The Spring days make me desperate to get out into the garden, and with the twins’ Easter holidays about to begin, an email from B&Q about their brand new packaging solution for bedding plants – easyGrow – pinged into my inbox at just the right time.
The kids love gardening, so yesterday with the sun shining, I gave them an easyGrow tray of plants (begonias for Fonz, and petunias for Ez) and a pot each, and they got stuck right in.
B&Q’s easyGrow has done away with the polystyrene packaging usually used for bedding plants, replacing it with a teabag-style solution that can be planted directly into the ground and is fully compostable. The kids could lift each plant straight out of the tray and plant them themselves, making it really easy for them to finish the project with little help from me.
Here are a few stats from B&Q that definitely got me thinking about greener gardening:
- B&Q sell 80 million bedding plants between March and May – which would result in 22,500 cubic metres of polystyrene being sent to landfill, enough to fill 87,200 wheelie bins or 9 Olympic sized swimming pools
- The new packaging is 95% peat free, helping to ease pressure on the excavation of peat bogs, using coir instead which is made from coconut husks. 94% of this peat bogs in England have been excavated largely for use in compost
- Peat use in gardening in the UK releases around 1.25 million tonnes of CO2 each year. Around 400,000 tonnes of this comes directly from commercial peat extraction on UK bogs
Disclosure: We were sent a tray of easyGrow plants to use for writing this post.
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