A quiet property market coupled with the fact that staying in is the new going out, means people are spending money on their gardens. But forget the swimming pool, hot tub and stripey lawn. A tried-and-tested (and cheaper) way to make your garden attractive to buyers is to plant nice flowers and have a tidy lawn.
Forget the expense of a landscape gardener – basic weeding, pruning and planting will have the desired effect. At this time of year, bedding plants are a great way to add instant colour to a garden as they're low-cost, fast-growing and have long flowering periods.
The ideal bedding plants have brighter colours, longer flowering times and better weather tolerance. Gardening consultant Tim Millward of
Plant Me Now, gives his top five tips for getting the most from your bedding plants:
- At the end of the season, replace bedding plants with winter flowering bedding for a colourful outdoor space all year round.
- Summer bedding plants make great gap fillers in flowerbeds. They also work brilliantly in hanging baskets and containers where you can mix a combination of upright and trailing varieties.
- Add a taller plant like a fuchsia or dahlia as a centrepiece to create a focal point. Mix bright, bold, large flowers with smaller, subtler flowers for a stunning effect.
- Attract bees and butterflies by choosing brightly coloured, large flowering plants. Bees like to get to the centre of the flower so avoid 'double' flowers and plant bedding with 'daisy-like' flowers instead.
- Bright orange and yellow attract pests like aphids, so planting marigolds or nasturtiums on an allotment will draw aphids away from your valuable vegetable plants.
- Water bedding plants first thing in the morning or early evening to ensure you avoid watering in bright sunlight. Deadhead regularly and remove faded flowers so nutrients will produce new flowers rather than feed faded ones.
- A food that's high in potash to promote flowering, while nitrogen will encourage plants to grow large and bushy. Get quick results by feeding regularly with a liquid or soluble feed, or feed once at the beginning of the season using a slow-release feed.
- Most bedding plants will have been grown in greenhouses from around March. The low light levels this year have caused flowers to be a little late and if the greenhouse is unheated then growth may be behind by a few weeks.
Don't panic if you have no flowers yet - a week or two of June sunshine should easily help the plants catch up if they're behind. After trialling thousands of varieties, the best 150 are now available at Plant Me Now, online
garden centre.
