Tasks for April

The RHS is calling on Britain’s gardeners to ‘spring’ into action as the warm weather brings a short, intense burst of spring flowering bringing the biggest and most beautiful spectacle of colour seen in years. Weeks of cooler conditions earlier this spring meant plants remained in bud longer this year, so burst into flower over a shorter space of time once [...]

Harvest your rhubarb by the armful from this month onwards; a fully mature clump can keep you supplied with as many succulent, sweet red stems as you can eat from now until June, with plenty left over for the freezer! You can start your season with ‘Timperley Early’, always first to reach maturity; then enjoy traditional varieties like ‘Victoria’, or more [...]

Next week is National Gardening Week– a chance for the whole country to get together and celebrate all that’s good about gardening! Run by the Royal Horticultural Society, National Gardening Week is now in its 7thyear with thousands of people, gardens, charities, garden centres and groups getting involved in inspiring you to get out into your garden. This year promises [...]

Alpine troughs and pans can be as small as a single dish, right up to an elegant stone trough; you’ll find a superb selection of suitable containers here at the garden centre. In their native habitats high in the mountains, alpine plants grow among thin, dry, rocky soils in full sun, so they make natural choices for containers; you can [...]

You’ll find a huge range of annual herbs on our seed racks here at the garden centre, so drop by this week and pick out your favourites. Annual herbs are super generous as they last just one season, so they grow really fast, producing lush, leafy, fragrant greenery for you to pick within weeks of sowing. Here are just a [...]

April is a kind month, its warmth encouraging shoots and seedlings to burst into new growth at last. There are daffodils and the first tulips to enjoy, as well as spring perennials and the glory of spring blossom. So here are this month’s jobs so you can get yourself outside and enjoy it all! General tasks Restock ponds with summer beauties [...]

Start planting new perennials as the soil is starting to warm up and they can get off to a flying start in your garden, filling it with colour and scent from early summer until the first frosts. Perennials are the ideal choice for any new planting scheme, as they come back year after year and perform even better as they mature. [...]

Give everything a spring feed to get your plants up and raring to go again after a long, hard winter. The soil can often become really short on nutrients after a long battering by rain, wind and snow, so that by spring, when everything starts to grow again, it’s not at its best. So a spring feed is arguably the most [...]