of garden products, growing media and plants continued to grow at a fast pace last week, despite overall garden centre volume sales dropping off slightly.

The GTN Bestsellers Growing Media Top 50 index saw the highest week-on-week movement, up by 32% to reach a record high for the year. The increased gardening activity has arrived as more gardeners put out bedding and plant up hanging baskets now that the threat of frost appears to have gone.

For suppliers and retailers alike the sales patterns of gardening products have been much steadier than the two previous years, as can be seen by our GTN Bestsellers Top 50 Volume Index graphs below.  

One week in and our prediction is off target. But then there’s the Bank Holiday to come. Where do you think we will be at the half year, 6% up as we suggested last week, or closer to 10%?

A smooth growth line for the Garden Product Top 50 Bestsellers sales. Garden lighting has been a consistent performer all year long.

After a dip post-Easter, growing media sales volumes are back where we’d hope them to be – this is after all the best indicator of real gardening activity. On this basis we could be in for a great summer of gardening.

Veg-2-Gro is the only graph showing volumes down year-on-year. A deeper look into the Epos data reveals more veg plants being sold without specific variety identification and as own branded lines.

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