on, it’s time to sow another batch. T&M plug plants have been arriving regularly. This year I decided that I would be well and truly geared up in the greenhouse: 9cm pots washed and stacked by colour (perhaps a little too obsessive?), new plant labels written up in advance with indelible pen (sick of guessing!), propagating lids washed (green algae tends to block out the light!), seed modules matched up with waterproof seed trays.
Caroline Broome has been gardening for more than 20 years. Having passed the RHS General Certificate, she has since developed her East Finchley garden into a “personal paradise” that she and her husband invite the public to visit each year via the National Garden Scheme. Learn more about our contributor using T&M’s ‘Meet the experts’ page.
It takes confidence to launch a new product in a crowded market while claiming to have the best in the business, but consumer champion Which? has confirmed what Thompson & Morgan already knew: the mail order specialist’s incredicompost® really is the best overall compost for sowing seeds and raising young plants.
The premium-grade compost was officially launched in March 2015 in response to increased levels of Thompson & Morgan customer disappointment with existing blends on the market, which were leading to poor performance in their gardens from the mail order specialist’s core range of seeds and young plants. Following extensive in-house comparison trials incredicompost® was launched along with incredibloom® and incredicrop® fertilisers, promising the healthiest of plants with up to 400 per cent more flowers and fruit.
incredicompost® – prices from £9.99
Justifiably the trials team at Which? Gardening was keen to put the claims to the test. Their independent trials, carried out during the 2015 growing season, have named incredicompost® as the best overall compost for sowing seeds and raising young plants. It was given a score of 95 per cent for sowing seeds, setting it well ahead of the next best performer, which scored 80 per cent. It came miles ahead of the worst seed sowing performer, labelled a ‘Don’t Buy’ product by the trials team having scored just 33 per cent. For raising young plants incredicompost® also gained a high 90 per cent test score, leading to a Which? Best Buy.
Two seed varieties, antirrhinum and cabbage, were sown in the Which? trial and two plant varieties, fibrous begonias and tomatoes, were chosen for growing on. According to the trial report incredicompost® “had the highest germination rate by far for the antirrhinum seed and close to perfect germination for cabbage seed. The seedlings were all very healthy. The young begonias were the best in the test and the tomatoes were robust plants.”
In another Which? Gardening compost test looking at container performance, incredicompost® was listed as a recommended product: “The bedding plants [grown in incredicompost®] were dazzling. They shot away and were larger and flowered better than in most other composts early in the season. They were also superb in August.”
Comparison shot from Thompson & Morgan’s own trial programme
Thompson & Morgan Horticultural Director Paul Hansord said: “We always knew we were on to a winner with our first move into the compost market. Our aim with incredicompost® has been to develop a premium-quality product that brings consistency and reliability back to the market – something that has been missing since the increased use of green waste materials in a bid to reduce peat content in many well-known brands. Gardeners are keen to reduce their peat use but many have reported poor results with green-waste products.”
He adds: “To reduce the peat in our blend we have instead included wood fibre, sourced from Irish saw mills, actually making use of a surplus by-product. This wood fibre is graded by chip size, so each time we make a new batch we can guarantee consistency from our ingredients, leading to consistent performance from the compost, no matter the time of year or which ‘batch’ our customers are supplied from.”
incredicompost® comes packed with trace elements and minerals and like many other composts includes wetting agent for easy watering, plus a little pre-mixed fertiliser to ensure good early growth. What sets it out from the crowd is a pre-packed sachet of incredibloom® in every bag for mixing in at planting time, ensuring strong healthy growth for 7+ months – a little goes a long way! Separating the feed into a sachet prevents degradation (leading to either a lack of nutrients for plants or nutrient scorch), a common problem with other pre-mixed, long lasting composts.
If you can’t afford failure in the garden, choose incredicompost® for the best performance from all your seeds and plants. Click here to view incredicompost®. Prices from £9.99.
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.
As Amanda and Geoff have already mentioned the troubles of Storm Imogen and what it left behind. It took out our fence in the front garden. On getting up early the next morning discovered that the posts had snapped clean off and one of the panels was swinging out across the public footpath so at 8am just as it was getting light I was trying to hang on to the panel while Alan unscrewed it to make it safe until the gale had died down. What a mess! It ended up with us replacing the complete fence as damage was discovered on two more posts and also the panels.
I started gardening 65 years ago on my Dad’s allotment and now live in Bournemouth, where spend a lot of time gardening since retiring. In 2012 I won the Gold Award for Bournemouth in Bloom Container Garden. I am a member of Thompson & Morgan’s customer trial panel.
Juniper berries and quinine bark from the same tree? Following the success of the dual-cropping Tomtato® (tomatoes and potatoes from one plant) and Egg & Chips® (aubergines and potatoes on one plant), Thompson & Morgan is pleased to introduce its latest innovation in grafting technology: The Gin & Tonic Tree™.
It may sound impossible (so did the Tomtato® concept!), but UK gardeners can now grow juniper berries and quinine bark on the same plant, thanks to a major breakthrough in grafting technique.
The mail order seed and plant specialist has cornered the market for dual-cropping grafted plants in recent years having invested heavily in a grafting development programme at its Suffolk trial grounds.
The project has come on in leaps and bounds under the stewardship of Rolf Paoli, who joined the firm in spring 2015, bringing with him a reputation for creating the seemingly impossible.
The Gin & Tonic Tree™ is set to be the first in a series of grow-your-own beverages. Expect to see the Vermouth Vine and Sherry Cherry following in future years.
A limited stock of the Gin & Tonic Tree™ has been made available for the spring despatch season. A further 100,000 plants will be made available this summer for autumn delivery.
Thompson and Morgan recommends growing The Gin & Tonic Tree™ alongside a lemon tree to complete the ingredient list. For a bit of fun this was our 2016 April Fools joke. We hope you enjoyed it?
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.