Gardening in hard times (During Covid) – Grow your Own Part 1

The coronavirus pandemic has set off a massive gardening boom in recent months, Grow your own was a massive interest in the early days of lockdown. Major seed suppliers were depleted of stock quickly with uncertainty of future re stocks. Garden centres were closed and just buying a simple bag of compost became a desperate challenge for many. 

What we have discovered is that this pandemic has now created a lot more home gardeners who have taken a vested interest in starting to grow their own food. Small patches of gardens have been carved up and raised beds added and seeds sown. Long queues at supermarkets, certain food items being cleared from shelves within days and stocking up of larders for the unknown happened quickly. Stock piling and empty shop shelves became the norm.

What have we seen as being the biggest trends since lockdown

1. Grow your own part 1
2. Easy to grow flowers part 2
3. Raised bed gardening part 3
4. Upcycling / Recycling part 4
5. Demand for Allotments in the UK part 5
6. Gardening sustainably part 6

Here we will publish a series of 6 posts of Gardening during hard times (During Covid). We start with Grow your Own.

Grow your own – I remember I was contacted on a daily basis on how to extract seeds from shop bought Peppers and Tomatoes in order to propagate from them…….

Many people of today may have had a family member when they were a child who grew vegetables in the garden at home or an allotment. Grow your own though in essence is still the same as it was many years ago. Nowadays it’s fashionable to have a raised bed at home and this became even more evident once lockdown occured. People needed contact with the outside and more so of parents with young children. What an inspiration this situation provided. I was contacted on a regular basis on how to extract seeds from shop bought Peppers and Tomatoes in order to extract the seeds and then propagate from them.