Check Out our New Blog

In an exciting development for us we joined forces with leading gardening writer and old friend Graham Rice to bring you 'Simply Gardening' - a new blog thats packed full of news, information and expert gardening tips.

This is the last post on this blog but you can see our new blog here.

From Sweet Peas to Sweetcorn!

No posts for ages - sorry - we've been busy developing a great new range. Veg plants! Richard and Geoff both have allotments and have been growing veg for years (and - in a previous life - Richard was the 'face' in a leading veggy catalogue). We've been growing our own vegetable plants on the nursery so it seemed natural to now offer them online. See our new veg plant range.

Most of our trialling has been done on Richard's patch - see the before and after shots.....

Much more on all of this very soon....

It's that time of year again........

Thank goodness- the winter is almost over, daffodils are blooming and once again the nursery is full of young plants. The new block of glass that we showed you in it's early stages of construction is now fully operational and has already produced it's first crop and will soon be full of sweet peas. Elsewhere our fuchsia plants are growing vigorously and we are just getting ready to send the first sweet peas.

If sweet peas are your passsion you are sure to be interested in Geoff's Sweet Pea Diary. Here he is sharing the events in his own sweet pea year........

Some Lovely New Fuchsias!

We grew over 150 different varieties in our Fuchsia Trial this summer and had a really lovely display. The plants were in full flower through July - this is when we make our assessments and take pictures for the web site. We then took all the plants as apart of our display at Sandringham and sold them off at the end of the show. Some were waiting for over an hour to get the pick of the varieties, we are sure it wa worth it as there were some beauties to be had.

In recent times the very large flowered doubles have been very fashionable and we certainly sell plenty of these. This year however we were looking for varieties that carried lots of blooms and flowered over a long period as these give great value in the garden and form spectacular displays.

We found plenty and the best are now in our range. Highlights were

Strawberry Daiquiri - a real head tuner with cascades of pink single blooms
Red Spider - a great basket variety with sheer flower power
Electric Lights - lots of flowers that face up to enhance the display
Auntie Jinks - still one of the best for baskets

All these had more flowers than we could count!!

Sweet Pea Variety Trials - Latest

We've just walked through our sweet pea trial area for probably the last time this year - we now need the space for other crops - and the results have once again been fascinating......

We had real concerns early in the summer as the very hot June weather almost ruined the trial. An increase in watering and slowing down the feed for a few days coincided with cooler days and the plants quickly picked up. They flowered alsmost as strongly as last year although this was delayed by about 10 days, this resulted in us having better flowers in August than ever before!

Highlights of the trial were as follows:

Dragonfly - a very interesting new intermediate variety, shadeds of pink and lavender and good scent.
Alan Roberts - this was it's best year, seems to give high quality blooms for longer than almost all others
Sylvia Moore - we think this is as good a pink as any - exhibition potential
Anna's Hope - a lovely new mid blue, bred by Andrew Bean
Apricot Queen - the most popular variety at Sandringham -we expect to have new seed from New Zealand in 2011
Patio Perfect - was really good in patio pots and flowered strongly.
White Frills - the best white by far
Ethel Grace - a week later to flower but gave great exhibition quality stems

Virtually all others (we trial all we sell) performed as expected and we had several very exciting new seedlings that have not even been named yet!

We'll miss the trial now it's going and will have to wait until next year for those armfuls of sweet peas that we've enjoyed taking home!

Gold Again at Sandringham Flower Show

We were at Sandringham Flower Show once again in late July and were delighted to catch up with many old friends. It was wonderful to hear that our seeds and plants bring so much pleasure and, in spite of the baking conditions at times this summer, pleasing that many of you have done really well with sweet peas and fuchsias. We were concerned that the hot weather would prevent us finding quality sweet pea blooms but they appeared in the nick of time and we picked masses of bunches from the trial house. We also took the pick of our fuchsias and put on what we think was our best display yet.....

The judges agreed as they awarded us a Large Gold Medal for the second year running. We'd just like to thank all that visited us and also our hosts from The Sandringham Estate who once again made us so welcome. We hope to see you all again next year.

New Sweet Pea looks Perfect on the Patio!

We've just taken this pic of our new Sweet Pea Patio Perfect. This large pot has about 10 plants in it. The light blue flowered a few days before the other colours and the display is now a real treat as you can see. As a bonus the warm weather is really bringing out the fragrance which seems stronger than last year.