The Mad March Hare is pulling rabbits from the hat and serving up April type sales levels. Let’s hope for a continued spell of good weather. Dare we say we could be in for a “normal” spring this year – hush you say, we don’t want to end up as April Fools.

As you can see in the graph of total sales in the Epos data supplied to GTN Bestsellers, last week matched the busiest week of March and April in 2012 when Easter was early and then it rained, and rained, and rained.

Sales volumes have even bettered the middle of April last year when business was starting to pick up after the dreadful weather of March 2013.

In the GTN Bestsellers Garden Product chart, sales volumes also almost on a par with 2012 – and that was the first week of the Easter holidays. 

Gardeners are cleaning up their paving and decking with Westland Hero Cleaning Capsules the highest re-entry in the chart, and also paying attention to their lawns as Scotts Evergreen Mosskill Soluble is the highest climber.

Garden Re-Leaf Day will certainly have added sales in centres that geared themselves up to take part and involve their customers. Quiz nights, sponsored events, school pallet garden competitions, garden centre fetes and many more activities ensured plenty of fun and fundraising, plus of course a good amount of local and national media coverage for our industry..

If you’d like to share your stories of successful Garden Re-Leaf Day events, let us know and we’ll publish them in the GTN Xtra.  E-mail neil.pope@tgcmc.co.uk

GTN Bestsellers Top 50 sales volumes compared to the same week last year:

• Garden Products – up 37%
• Veg 2 Gro – up 75%
• Growing Media – up 119%
• All items index – up 52%

To subscribe to GTN Bestsellers email karen.pfeiffer@tgcmc.co.uk