It’s strange to be thinking about Christmas in the middle of September!

But to be sure to meet the Christmas rush, this is one of the realities of providing a service like ours. With so many suppliers out there, we need to make sure that we maintain the high quality people expect of us, even for the short Christmas season.

Well, we believe we’ve done it. We’ve found a supplier who uses a sustainable, managed forest in Scotland who can have your tree cut, prepared and delivered to you within 24 hours of the order. And we’re really excited about it.

It means that you’ll get the tree to make your Christmas without the trauma usually associated with it. No queuing up and fighting through a pile of branches like Rambo, no messy car and disruption to your home as you drag your tree in from the street.

Simply go to our site, pick the tree you want from a wide range of sizes and types and leave the rest to us. Your tree will be carefully cut, packed and delivered in a closed box, ready for you to unpack where you want your tree to be. Easy!

We’ll be supplying  Nordman Firs as part of our range, this is now Britain’s top selling Christmas tree. Nordman’s fine deep colour, shape and excellent needle retention provides a classic triangular shape. But if you’re after something a little different, we’ll be offering more besides. Stay tuned - check our site for news!!

Oh, and remember, keep the box because it’ll help you when you’ve finished with your tree after Christmas. Wow, can’t believe I’m talking about January now!

Exotic Garden Bulb packs join the PickaPlant product line!

Have you noticed how much PickaPlant’s grown from when we appeared last spring?

We want  to keep that summer feel to every British garden throughout the year - so as the days shorten we’ll bring the colour closer to the living room with dazzling foliage and by adding patio, house and conservatory plants.

But we’ve not forgotten the real garden as autumn approaches. We’re offering absolutely amazing garden flower bulb deals. Packs of stunning, vibrant colours - everything you could dream of - presented in easy to plant cartons. Flower bulbs ready to make your garden explode with colour next year.

Following on from our success with our ready to go garden packs, we’re also offering colour-matched garden bulb packs. Great combinations like Black and white tulip bulbs and many more coordinated garden flower bulb arrays guaranteed to brighten every area of your garden.

So now that the gardening bug has bitten you, feed your passion by planting our bulbs. More great ideas from PickaPlant!

Did you know, simply spending some time developing and improving your garden can add as much as 15% to the value of your home?

I came across this in a piece of research from a National Savings and Investments press release. It was looking at the spending trends of people on their gardens and the effect on the property value.

Nicolas Leeming, director of the leading property website PropertyFinder.com says:

“Gardens play a hugely important role in selling homes and can add significant value to a property. Our research shows that well tended front gardens are the most important factor that attract buyers to a street. Back gardens are even more important.

“Simply having a garden can enhance an average property’s value by perhaps up to 15%. As always, the closer matched the style of garden is to your target market, the quicker you can expect to sell and the more money you can bank on raising.”

Tactical gardening

With a typical house costing £300,000 in many areas of the UK, this means that a little tactical gardening could see your house go up by £45,000. Not a bad investment for no disruption to the inside of your house.

It’s interesting, too when you look at spending habits of the UK’s households. On average, we spend around £220 per head on our gardens. Even if the house is rented, the figure is still nearly £160.

Looking at this another way, if this is the average spend, this is what you’d need to spend to just keep up with what’s being spent along your street. No pressure then!

We know that improving your garden adds value, but that’s not the only reason why people are spending on the outside as well as the inside of their homes.

59% want a place to relax and entertain in

32% want to encourage wildlife (birds, butterflies, etc)

17% want to simply improve the value of their home

16% because they think they should

And if you thought this was an old people’s pastime, you’d be wrong. Over 24% of home owners under 25 years old spend on their gardens to improve property value opposed to the national average of 17%.

Well, there you have it. for a couple of hundred pounds, you could be adding over £45 grand to your house. Sounds like a deal to me. So what are you waiting for?

Choose your garden plants from us - PickaPlant’s ready to help get you a great garden. After all, creating a garden with us could be the best investment you’ve ever made!

Welcome PickaPlanters!

Sleepless nights, bitten fingernails, a lot of running around and chasing people, but on time and as planned, we went live.

Even the big guys, like Dell Computers, bent over backwards to get up set up ready to take orders by getting us our kit in record time. Thanks guys!

With our nurseries lined with brand new garden-fresh stock, it really was a joy to see. We’d always known we would be selling high quality stock, but to see such fine, healthy stock sitting there was amazing. The stock level is building every day, so please bear with us if something you need isn’t there yet.

We sell plants that are growing well and are of show quality, but this can mean that plants will come and go throughout the season as they reach or move off their peak. This’ll only affect a few varieties, but we’d rather not sell you something not ready or past its best.

The packaging we spent so much time designing arrived on time (thanks, Andy!). It’s just as good as we’d hoped and we’ll be proud for you to see it arrive.

So, everything’s in place, everything’s ready. We’re so excited about what lies ahead, we thought we’d do something to celebrate.

We’ve sent out an email offering a 10% off voucher for any orders received during March, as a thank you for those who give us a try. We’re even offering some extra plants if you spend £30 or more.

If you want one of these vouchers, just send us an email via this link and we’ll send you one by return.

The voucher scheme will be a regular feature of PickaPlant, so please keep coming back to see when we’re offering such deals!

From all the team in Cheshire, Happy PickaPlanting!

Hello there, PickaPlanters!

It’s great to be able to say that next week, after months of careful planning, nail biting and sleepless nights we’ll be switching on all the features of PickaPlant, the gardening website for today’s new home owners.

The concept behind PickaPlant is unique. We saw our friends settling down and moving into new houses and making their mark on them to create a home, something original and personal to them. But one area remained a problem. What about the garden?

For many people, creating something individual and to be proud of outside the patio doors was a mystery. But worse, the conventional garden centres seemed to cater for the older generation and looked too intimidating for our new home owners.

Maybe getting lost in a sea of beige, staring at rows of grubby plants and getting the new mini’s boot full of compost and worms on the way home probably wouldn’t appeal to PickaPlant’s potential customers!

Take a stroll around a virtual garden

So welcome to PickaPlant. We’ve taken what you want to achieve and created a really cool way of doing it. No special knowledge, no impromptu Latin lessons, no hassle. Just click on what you want, the size and the colour and its yours, straight to your door.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be expanding the idea to make PickaPlant a place where you’ll be coming back to.

We’ve been burning the midnight oil looking at every inch of the new service, but realise that even the best ideas can have a few hiccups. So we’re hoping that nothing causes you, our customers any problems, but rest assured, we care very much about your relationship with us and will be jumping on any teething troubles quickly.

We wish you all a great experience with PickaPlant and your new garden!

What’s all this about?

Everyone would love a beautiful garden. Relax, entertain friends, play with the kids. But that dream’s out of reach for a lot of people. Particularly non-gardening home owners or people who don’t want to or simply can’t visit a garden centre.

So PickaPlant has used the Internet to bring the garden into everybody’s living room. It’s an exciting and amazingly easy way to choose the plants you need and have them delivered to your garden.

Virtual Gardening – from pick to plot

PickaPlant is a virtual gardening website. It’s designed to make selecting and getting your plants far easier and having much more fun doing it than anything that’s gone before. Here’s how it works.

When visitors arrive on the site they’re taken on a tour around a 3D, moving garden. A butterfly then appears guiding them to the types of plants available, such as trees, bushes, herbs, flowers, etc.

When the visitor spots the type of plant they want, they just click on it. They choose the height and a colour from a colour wheel. That’s it. No more questions. Just pick the plant from the ones presented and the plant is delivered to their garden.

About the PickaPlant site

We wanted PickaPlant to feature the very best in web design to make it incredibly easy to use, by applying the power of the Internet in a way no one has seen before. We took the latest 3D animation software that you’d normally see in state-of-the-art computer games or a design studio to create our virtual garden.

Adding the human touch, removing techno-clutter

PickaPlant technical designer Neil Robinson explains “We wanted to throw away all the “techiness” that so many sites suffer from. We wanted PickaPlant to be human-like. Wherever we could show an option rather than expect the visitor to type stuff in, we’d do it. We use an animated human figure to represent height, a colour wheel to indicate a colour choice.

We also wanted to eliminate the “website fatigue” so many sites suffer from, too. You can get what you want in three clicks. Type of plant, height, colour. Give us your details and the plant is picked, packaged and sent to you.

PickaPlant uses artificial intelligence to replicate high-street shopping. The site uses state-of-the-art “fuzzy logic” to behave like a good gardening expert would when offering choices, an important and key asset of our design.”

PickaPlant’s easy to use, but certainly not boring. There’s a lot available and visitors can go back to the garden as many times as they like. In fact we found that people spend a lot of time exploring.

The design allows ever-expanding choice and options, so returning visitors are always likely to find something new without losing their way because everything’s different from when they came last. (more…)