For the hardened horticulturalist

A wormery is an excellent idea for a keen gardener, particularly if they don’t have space for a compost heap. The worms will merrily gorge on kitchen waste and produce wonderful (and free!) liquid feed for the garden. We like the sturdy Wormcity wormeries which are available in a range of sizes.

In cold weather even the most dedicated gardener can be put off, but not with a pair of heated insoles in their wellies! Available from retailers including Amazon and Greenfingers, they are battery operated and most use an adjustable ankle strap to hold the battery pack.

A solar radio is a great gardener’s gift as they can listen to their favourite stations while in the garden, without the hassle of cables or having to turn the house radio up so high that the whole neighbourhood can hear it! AM/FM solar radios start at around £15 while you can buy a Roberts DAB solar radio (which will also run off the mains) from £65.

There are some things which every gardener always needs more of, so why not buy them a trug and then fill it with all the gardening essentials. Gardening gloves (especially warm winter ones), twine, plant labels, plant label pens, fresh secateurs blades, hand cream and Jeyes disinfectant fluid are items that no gardener can have too much of.

If you’re buying for the gardener who has everything, why not treat them to a new skill? Many open gardens around the country offer courses throughout the year on a wide range of topics. RHS gardens and university botanic gardens are particularly good sources. Send them on a course to brush up the basics of pruning or propagation, or perhaps go in depth with a course on hybridization or grafting.

For the casual gardener

For many people a garden is as much about relaxation and socialising as it is about growing the perfect paeony or cultivating an award winning veg patch. There are plenty of great gifts for those who prefer peaceful pottering in the garden.

‘Plant Theatre’ have created the perfect combination of gardening and relaxation in their ‘Grow your own cocktail’ kit. The kit contains seeds and pots to grow 6 different plants with instructions on how to use them to create 18 cocktail recipes. The plants include cucamelon, borage and lime basil.

Many designer names are coming into the gardening market, meaning that gardeners can truly garden in style. Big brands such as Orla Kiely and Joules are creating beautiful gardening accessories and equipment, including gloves, pots and kneelers. Or you can personalise a basic pair of gardening gloves to suit the recipient. Sew on a fur trim, red felt ‘painted nails’ or some festive tinsel to make your own original design.

Lighting can make any garden look special, even in the depths of winter. While solar lights are great for the summer, in the winter battery powered lights can take their place. So why not buy them a string of LED fairy lights to decorate trees or shrubs. Buy ones which automatically come on in the dark or have a timer on them (so they don’t have to go out to turn them on and off) and some rechargeable batteries to power them, and they’ll be able to add a little winter sparkle to their garden.

Getting kids into the garden

Teach children about how plants grow with a pack of beanstalk seeds which reveal a secret message as they grow, by Beecycle. As the seed germinates a secret message (such as ‘Merry Christmas’) appears on the cotyledon (the first, embryonic leaf that appears).

Give the green fingered child in your life some great gardening ideas with the RHS ‘Ready, steady, grow!’ book of gardening projects. From growing salad to creating a fairy ring, the projects take from 1 day to 12 weeks to complete, suiting all attention spans!

If you’re buying for kids who love Hallowe’en, then why not get them a kit to grow their own pumpkin ready for next October 31st? Scott and Co have a ‘Percy the Pumpkin’ kit which supplies everything needed, including carving tools for the final product. Alternatively, create your own kit with pumpkin seeds, pots, coir pellets and growing instructions.

You can bring some family fun into the garden (well, when the weather improves anyway!) with giant versions of favourite games. You can buy giant Twister, snakes and ladders, noughts and crosses, playing cards, Kerplunk, draughts, chess, Jenga and pick up sticks – so there’s something to suit everyone (and to suit your budget).

Practical purchases

Lechuza have a range of polypropylene planters with integrated watering reservoirs which will suit many different garden styles. They are all smartly designed with ceramic or metallic finishes and are frost, UV and shatter resistant (a benefit over terracotta). Plus they won’t overheat your plants like metal planters can. The full range can be found on the Lechuza website and there are various stockists online and in local garden centres.

Spear and Jackson have launched a Kew Gardens Collection of garden tools, which combine durability (borne out by their 15 year guarantee) with a stylishly traditional appearance. There’s a wide range of tools available to suit all types of gardeners, from the more usual digging forks and spades to less commonplace rose bed rakes and mulch forks.

Little girls will love a flower press like the pretty one available from the Handpicked Collection. Make the gift even more special by adding in some cards and glue for them to turn their pressed flowers into works of art.

Anyone with an interest in flower arranging will appreciate a good pair of florists’ scissors and I love the Spear and Jackson ones sold in a robust, Union Jack adorned pouch, from Bradley’s Tannery.

Grow their own

Veg growers love to plant unusual varieties, so search out some heirloom and heritage seeds from The Real Seed Catalogue. I like the sounds of ‘Sweet Chocolate’ bell peppers, vibrant ‘Dragon Purple’ carrots and the oak leaf shaped leaves of ‘Flashy Butter Oak’ lettuces (well, I was bound to like that one!).

Make growing potatoes a bit easier by buying spud-lovers some potato planting bags. These don’t have to sit on the patio – dig a trench where you want to grow your potatoes, put the bags in it, then fill with soil and a seed potato. The potato grows naturally into the ground through the holes the bag, but when you come to harvest it you simply pull out the bag, saving all that digging. You can then store the potatoes in the bags (in a cool spot) until you’re ready to eat them. They can be purchased from LBS Garden Warehouse.

A perfect gift for a keen herb grower, or a lover of mint tea, is the tisanière tea set from Crocus, which combines mint seeds and the pot to brew up the resulting leaves.

Rocket Gardens have a range of ‘instant gardens’, so if you know someone who’s keen to start growing their own, this could be the perfect gift. They sell packs of ‘baby’ plants to suit areas from window boxes to large veg patches, delivered at exactly the right time to plant them. Included in their range is a ‘River Cottage’ collection of plants. If you’re not sure what to buy then they also sell gift vouchers, so the recipient can choose their own garden.

Whimsy

Thrive, a charity promoting the advantages of gardening for people with disabilities, have a selection of gardening-themed Christmas cards, including their exclusive ‘Christmas Thyme’ card.

If you have a gardener to buy for who’s also a football fan, then a football club gnome might be the perfect gift! Available from Amazon and other stockists, the gnomes are dressed in the colours of key premiership and national football teams.

For children of any age, the SnowBall Blaster will get everyone outside for the mother of all snowball fights! It hurls perfectly formed snowballs up to 30m and comes complete with a target…not that I believe anyone will be firing at that! Available from Amazon and other stockists.

Kneeling pads are useful to all gardeners, but some more so than others…I like the ones with ‘Beer please’ or ‘A nice cup of tea please’ printed on them in large print, perfect for waving hopefully towards the kitchen window when you’re feeling a bit parched from all that weeding! Available from Amazon and various other stockists.

Outdoor living

If you know someone with a balcony then the Elho Corsica Flower Bridge Table could be a great choice for them. It hangs neatly over the balcony and provides a stylish area for planting herbs or annuals, plus a table and tray for storage or simply somewhere to put your cuppa. It’s available in a range of colours and can be purchased via Amazon.

Treat a swashbuckling BBQ fan to a new implement – a cooking fork with a cutlass-style handle! It even comes complete with a cut out mask so the BBQ buccaneer can keep their identity a secret! Available from Firebox and other stockists.

Creature comforts

The cupcake craze doesn’t need to exclude the garden – The Worm That Turned is selling delicate seed cupcakes, perfect for your friends’ feathered friends!

Traditional bird feeders don’t always suit modern, urban gardens, so CJ Wildlife have introduced a range of stylish hanging and wall mounted bird feeders in stainless steel, suiting the most contemporary gardener.

Genuinely useful gardening gifts

• Kew Royal Botanic Gardens have a range of practical garden equipment made that little bit special by being adorned with a suitably regal crown. We particularly love the garden line, an ideal gift for allotmenteers and other veg growers. It can be purchased on the Kew Gardens website.
• Garden lovers with balconies, or decking with railings, will go potty (pun intended!) for handy containers which slot over the railing and allow plants to adorn this usually dull spot. The balcony pots are available from Crocus in black, green, white or fuchsia pink.
• Another useful buy from Crocus is their windfall apple collector. If the gardener in your life has an apple tree you’ll be all too familiar with the autumnal chore of clearing windfall apples (worsened, in our case, by the need to get to them before our greedy labrador eats too many!). This cunning device is wheeled along and scoops up fallen apples as it goes, without causing additional bruising. Saves all that back ache!
• Plant labels are one of those things that you can never have enough of, and we all hanker after those beautiful slate labels we see in the veg patches of formal gardens. You can now get the style of slate with an environmentally friendly solution thanks to plant markers made out of recycled coffee cups. They are available through The Worm That Turned’s website.
• Hand creams are a bit of a ‘cliche’ present for gardeners, but the Crabtree and Evelyn Gardeners’ Hand Therapy hand cream is truly a treat for tired gardening hands.

Whimsy

• Non breakable mugs are always handy in the garden and this one, available from The Worm That Turned, offers extra encouragement to fruit and veg growers with its World War II style ‘Dig For Victory’ message.
• Greenfingers have a range of cute ceramic ladybirds available in two sizes which are bound to bring a smile to the face of anyone who spots them peaking out from under a plant.
• As lawn mowing doesn’t just happen on warm summer days, a woolly hat might be the perfect gift for the mower in your family. It’s made extra special by ‘The Lawn Ranger’ cartoon decorating it. It’s available from Smart Gift Solutions.

For children

• Briers have brought out a range of children’s garden clothing based on the ‘Gruffalo’ book and film. The range includes fleeces, macs, gardening gloves and snug boot warmers. You can buy it via the Briers website.
• Most kids love attracting birds to the garden, and a new kit available through the Not On The High Street website enables them to make their own feeder for apples. The kit is for a wooden apply holder which can be decorated as required.
• The creative theme is continued with the ‘paint your own gnome’ kit, which provides a gnome along with a variety of paints to decorate it. The paints aren’t weather proof, so you’d need to varnish it if you want to put the final article out in the garden. It’s available via Amazon.

Well, I have to say, it’s worked very well. I’ve used it on a couple of different beds and it’s done a very good job of suppressing weeds. Irritating little annual/ephemeral weeds seem to have been almost entirely kept in check. I’ve had a few of the larger, perennial weeds growing through the mulch, but I don’t mind these so much as I quite enjoy the satisfaction of digging them out…well when the root comes out in one piece anyway!

The colour of the strulch has become darker over time, although it still doesn’t provide quite the same fabulously dark background as a leaf mould or composted bark mulch would.

In areas which are more exposed (for example around the unplanted base of an apple tree) the strulch proved a little too light and has been blown away (probably with a little encouragement from the dog scratching around in it), so I think I may return to bark for those areas.

But all in all strulch has been a real success and I’m intending to extend my use of it to the veg patch next year, particularly around longer term crops such as my onions and garlic, where it will be very helpful in keeping weeds to a minimum.

So I went ahead and strulched. The 12 bags duly arrived. As the delivery man hefted them out of the van I noticed a distinct lack of perspiration from him. Going over to the bags I tried to lift on – and could do so single handed! Then feeling a little guilty for my apathy, I offered to help him unload the rest. So that’s already one tick in the box for strulch, it’s very easy to handle.

Next, the spreading. I dutifully pulled out all the weeds on the first border to be treated and applied the strulch to the recommended 3-4cm depth. It spread out easily and did appear well enough knitted together that the relatively shallow depth should be effective at suppressing weeds and keeping moisture in. As instructed on the bag I then watered it in (as no handy rainfall was due) to prevent it drying and spreading across mine and neighbouring gardens.

The next day it was still in place, so another tick in the box. It remains to be seen whether it is as effective as it is easy to use, but I am optimistic that my weeds will be summarily controlled by it. The only down side I can see, so far, is that its lighter colour isn’t quite as pleasing to the eye as the deep, black of composted bark which contrasts so well with the summer blooms. But I guess I can just use the money I saved to buy more plants so there’s no chance of seeing the mulch under the cacophony of flowers anyway!