Grow Your Own

Grow your own

PlantforLife and the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) have teamed up with celebrity plantsman, Chris Collins to champion the next phase of ‘grow your own’ gardening by educating people with simple tips on how easy it is to plant and grow fruit trees and berries in containers or a small space in the garden.

Your local Garden Centre should now be featuring heavily on grow your own tools, skills and passing on offers that will entice you into Growing your own vegetables. Grow your own is not a new craze, it is simply that growing your own has become far cheaper in recent years and is now cheaper than buying in any high street supermarket.
Make sure that you have the best tools to grow your own and make gardening easier by talking to your local garden centre and asking for their advice. Poplar Tree Garden Centre offer advice via email, telephone or in person in their store and you can buy many Grow your own items online which will give you everything you need to get gowing and thrive.

Why do I need to use a hoe?

Many people make more work of hoeing than is necessary. Although, the hoe is one of the most primitive of all tillage tools, it can be designed and used more effectively now. No, there isn’t really any way to make hoeing fun, but isn’t a beautiful garden or flower bed and a painless back all the rewards you need?
The first problem with contemporary hoeing is that too often hoes are used for deep cultivation or chopping, rather than the scrapping action they are designed for. Let’s not mistake a hoe for a shovel. Using a hoe in place of another tool accounts for sore muscles. We need a sharp cutting apparatus designed to slice weeds at their life-giving stems, not to dig them up. The majority of garden weeds have newly invaded with their shallow roots and fall easy victims to the scraping of your hoe. This scraping action takes relatively little work in comparison to cultivating or digging, and there are several hoe types that facilitate maximum scraping and weed death. For example, a shuffle hoe has blades on both sides to cut weeds on either side at the same time with pushing or pulling movements by its handler.