Category: Growing tips

As August draws to a close, we wanted to reflect on the last few weeks. With the weather being classically British, and often perfect for growing, with the mixture of sunshine and rain, some really hot heat too! It has helped us grow some amazing food and flowers this month. From new varieties to ones grown many times before, it has been quite the month for our Grow Clubbers too who are all gardening enthusiasts! So, we wanted to share some of our favourite picks and highlights for the month straight from the Seed Pantry Office!

Nick’s Pick:

This month, as a rookie gardener, it is the first time that I have grown dahlia flowers and so they’re a no brainer pick for me. My Dahlia ‘Bishop of Canterbury’ flowers have been especially good and just keep on flowering and they are my pick for the month! With luscious dark foliage and bright single flowers, I’ve enjoyed watching them grow and keep on producing!

Neil’s Picks:

As shown on Instagram, he was particularly proud of his Onion ‘Long Red Florence’ and the Bronze Fennel too. It was the first time of growing either, so was a good adventure. He has have grown many shallots and onions in the past but the heirloom Red Florence onion looks great in the veg patch and he can’t wait to eat them!

The Bronze fennel looks amazing in garden borders as an ornamental plant, but it also produces exceptional flavours for use in the kitchen. With a sweet aniseed aroma when you brush past them, the leaf fronds can be finely chopped for seafood, roasted vegetable and salad dishes.

So new to us that we’re coming up with recipes and ideas on how to cook fennel!

 

All our top picks come from the Seed Pantry Grow Club discovery boxes, sent monthly, that you can sign up and save on the best plants, flower bulbs and seeds from around the world, delivered to your door to grow. See here for more details: https://www.seedpantry.co.uk/grow-club.html

 

Seed Pantry Team

This month we started a new obsession, AIR PLANTS! 🍃 These amazing plants are truly fascinating! To avoid any confusion about what to do with these plants we thought we post about what makes them so special! 🌟

Air Plants, (Tillandsia) are tropical plants that do not have roots and therefore do not require soil to grow! This means you can grow them mostly anywhere!

Air Plants or sky plants, as they are sometimes called are from the bromeliads plant family. They are Epiphytes, meaning an organism that captures moisture/nutrients from the air and rainwater through its leaves.

Here is our guide on how to care for your Air Plants! 😁

Placement:

As they have no roots and require no soil, placement is unlike any other type of plant. You will most likely want a way to prop them up or to keep the air plant in. You can do this in various ways. From adding to small pots, displaying on driftwood, to copper wire mobiles hanging from the ceiling, they all look great. One of the most popular ways to do display them is with the use of terrariums or Aeriums.

The later of these can be made at home! Aeriums are glass enclosures that contain air plants, making them a great place for air plants to live and grow. You can create your own by using any spare glass cups you have and placing them inside. You can add sand or pebbles to the base of the glass to help prop the plant up also.

Light:

Originating from tropical climates mean air plants need sunlight to stay healthy, however not too much as it will dry them out. This makes windowsills the best place to put Air plants. Make sure to choose a window that provides indirect sunlight.

Air plants pull in moisture from the air to help them survive, so humid environments, such as bathrooms and kitchens, are perfect. The more humid the environment the less you will need to mist the plants in order to keep them happy.

Water:

As soon as your air plants arrive, soak them in room temperature water for 60 minutes, and for best results soak them in rainwater. After this, there are two methods of watering you can do to keep your air plants healthy.

Misting/spraying: Use a diffuser/spray device and water them this way regularly, 1 to 2 times a week during warm weather and once per week during colder months.

or

Soaking method: Once every other week, soak the plants in a bath (a bowl is good) of room temperature water and wait for 120-180 minutes. Remove and gently shake off excess/leave upside down and let them dry completely.  They will look healthy after this.

All in all, they are really easy to grow and take care of!

Visit Seed Pantry and start growing your air plant collection today!

Link: Seed Pantry Air Plants

Seed Pantry Team

Earlier this month (July 2019), we had the absolute pleasure of being able to attend the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show! Once again the RHS put on an amazing show, with some awe-inspiring displays of food and flowers! 🌱

Some of the standouts for us this year were the collection of Canna plants and their amazing foliage and flowers. These were included in May Grow Club boxes, so grow clubbers you have those plants to look forward to very soon!

Other favourites from recent Seed Pantry boxes are Gladioli nanus flowers. The lipstick kisses on the petals were spectacular, creating fabulous contrasting colours with the pink on white!

…elsewhere there were amazing collections of Air Plants and Hosta’s we love too!, which made these last 2 months of the Grow Club feel even more exciting as they’ve all featured too!

Rest assured, as Grow Club members, we’ll keep you right on trend in your garden spaces in the seasons to come! 😎🌱

Let the Summer roll on… ☀️

Seed Pantry Team

Our office Grow Pod’s have chillies ready to harvest! These are ‘Basket of Fire’ chillies that come with the Grow Pod 2 and we have been devising ways to add them to our lunches! 🌶️

At first, we did try to get people in the office to try them! however, no one seemed brave enough to attempt the first taste…! So Nick took them home to cook with and thoroughly enjoyed a bit of spicy heat…

Our Chilli Pepper ‘Orange Tyger’ plant is doing very well also and has now started flowering. Soon it will follow with chillies…orange ones! 😁 Also our Purple Basil, Red Robin cherry tomatoes are coming along nicely in the Grow Pod, but we are not quite ready to show yet! 😉

We will keep you posted on all of our office growing activities throughout summer! 🌅

Seed Pantry Team

The time has come! Our Seed Pantry June Grow Club box has arrived, so we got stuck in quickly to get our Hosta plants planted!! We have all been very excited about this! 🌿

Here is our quick guide on how to plant and care for your own Hosta plants! 👨‍🎓

1. Our Hostas come as bare root plants, so you can start planting them straight away, directly in borders or in containers.  As they do not need as much sunlight as most plants, you can position them in shadier parts of your growing space!

2. Plant the roots 5-10cm deep and 50cm apart for tall varieties like ‘Vulcan’ and ‘Fire and Ice, and plant with 30cm of spacing for the smaller types like ‘Blue Mouse Ears’. Place the roots downwards with the growing points, facing up.

3. Cover the plants with compost, add a splash of water and wait for the magic to happen! Hostas like fertile, moisture-retentive soil for the best growing conditions.

4. As we mentioned before, Hostas like shade or part shade growing spaces and do not require as much light. This gives you the opportunity to fill darker areas of the garden that may have been left a little bare until now!

Hosta are hardy perennial plants that die back in winter and will come back each year in spring, so simply leave them to do their thing!

Container growing can help fend of slugs, as they do like to chomp on them, also you can ‘companion plant’ by adding Astilbe plants from our June box too, as they hate those and avoid them!

All in all, they are easy to grow and take care of! 😅

Visit Seed Pantry and start growing your own too! 😁

I have been growing my first ever chilli plant and this one is my pride and joy! It was from December’s Grow Club box, however, it took me a little longer than I would have liked to get going, so it is a little behind everyone else’s. Now that it is growing nicely, I have been zealously taking care of it!

I didn’t take note (again!) of what was planted where, but I am hoping it could be ‘Moruga Red’ as I would like to have some serious mouth scorchers! I made a makeshift greenhouse out of a sandwich bag, whilst not visually pleasing, it has helped the chilli plant grow and stay warm.

Soon I will re-pot them, but in the meantime, they will be kept safe here on my windowsill. I cannot wait to grow my own chillies!

Nick – Rookie Gardener

Seed Pantry

And so begins our venture into growing our indoor office garden! 🌿🌶️ We are starting with two Seed Pantry Grow Pods in the office, to grow as we work! 😁

Recently we moved office and we wanted to bring gardening life into the workplace. With one situated on one of our desks and the other on the windowsill.

Right now we have chillies, purple basil, broad leaf thyme and cherry tomatoes growing! Hopefully, soon we will have a range of edibles to add to our lunches! 🍽️

We are also planning to get office flowering plants in soon too! So keep your eyes out for that! 😃

Why not start growing at home or in your office with us too! 🍅

https://www.seedpantry.co.uk/grow-pods/seed-pantry-grow-pod-2.html

 

Seed Pantry Team

Following in the footsteps of Richard (Sharpen Your Spades) and Neil, it is now my turn to finish planting all of my Dahlia flowers! 💐…and you thought we may have been done talking about them!

So I have already planted 3 into containers over the last few weeks, but as I have a shared garden, I wanted to check with the rest of my building that they were OK with me planting things in the shared space.

As you would expect, they all agreed! I have planted them all directly into the ground on the garden borders as the frosts seem to be behind us now! I closely followed the instructions given to me by Neil in our blog, as this is the first time I have ever grown Dahlia flowers.

This has to be the most excited I have been to grow these Mexican flowers, so roll on Summer! 😁

Nick – Rookie Gardener

Seed Pantry Team

In all the excitement of the RHS gardening week, we almost forgot that the beginning of May went by… which means a fresh new selection of food and flowers for the Seed Pantry Grow Club!  This Month we have a beautiful range of Canna Flowers.

Canna flowers or also known as Canna lily (although not actually being a true lily) are stunning plants from the tropics that are related to banana plants! We have four varieties available this month: Canna ‘Black Knight’ has dark foliage and deep red flowers, ‘Pink and Roses’ is beautiful, ‘Verdi’ (AGM) is a tall big plant and will look great in city or rural gardens and large containers,  and ‘Stuttgart’ with striking variegated leaves.

You can see the varieties in this month’s Grow Club with the link below:

https://www.seedpantry.co.uk/grow-club/discovery-box.html

Each plant grows to around 80cm, however, the Canna ‘Verdi’ can grow up to 1.5 metres tall for a real dramatic jungle effect! On top of their beautiful flowers, they are often grown for their magnificent foliage. So much so, that some people even clip the flowers to keep only the exotic leaves!

We thought as these are unusual flowers, We would put together a quick guide on how to plant and care for your own Canna plants! 🌱

1. Now that the colder weather is (hopefully) behind us, you can start planting canna rhizomes outside, mid-May onwards, directly into borders or in containers. It can be very helpful for drainage if mix in a few handfuls of sand/grit to the compost you use.
2. Plant the rhizomes 10-15cm deep and 50cm apart for tall varieties or 30cm apart for the medium size types. Place the rhizomes with the eyes, or growing points, facing up.
3. Position your cannas in full sun for the best foliage colour and the greatest number of blooms. Or people do grow them just for the jungle-like foliage, so semi-shade works.
4. Cover the rhizomes with compost, add a splash of water and that’s it! Wait for the magic to happen.
5. For care, remove old flowers from the plant to keep them producing. Cannas are not full winter hardy, so you should lift and store in late autumn after the first frost or mulch well and leave in the ground in the South of the UK.

And that is everything you need to get you growing beautiful Canna flowers come August! 💐

Seed Pantry