Garden sales spoilt by rain

The rainy month of April caused a lot of trouble for the UK garden market. Sales in the garden care category (chemical products, fertilizers, soils and substrates, lawn seed, soil improvers and spreaders) during April were 43 per cent below the level of April 2011, which admittedly was exceptionally warm and dry. According to a GfK report, the unfavourable conditions forced the cumulative figure from January to April 2012 down to the lowest level since 2008. This happened in spite of the fact that the year had commenced with double-digit growth – twelve per cent in January, ten in February and 21 in March – so that a cumulative gain of 17 per cent had accrued by March. The market researchers also report high losses from other product categories in April. For example, the fall comes to 50 per cent for lawn mowers and water-based wood preservatives, and as much as 78 per cent for barbecues. In contrast to this, other products actually benefited from the bad weather: rodenticides and mousetraps, for instance, notched up increases in terms of both sales and volumes.