Visiting the Garden Centre

We absolutely love going to the garden centre, it’s beautiful and all the plants and vegetables are full of life and colour – I’m hoping this is because of the timing in which they sell them and not a damning reflection on my lack of watering the garden. I always come out with tonnes of ideas, lots of plants I had no idea I needed for my garden, and usually a lot less money.

Due mostly to the amount of money we were spending and the fact that many of the plants I chose weren’t lasting I came up with a few new approaches to help me get the most out of my garden for the least amount of money. I don’t want to teach anyone how to suck eggs as the saying goes but I do think it’s worth explaining about the two different types of plant that you can buy; a perennial is a plant that lives and flowers for more than two years, whereas an annual will only live for the spring/summer in which you buy it.

My first step was to research perennials that I liked and that would work in our space; I wanted to have a good foundation of beautiful plants that I knew would come back year after year and save me having to start from scratch every spring. Yes, if you have gardened before you probably think this is obvious, but I had never had a garden before and knew very little about what flowers I liked or how to look after them. My Mama had a beautiful flower garden growing up (and still does) but I didn’t show any interest in it when I was young and the knowledge wasn’t passed on until I asked for it a few years ago.

So, once you know what you want (and I do recommend at least 70-80% perennials), then you can start to fill in the gaps with annual plants that you love. I always choose pansies and the children have picked some violas to plant over the last few years. Geraniums always make your flowerbeds look happy and I honestly don’t think there is anything more beautiful than buckets of sweetpeas all over the patio.

Once I have a list of what I am looking for I go to the garden centre and write down the price of what I am looking to buy with a rough note of the size of the plant. I normally do this at the beginning of April, then I keep my eyes out for bargains in places like Lidl and Aldi as well as reduced items in Homebase. I have gotten rather a lot of bargains buying the heavily reduced stuff in Homebase – it’s normally dying because they haven’t watered it and it’s in a small tub with no nutrients, but once planted in the soil at home and given a good water, about 90% of the plants we have bought heavily discounted has survived and flourished.

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I go back to the garden centre at some point in May to buy the remaining flowers on my list. This approach has saved us a lot of money and our garden looks much happier and healthier because of it.

This season I am hoping to look into when things flower so that there is always something in bloom between May and September. Last year our garden looked fabulous in July and August but pretty average in May, June and September. We will see how this goes as all of the plants in my righthand bed have sadly started dying. I am completely heartbroken about this (especially my two beautiful hebes and my hollyhocks!) and at a complete loss as to what has caused it. I’m really nervous about planting new ones in case they die too and I end up throwing money down the drain but I have to try something! I will post an update if I do find out what has happened.

Please do let us know what you are doing with your gardens this Spring, we love a bit of inspiration.

Livvy and Summer