What was your best garden buy this year?

A bottle of Tomato Feed. My fuschias, begonias etc. love it and are the biggest ever, and still going strong.

My potatoes were brilliant this year and so are my new autumn fruiting raspberries which are still producing a bowl every couple of days. Best plants - three new fuschias, flowering beautifully.

I bought a tomato plant in a lovely terracotta pot in Tesco's knocked down from £10 to £1.80 as it was a bit tired. Not only did it revive beautifully and produce masses of tomatoes but it turned out to have two herbs growing in the pot alongside the tomato and now the letter has finished they are going great guns. One is a rosemary plant and I am not sure what the other is but it is blue-ish and lavender-like but smells of curry.

I got a tray of red geraniums from B&Q reduced to 50p. They are now in a window box and have flowered beautifully. Most of my plants come from the reduced section.

I bought a lobelia cardinalis which is about 2' tall, deep purple foliage and small red flowers, still a few remaining, also a red hot poker, dark orange (hard to find a red one but I plan to get one on line for next year) it produced ar least a dozen tall flowering stems three times during the summer although I lost a lot of the first ones because a slug or snail got to it first.

I have a brilliantly named Grooving Tool from Poundshop.

I absolutely love it. Basically it's a wooden handle from which protrudes an iron spike, with a 90degree bend half way down. Perfect for getting weeds out of grooves.

And of course being a 60s chick... I love being in the groove again after all these years !

Best garden buy? The services of a gardener!

Kim19 I think it must be a good year for Cosmos. From little seedlings mine have grown about 5ft tall. They’ve dwarfed and covered everything in the flower bed, and they’re still flowering.

A plant I don't know the name of! Still flowering. A dark blue/purple and white flower. Have brought pot into conservatory as not sure if it is hardy.

Loopyloo
I lie in the south West and never lift my Glads. We have sandy soil so there is little water retention to freeze them in. They have been glorious this year. I leave Dahlias in provided I am not replanning the borders. We haven't really had a heavy frost for years now so fingers crossed! We had a late air frost earlier in the year when the Hydrangea was just unfurling and all the leaf buds turned black. Everyone said just leave it alone so I did and it recovered spectacularly well.

My Best Buy was a swinging hammock !

The best gardening gloves ever. Expensive but strong leather lined, warm & comfortable. My nails remain perfect!

Interestingly it was cosmos. A flower I had not particularly cared for but received them as freebies in a consignment. Duly planted and I have to say they have given me endless and constant pleasure this year. Will be my first purchase for next year without question

Plastic cocktail glasses for our Pimms every night on the patio

A gardener for 3 hours every fortnight!!!
She does the heavy boring things & I get to enjoy doing the pretty bits.

Hi loopyloo, I am well thank you.

Mine was a free make over. I got rid of the leaky, unsightly log store and converted the old PVC coal bunker by making a large hole in the front. So much more practical than the log store was and FREE which is my favourite price and, I love a re cycle project.

Bought a meddlar tree, it has some fruit I will have to see how that grows on.

Should I lift gladioli? We live in the SE of England.

I picked up from Wilko a couple of packets of giant sized mixed navy and white gladioli together with a pack of pink and mauve ones in a slightly smaller size. They were slow to start off but then bloomed from mid-August until mid-October. I've now lifted them together with about 100 others from earlier years and they are all drying out on racks in the garage. I'm hoping that they'll do equally well next year.

Best buys were 2 marked down plants, a cucumber and a bell pepper, for 20p each, which both provided half a dozen fruit (or veg, whichever appropriate).

ps potatoes also did well, but some still to lift, very difficult in the rockhard clay soil. Probably the wireworms have got them now

winter pansies, 6 weeks ago.
Flowers are always grown in pots or troughs here, due to the climate and soil conditions, very fast rate of growth of perennial weeds etc. So our long troughs of pansies bring a bit of colour.
We also have a planter of some bright red or pink flowers that never seem to need watering - don't know the name. And some bushes of salvia ditto.

A garden shed.

And some French bean plants left over at the garden centre - 99p and gave us loads of beans.

A leaf sucker upper. We have lots of trees and so have our neighbour's. So it is easy now to suck them up and burn them. ( our compost bins are full)

Mine was a white Marguerite daisy. It's November and it's still going strong and has turned bushy and is full of blooms. I didn't have a sunny spot for it so it's in a light but shady spot and seems to relish it! All I have to do is dead-head it regularly. Everything in the garden has faded apart from some shrubs and russet chrysanthemums. I cannot believe it's still flourishing so well.Magnificent plant! (First year I've had one.) I believe it's not fully hardy?