By the time this goes to print, Easter will be behind us and Spring officially will have started, although as I look out the window today my daffodils are looking far from happy with the sharp frost we had last night. Spring is the time to shut the computer off for a few hours and venture out into the garden. However, you may want to consider leaving that PC switched on as the Internet offers a wealth of information about all matters green fingered if you know where to look.
Type “garden” into www.google.co.uk and you will get in excess of 600 million results! So I will narrow that down for you a bit. Remember, the more words you search for the more accurate your results will be. “Garden Composting tips” finds 3 million and so on.
If you prefer to admire others hard work rather than your own then a good place to start is www.rhs.org.uk. Here you can find links to activities at one of the many gardens you can visit as well as tips and an online shopping area.
Shopping online for plants is now as straightforward and purchasing anything else. A lot of gardeners having been using mail order for a number of years so internet shopping is really just an extension of this, with the added bonus that online brochures tend to be more up to date than the ones you receive in the post. Remember to look out for the padlock and https at the start of the website address before you put your credit card details in. You can try and save a bit of money too by searching for a discount voucher – www.save.co.uk is a good place to look.
If designing your garden on the computer appeals then you could visit www.showoff.com and use their free software to create the garden of your dreams. It is an American piece of software but there are instructions on how to use it here http://http://tinyurl.com/putergarden.
Finally if you just want to waste some time type “beautiful English gardens” into images.google.co.uk.
