New Garden Gear To Make Life Easy, Stylish & Sustainable

The view from my kitchen door, early one morning, just before heading off to London last week for the day.

I love a visit to London, to walk through the city seeing the sights & people-watching is always a treat. This time though, it was head down, avoiding the slippery pavements & hoping snow hadn’t affected trains & tubes too much…. fortunately it hadn’t.

I was there for one of my favourite events the annual Garden Press Event. Its packed with all things garden related & you can talk to the people who make things, distribute them & generally know all about them.

My main intention was to keep an eye open for any thing that helps sustainable gardening, new ideas & stylish things too, because function is important, but it has to look good too.

Hope Grove Nurseries:

They supply all kinds of hedging, but it was these kits of bare-root hedging that caught my eye. There were many for special purposes, obviously the gin makers hedgerow appealed to me most. Bare-root hedging is great value & can be planted until April.

More about Hope Grove Nursery here.

Seedcell:

Seeds fall into this category without much effort, You simply stick the little pod, containing 2 or 3 seeds, into the soil & wait for them to germinate. The surrounding cardboard, which doesn’t have any glue or artificial content, gradually disintegrates into the soil. If more than 1 seed comes through, the weaker ones are plucked out, it’s survival of the fittest in gardening.

It’s more expensive than buying a packet of seeds, but not everyone wants a whole packet, & this might just encourage beginner gardeners & children. I reckon they’d be great for balcony gardening or a window sill.

They’re sending me some packs to try out, so I’ll let you know what they’re like.

More Seedcell info here.

Burgon & Ball:

Where to start, because they have so much on offer, including garden tools, & lots of other gardening paraphernalia.

My favourites on the stand were the little pots for house-plants

& the pegboards, for when you want to feel more organised. Lots of other products here.

Crocus:

Whatever you need for your garden, Crocus probably make a stylish version of it, & they sell mail-order plants.

If you need a cloche to protect plants there are a whole selection, including these with a copper base to keep the slugs out. I’d love to know how well they work, I still haven’t recovered from my small dahlia plants being eaten a couple of years ago.

More delicious Crocus products here

Robomow:

I think very hard about buying big items of gardening equipment, they take up space, are usually noisy & expensive. But there was something appealing about the keen little, robotic mower, slavishly nipping round & just getting on with the job. It cuts within the boundary of a sensor laid out around the perimeter of the grass.

I surprised myself by thinking why not one of these? After all most gardens have a lawn, they need frequent cutting & are generally one of the most time-consuming gardening tasks.

It’s electric & therefore quiet, there aren’t any polluting exhaust fumes & it would be useful for disabled gardeners, gardeners who may not have as much energy as they used to, or if you’d rather sit down & watch something do the work for you…. I’m all of those, apart from disabled.

The smallest retails at just under £500.00

More about them here.

Bosch Power Assisted Secateurs;

I had a go with these & they’re light, feel comfortable & made easy work of tough stems. They have a sensor that measures the force you’re using as you make the cut. When it exceeds a certain limit, a sensor sends a message to the drive unit & the power kicks in. But it’s not just about making life easy, the cut is clean & heals more quickly than a ragged one.

These are ideal if you have arthritis or want to avoid straining your arm, especially in rose-pruning season when a repetitive movement can be painful, whatever your age. But the attraction for me is making light work of a gardening task & saving energy, especially when there’s so much to do in the garden.

They retail at £84.99

More about them right here.

Coffee Logs:

These are solid little log-shapes of used coffee grounds. Aimed at indoor stove users, they’d also be ideal for a brazier in the garden & seem like a good alternative to using fossil fuels.