B&Q EasyGrow – Supporting British Flowers

We were offered a few weeks ago the chance to review a new product to the B&Q garden line up, the EasyGrow technology. I must say here that B&Q kindly donated the plants for this review via a £10 gift card. It would seem that we are easily bought. The EasyGrow website states that the purpose of the new technology, which will replace all polystyrene packaging from now on for their bedding plants, is to reduce peat usage and also to reduce the amount of polystyrene going to landfill. Both of these sound like a pretty good idea to me and I am happy to admit that I have done battle with more than a few polystyrene trays in my time. However, the point which is more pertinent to me was that they now are supporting local plant growers and all the plants we bought (and the vast majority that we found in store) were grown in the UK. This has to be a good thing and hopefully one which might one day make it onto the front of the tray rather than the back!

I was really pretty impressed with the ‘teabag technology’. Lucan, being only 3, is not the gentlest pair of hands with plants and yet even with his rough handling, the ‘teabags’ came out the green trays with ease and into the holes he made all by himself. It has to be said he was really very chuffed with himself and managed 2 or 3 completely unaided, something which really is testament to how easy the system really is. This was great on many levels but more than anything getting him involved and interested in gardening and looking after plants is something that is important to me.

Once all the plants were planted there is one bonus which is that, while you can recycle the green trays, you can also use them as seed trays to propagate the next round of seeds. This is exactly what I have done and I am looking forward to my tomato seeds getting going in their new green home.

All in all the technology of the biodegradable teabag style outer for the plants works well and seems to make gardening easy enough to make it childs-play. The proof will be rather in the flowering and hopefully the front of our house will be awash with begonias and verbenas in the not to distant future.

– Emily