National Gardening Week The country’s biggest annual celebration of gardening will take place from Monday 26 April to Sunday 2 May 2021. The event is run by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and has grown in popularity every year with National Gardening Week seeing thousands of people sharing their ‘passion for plants’ around the country and talking about what they’ve grown on social media. National Gardening Week is the nation’s biggest celebration of gardening and raises awareness of the difference that gardens and gardening can make to the lives of everyone in the UK. It inspires more people, particularly the next generation of gardeners, to experience the joy of growing and create beautiful green spaces.
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TOP TIPS FROM NATIONAL GARDENING WEEK • Fill containers including window-boxes and hanging baskets with flowers. They might need protection on frosty nights still to come in exposed gardens and northern areas. If plants can’t be bought locally or online – quick-growing calendula, cosmos, nasturtiums and zinnias are especially rewarding to sow next year. • Salads are especially welcome; sow lettuces, radishes and salad onions indoors during cold weather. Even if you only have patio containers or tubs on balconies, masses of tasty fresh salad can be grown. Lettuces can be snipped when they are small seedlings and go on to produce another crop. • Consider leaving at least some unmown next year. The array of flowers that will grow and insects that use the long grass is surprising. • Try your hand at home composting. Simply stack waste material, ideally 50:50 soft green material such as grass trimmings and vegetable scraps with denser stuff – pulled up plants, cardboard and scrunched up newspaper work well. Aim for a 1m cube or more, ideally in a bin, for the best results. • Help worms by covering the soil around plants with compost, straw, wood or bark chips (mulching) and hoe only shallowly to be rid of weeds. • Early May is the ideal time to sow annual flowers including wildflowers. To prepare the ground next year, remove weeds with the shallowest hoeing, water the border and the following day sow seeds in short rows so they can be easily weeded before they get too big. • Plant ‘bulbs’ such as dahlias and gladioli for easy late summer colour • Put plants such as heleniums, phlox and sedum in your borders in the spring, make sure there are supports to prevent them from flopping after summer rain.
