Thompson & Morgan Gardening Blog

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.

A Small Gardening Space

by Sarah Belsey | Jun 12, 2015 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts, Your Stories | 2 Comments

After living without any outdoor space of my own for 5 years, last year we moved and I gained an empty balcony. A blank canvas. When you live without any outdoor gardening space you realise just how much you previously took it for granted. I had never been a gardener, despite my mother avidly encouraging me through my youth. However, spurred on by the gift of some blueberry bushes and the notion of ‘feeding off my (rented) land’ I decided to give growing a go.

Sarah Belsey

Novel gardener trying to make the most out of limited space!

Perennial plants

by Terri Overett | Jun 2, 2015 | Gardening Posts | 0 Comments

What are Perennial plants?

Perennial plants add colour and seasonal interest to the garden from April to November, often attracting bees and butterflies to their blooms, and making great cut flowers too. They are incredibly versatile and can be used as fillers between shrubs, planted as groundcover beneath trees, grown in containers or planted on their own to create a classic herbaceous border. Herbaceous perennial plants are an easy alternative to annual flowers, returning each year and growing larger as they mature.
A perennial plant lives for more than two years, longer than shorter-lived annuals and biennials.

Our Top Perennial Plants

1. Foxglove illumination pink

Winner of Plant of the Year 2012 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Best new product at the Anglian Business Awards and Best new product at the Garden Retail awards. Being completely sterile Foxglove ‘Illumination’ won’t set seed, giving it an incredibly long flowering period. Unlike most foxgloves which are generally biennial, this half-hardy semi-evergreen is a true perennial so you will be able to enjoy its flowers for years to come.

2. Geranium Rozanne

Winner of The RHS Chelsea Flower Show ‘Plant of the Centenary’, this stunning Geranium will flower repeatedly throughout summer and will turn to a fiery orange colour for an extended display in autumn.

3. Sedum

Sedums, also known as Stonecrop, are superb for their late summer and autumn colour, often flowering into November! With fantastic tolerance to drought, salty coastal conditions, and poor soil, Sedums are one of the easiest plants to grow in the garden.

Terri Overett

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.

www.thompson-morgan.com

Gardening, a challenging few months

by Jean Willis | Jun 2, 2015 | Gardening Posts, Your Stories | 6 Comments

Tomtato

This spring has proved the most challenging gardening season in all my gardening years. In November 2014 whilst on holiday at my Sister`s in Huntington Beach, California, I had a bad fall and fractured my spine. I`ve always wanted an extended holiday but not quite like this – flat on my back. Getting the garden ready had to be done in short bursts so I could rest but with the help of my Husband Alan, who did all of the lifting, moving and digging I managed to get the garden sorted.

Jean Willis

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.

Update from the Greenhouse

by Amanda Davies | May 26, 2015 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts | 1 Comment

Hello Everyone,

March winds blow and April showers bring forth slugs eating my flowers! I ignore the greenhouse for one night to discover the next morning that out of eighteen baby leaf lettuces I am left with four. What’s worse, something has also eaten my entire radish, including the roots. I am convinced that the culprits are woodlice, until I read in a magazine that woodlice are often wrongly accused of this; woodlice in your garden are a healthy sign. So where are the slugs? There are surprisingly, no slimy trails, and I can’t see them on the soil. I look in horror at my jeans to find one fat critter has attached itself to me, probably when I was on my knees looking for them. It gets flicked off my leg with a dibber, slightly cruel but it’s a reaction to mild disgust that this thing with no legs is slithering up me. It’s a bit too late to get Nematodes to save what’s left of my lettuces so I sprinkle slug pellets around the remaining leaves and sow more radish and rocket seeds.

Amanda Davies

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.

Potatoes Win Gold at Chelsea

by Thompson & Morgan | May 20, 2015 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts | 1 Comment

A Great Pavilion exhibit without a single decorative bloom on show has charmed judges into awarding a Chelsea Gold Medal to Scots potato aficionados Morrice and Ann Innes – the first gold to be awarded to a potato-only display in the show’s 150 year history.

The Potato Story, sponsored by Thompson & Morgan, acts as a simple showcase, highlighting more than 140 varieties, and traces the history and origins of the potato while drawing attention to its diversity and versatility in the garden and kitchen. Morrice of Old Town, Aberdeen, claims to have the largest private collection of potato varieties, built up over 20 years, and has long championed his favourite vegetable.

Many of the display’s varieties come from Morrice’s own collection of tubers, and include original South American species as well as historical European heritage varieties such as Karaparea, which was taken to New Zealand by Captain James Cook in the 1770s. The exhibit is completed with modern varieties grown from Thompson & Morgan seed potatoes, including blight resistant main crop Sarpo Axona and its latest introduction, high yielding salad potato Jazzy, currently the mail order supplier’s best seller.

The modest, yet impactful display offers information boards, telling the story of the potato and highlighting its global importance as a major food source and healthy eating option. Morrice said: “We’ve tried to tell the tale of the potato by highlighting a vast array of skin colours, shapes and sizes, while suggesting the best uses of each variety and the places where they come from. You won’t find many of the varieties for sale at the supermarket. Hopefully we’ll help inspire more people to grow potatoes and to try a some of the more unusual forms while they are at it.”

The exhibit’s sponsor has supported Morrice and Ann in the past, scooping silver and bronze medals at previous RHS shows, and is delighted to finally see a Gold Medal awarded to the nation’s favourite vegetable. Thompson & Morgan Vegetable Product Manager, Colin Randel, worked with Morrice to set a world record for the largest display of potato varieties at the 2004 Shrewsbury Flower Show. He said: “Amongst all the glitz and glamour of the world’s most prestigious flower show, it’s great to see a modest, uncomplicated homage to the humble potato stand out from the crowd to scoop a Gold Medal. Morrice and Ann have put on a fantastic display, there’s pretty much every colour under the sun on show, from very old varieties right up to our very latest introduction, Potato Jazzy.”

To celebrate the win, the mail order seed and plant specialist has launched a special lucky dip offer on seed potatoes. In time for the main crop season Thompson & Morgan customers can add a 100 lucky dip tuber collection, made up of top performing customer favourites, for just £4.99. Visit www.thompson-morgan.com/lucky-dip-potatoes

Thompson & Morgan

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.

RHS Chelsea; my dash for plants

by Terri Overett | May 18, 2015 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts | 3 Comments

4pm on a Thursday and the minutes were going by slowly. I was looking forward to getting home, putting my feet up and relaxing with a large glass of wine. The next half an hour went pretty quickly and I overheard a conversation about needing someone to go to Barcelona to collect plants for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. To be honest, all I heard was Barcelona and I said ‘I’ll go’. Never did I think I would then be rushing home to get my passport to book flights for the next morning.

Terri Overett

www.thompson-morgan.com

Scouring Europe for Chelsea centrepiece fit for a Queen

by Holly Taylor | May 16, 2015 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts | 0 Comments

When you know there’s a chance that Her Majesty The Queen might visit your Fresh garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the last thing you want is a gaping hole where your centrepiece plants should be on display. That was the situation faced by Fernando Gonzalez Garden Design, when UK

Thompson & Morgan’s Digitalis Illumination Apricot

stocks of Digitalis ‘Illumination Apricot’ failed to flower in time for display in the Pure Land
Foundation Garden, already being flagged as the most prestigious show gardens at this year’s event. read more…

Fuchsia Summer Care

by Carol Gubler | May 8, 2015 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts | 1 Comment

Summer is almost here! We want to be able to keep our fuchsias looking good for months to come.

However to get to that situation – they do need some care and attention to keep them looking at their best! Luckily once fuchsias get going, they will flower until the first frosts or until you have had enough!

So here are my top tips for keeping your fuchsias at their best for many weeks to come!

Carol Gubler

My family first got the fuchsia bug in 1963 when my late father stopped to admire the plants growing in a neighbour’s garden – they were fuchsias and he was hooked! Gradually the garden was overtaken by fuchsias – and in 1979 we moved as a family to a little village near Guildford, where to this day I grow lots of fuchsias (about 500 different types!)

I am Assistant Secretary of The British Fuchsia Society and involved in anything and everything to do with fuchsias!

Gardening like my mother taught me

by Alison Levey | May 6, 2015 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts | 0 Comments

From an early age lots of people have influenced my gardening. My grandfathers were both keen gardeners, my neighbours when I was a child and also my mother. I have to clarify this by saying that I think even my mother would admit she was not the world’s keenest gardener, but she likes her garden to look nice and has always cared about its appearance.

Alison Levey

I am a keen amateur gardener living in the East Midlands. During the day I work in an office so I love the times I can get outside. I would not call myself an expert gardener but I am an avid learner. I have been writing a blog based on my garden and gardens that I have visited for nearly two years now and it is something I really enjoy doing. It has added an extra dimension to how I view my garden.

UK No: 1 Garden Blog 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 (Vuelio)
Garden Media Guild Blog of the Year 2019 winner.

www.blackberrygarden.co.uk/