Windowsill Grower Archives | Thompson & Morgan Blog

How to choose the best pots for container gardening

by Mandy Bradshaw | Jul 23, 2025 | Gardening Posts, Gardening Tips, Windowsill Grower | 0 Comments

There are many ways to create a garden, and you don’t need acres of space, tonnes of soil or a green lawn to do it. A few carefully chosen pots, troughs, planters, windowboxes and raised beds will quickly transform a bland space into a mini oasis or a productive veg patch. And, if you live in a rental property, you can take them all with you when you leave.

Browse our full range of containers and plant pots for more inspiration.

Mandy Bradshaw

Cotswold-based, Garden Media Guild member, Mandy Bradshaw is also known as the Chatty Gardener. Passionate about gardening and writing, her beginnings are in football reporting for her primary school, and Mesembryanthemum planting with her mother. Winner of the ‘Garden Journalist of the Year’ in the 2018 Property Press Awards, she writes for not only her own blog but also newspapers, magazines and other sites.

Finalist in Garden Media Guild Awards for 2022 – Category ‘Blog or Vlog of the Year’

thechattygardener.com/

Grow your own winter five a day.

by Graham Porter | Nov 24, 2016 | Autumn gardening, Expert Update, Gardening News, Gardening Posts, inspiration for the garden, Vegetables, Windowsill Grower, Winter gardening | 0 Comments

Just because we have nearly reached the shortest day does not mean to say that we should only eat sprouts, cabbage and leeks between now and springtime.

Graham Porter

I have worked in horticulture for the past 49 years and have become more involved with and concerned about the environmental impact that our profession has had on the world. I am married with 2 grown up children and 4 wonderful grandchildren. My first book, ‘The Yorkshire Organic Gardener’ was published in November 2018. I am Vice Chair of the Chartered Institute of Horticulture’s Young Horticulturist of the Year competition and am also the CIH Northern Branch Regional Organiser for the competition.

Recipient of 2021 RHS Harlow Carr medal for services to horticulture in the North of England.

Garden Mirrors and Wall Art

by Wendie Alexander | Sep 29, 2016 | Autumn gardening, Exterior design, Flowers, Gardening Posts, inspiration for the garden, Roses, Spring gardening, Summer gardening, Windowsill Grower, Your Stories | 6 Comments

Using a garden mirror in your garden or outside space is a good way to add the illusion of room, space and a whole new dimension of liberty.

Wendie Alexander

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.

Geoff shows off his new plants

by Geoff Stonebanks | Jun 16, 2016 | Customer Trial Panel, Flowers, Fruit, Gardening Posts, inspiration for the garden, Photo Competitions, Top 10, Vegetables, Wildlife, Windowsill Grower, Your Stories | 0 Comments

The summer is racing on at a pace, but the plants still think it’s spring! The garden here at Driftwood, is roughly 3 to 4 weeks behind where I would expect it to be at this time of year. We’ve already had 2 open days, raising money for the Mayor’s charities in Seaford and the first of 4 openings for the National Gardens Scheme this summer. Hot topics, as usual, are some of the plants from Thompson & Morgan.

Geoff Stonebanks

Geoff Stonebanks was very lucky to be able to retire early from 30 years in Royal Mail back in 2004. He had 3 different careers with them first as a caterer, then manager of a financial analysis team and finally as an Employee Relations Manager and Personnel Manager. He sold up and moved with his partner to Bishopstone, near Seaford in East Sussex in 2004 and now spends all his time gardening and fundraising for Macmillan Cancer Support. Using his multi award-winning garden, featured on Gardeners’ World on BBC TV and finalist in Gardeners’ World Magazine Garden of the Year 2016, he’s raised £164,500 for various charities in 12 years, £109,000 of that for Macmillan. In his spare time, he is also Publicity Officer for the National Garden Scheme in East & Mid Sussex. In 2023, Geoff was also crowned one of the 500 Coronation Champions.

www.driftwoodbysea.co.uk

Storm Imogen causing more trouble for our bloggers

by Jean Willis | Apr 1, 2016 | Customer Trial Panel, Flowers, Fuchsia Festival, Gardening Posts, Petunia Parade, Windowsill Grower, Your Stories | 8 Comments

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.

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.

Having fun with glass jars, beads and succulents

by Graham Ward | Mar 4, 2016 | Gardening News, Gardening Posts, Windowsill Grower, Your Stories | 4 Comments

It’s been a long while since I managed to write things down – moving house kind of got in the way and last summer was spent trying to unpack boxes and tame a rather wild garden. Now that things are slowly getting straight I have had a chance to divert my attention to playing with indoor planting.

Graham Ward

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.

Preparing for the new gardening season

by Jean Willis | Feb 12, 2016 | Flowers, Gardening Posts, Windowsill Grower, Your Stories | 2 Comments

Today Alan (my Husband) has put my 4 foot portable greenhouse up after being stored away for the past 8 months since it was last used. I also have a 2 foot one which just fits nicely together alongside the 4 foot one, close by the kitchen door and will be erected as the first one fills up. You will see from the photograph that Alan has made a bracket which is fitted to the front of both greenhouses and screwed into the wall, following an unfortunate experience last year when on a very rough day it lifted the greenhouse up together with all the plants! This seems to work very well now against strong winds. Updated 8^th February: We have had storm Imogen whistle through today with winds of 60-70 mph here on the South Coast of Bournemouth and thankfully my greenhouse is still standing.

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 | Aug 25, 2015 | A year in the greenhouse, Gardening Posts, Windowsill Grower | 0 Comments

Hello Gardeners,

Hope you are all well and enjoying the summer, soon it will be a time for Harvest Festivals and Halloween. I can’t believe how quickly August is going. I apologise for the lateness of this blog as I try to get it out in the middle of each month, but we went on holiday. We got on an aeroplane and flew to sunny Scotland! We spent five days there and it was fantastic.

Our greenhouses are at their best thanks to my brilliant friend Rachel who kept an eye on things. All the plants survived our mini break and we are still picking a steady stream of aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, radish, spinach, beet, lettuce and basil. I have given away bags of tomatoes to work colleagues as well as to family and friends. I have eaten fresh food every day since the end of July and it really does taste wonderfully sweet. It’s also quite interesting to have a salad consisting of four different colours of tomatoes, bright reds of a mystery cherry tomato, yellow sungolds, dark skinned, Black Opals and orange Gardeners Delights. In a few days I shall be photographing and eating my first Green Zebra ones. I can’t find any White Opals, I am wondering if this is why I have some unexplained Cherry Tomato.

Currently I have a massive flying ant problem. Ant Powder is doing nothing, thankfully the sparrows are trying to help, but if anyone has any ideas on how to combat them organically I would be hugely grateful. Sticky traps seem to help but I don’t want the bees to get stuck by accident.

Slugs and Snails seem to want to torment me at the moment. The number I have pulled off the glass outside is ridiculous. They seem to want to crawl up the glass and through the windows then slide down the canes. I even found a slug chewing a hole in the peppers and wood lice crawled out of a hole on the other side of the pepper. Do woodlice bore holes in them? I’m not convinced it’s them as I saw earwigs in there too. Earwigs nip pretty hard if you upset them.

On returning we spent two hours in the large greenhouse removing woodlice, picking produce, tying up stems, picking out side shoots and also cutting the very tops off the plants again. There are hundreds of blooms on the tomatoes and I don’t think the season is going to allow for them to turn to fruit. Because of the damp and humid weather here, there is a high chance of blight occurring. As soon as I spot any sign of it, the plants will be uprooted. Unfortunately we have not had the six weeks of sun that we had last year. I am really hoping for a warm September and a dry October. I am in two minds as to whether or not to grow Potatoes for Christmas. Two years ago we had the worst November storms and the crop really took a battering. They did supply us with potatoes but it was too wild to and dark after work to properly take care of them. I am reluctant to overwinter them in the greenhouse as again there is a good chance of blight.

Talking of big greenhouses, when we were in Edinburgh we visited the National Botanical Gardens. The place is massive. It took us five hours to walk around it, but I don’t think we even covered it all by then! It’s best to speak to the reception staff for the seasons highlights and to pick up the maps. It’s free to walk around the Garden and only £5 per adult to go into the glass houses. We had a 2-1 voucher so it really was value for money. However, I would gladly have paid an entrance fee for the Gardens if they charged, as it really is magnificent.

There are ten greenhouses in all. I have included a photo of the Victorian entrance and a picture of most of the greenhouse and its plan. It’s worth visiting just to see the giant Water lilies in flower. I could talk for hours about our trip away, but apart from the Botanical Gardens it would have nothing to do with plants, unless I can include, whilst out walking near Arthur’s Seat, that I never knew, once a Thistle has flowered it seed heads are super soft. I was slightly alarmed when my Uncle Ronnie picked a thistle and said rub it under his chin. I dare you to try it the next time you see one.

Looking on the T&M website, I realise I haven’t got long to enter the Fuchsia and Sunflower competitions, I can see there is a category for unusually shaped veg, I wish there was one for massive peppers. The biggest one I have grown so far this year is eight inches. Can you beat that?

Meanwhile in my little 6 x 6 greenhouse, the spinach beet and carrots are growing rampantly. We have seen temperatures in the high teens so nothing has bolted. The pots of foxgloves are ready for pricking out and the new basil plants can be split and put into individual pots for winter cooking.

Soon it will be time to bring the Christmas cacti, the spider plant and money tree back into the house once the nights start to draw in. I plan to start sowing my winter crops in early September but for now I’m happy to enjoy the last of the late sun, and plan another mini break, I think I would like to visit The Eden Project next as we have seen both the Welsh and Scottish Botanical Gardens. Is there an Irish National Botanical Garden? When we go to Europe it always astounds me how big geraniums can grow, and I love to see all of their native plants. Once in Ibiza I saw a field of poppies growing amongst the cereals and it was just beautiful.

Until next month,
Happy Gardening.
Love Amanda xx

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.

A great way to grow herbs – the windowsill gardener

by Graham Ward | Mar 5, 2015 | Gardening Posts, Herbs, Windowsill Grower | 5 Comments

Now I’m not a drinking person. But the people I live with do like the occasional bottle of wine, so when I went outside the other day and found the glass recycling box was rather full, I decided to do some recycling of my own.

I wanted something that would look neat and tidy but at the same time have a bit of uniqueness to it and wine bottles seemed to fit the bill nicely, after all, they were only going to be smashed up! So if it all went horribly wrong I could pretend it hadn’t happened and take a quiet trip to the bottle bank.

I’m rather lucky in one sense that over the years I’ve managed to build up a collection of various DIY tools and so it didn’t take long for me to dig out my electric tile saw, pop it onto my work bench and make a start. My first attempt at cutting one of the bottles in half was a disaster, I didn’t keep the bottle steady and level and so I managed to end up with a 1cm difference in just one circuit of the bottle, it didn’t look good – one for the bottle bank.

My next attempt was much better; I decided on a line and kept my hand steady, producing a nicely level cut bottle, one down, and five to go!

Once they were all done, I filed and sanded down all the sharp edges, after all, there’s no point in getting cut yourself when reaching for some herbs – which I’d decided to use the bottles for by the way. I lined up my creations on the windowsill and stood back to admire my handy work. They were going to be a nuisance to clean around etc if left loose like that so back to the garage for some plywood off cuts ( a man never throws away any wood “just in case” ). Twenty minutes later a nice little box had been made and everything looked neat and tidy, I was a happy chap.

Now for the fun part, the seeds… after much deliberation I decided on Oregano, Mint, Basil, Chives, Plain Leaved Parsley and Coriander. Mint being a bit unusual to grow on a windowsill, but it beats going to get some from the garden in the pouring rain!

I filled about a quarter of each bottle with horticultural grit and charcoal as there were no drainage holes in the bottles so I wanted to be able to see if there was water sitting in the bottom and the charcoal would help absorb any smell of sitting water, which would be unpleasant. Then topped them to within a couple of cm from the top with good quality compost. Once I’d sown all the seeds, I covered with cling film to make a propagator and waited for the shoots to appear.

Overall I’m very pleased with the look. I’ve recycled, in my own way, half a dozen wine bottles and a friend will be benefiting from a windowsill herb planter in the very near future (as long as I get to taste them in a nice meal of course).

Last months project was a success all the bulbs have grown well, the crocuses and daffodils have all flowered and the tulips are still to come. On reflection I will probably plant the same bulb variety in each planter next year as now the crocuses have finished it’s looking a little bit untidy and there are gaps.

I’ve managed to acquire some onions and even some shallots which have been planted in another two bottles (the shallots had fewer in the bottle and larger holes to allow room for them to split (hopefully)).

Next month there might be teapots!

Visit our hub pages for all the expert herb growing advice and tips you need.

Graham Ward

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.

Windowsill Gardening

by Graham Ward | Feb 6, 2015 | Gardening Posts, Windowsill Grower | 1 Comment

I have been gardening since I was knee high to my Grandad, he taught me as much about gardening when I was a nipper as I learnt at school about reading and writing! My father is also a keen gardener and so I have had a very well rounded gardening education. I have been working as a self employed gardener/landscaper for approximately ten years and I now work at Thompson & Morgan in the customer care department. I have a passion for gardening, growing things is one of the most rewarding things anyone can do.

I can also tend to be slightly “off the wall” in my thinking. I will try and make / build /construct things in the garden – from Old Compact Disc windmills to planters made from various bits and pieces. I still make Hypertufa using Geoff Hamilton’s recipe and have used it to make fake rocks and fake stone planters in gardens in the past.

But of course not everyone has access to their own (or other peoples’) gardens and so I started to think about growing more things indoors, things that would be useful in cooking, or would brighten up a room. I also wanted to recycle as it’s a cheaper and sometimes more fun way of doing things.

And so I’m going to share my “adventures” in windowsill gardening, I’ll document how I’ve made things and how well they do (successes and failures). I’m really looking forward to it and my brain is already whirring with a thousand ideas – some of which might even work!

So…. Uses for plastic bottles, and where and when? Those are the questions.

After some trawling of the internet, I came up with my first plan… a super windowsill onion planter, great! Onions sets aren’t in season yet and I’m a little keen to try this idea out, then I remembered I had some tulips and crocus and even a few daff bulbs that I hadn’t planted out yet that all had inch long shoots on them and needed using up.

So my first plan is… a super windowsill bulb planter.

We have some very large 4 litre squash bottles at work so I earmarked one of those and waited patiently for the staff to hurry and finish it up, as soon as it was empty I grabbed it and washed it out.

Looking very strange taking an empty squash bottle back to my desk, I started to work out how many bulbs I could plant inside and, armed with a marker pen, I worked out a rough criss-cross pattern which allowed me to put 64 bulbs inside. The next stage was to drill each of the holes out, which is a bit tricky as I didn’t want to split the bottle, I might try using a soldering iron or hot glue gun to melt the holes out next time as they were a bit on the rough side with burrs etc. Then I cut around the top so that I could get my hand inside.

And so to the planting, this was surprisingly easy, layers of compost and then poking the bulb shoots through each of the holes, until they were fairly tight (so that no water could escape), building up until I’d reached the top, I then planted four crocus bulbs in the top and taped the bottle top back, this was hopefully to reduce loss of water through evaporation.

Once I’d watered the bottle thoroughly I put it on the windowsill and I’m now waiting to see what happens…

Graham Ward

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.

Make Use of Your Windowsill

How to choose the best pots for container gardening

Grow your own winter five a day.

Garden Mirrors and Wall Art

Geoff shows off his new plants

Storm Imogen causing more trouble for our bloggers

Having fun with glass jars, beads and succulents

Preparing for the new gardening season

Update from the greenhouse

A great way to grow herbs – the windowsill gardener

Windowsill Gardening

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