Twenty years ago, back in 2005, the seed of an idea was sown. Mike Kitchen had been sowing vegetable seeds in trays with his two small children and was pondering the way Cornish farmers produced thousands of cauliflower plug plants ready to plant out in fields when the timing was right. This system, he thought, would be an excellent way of making it easy and affordable for people to grow their own vegetables at home.
In 2006, Mike launched his new business and Rocket Gardens was born. Since then, the company has moved from a 2-acre smallholding into a 125-acre farm with over 20 large polytunnels, some massive rainwater tanks for irrigation and an ever-expanding team, all dedicated to the task of growing and shipping millions of plug plants each year.
Mike has several bees in his bonnet when it comes to what Rocket Gardens does and stands for. Some of the things at the top of his list include:
- Making it easy for people to reduce food miles and knock money off their weekly food bills
- Getting children learning about growing food from an early age, by making it easy for school’s to grow veg
- Encouraging novice growers to get going with easy how-to guides and healthy ready-to-plant plug plants
- Giving customers a way to buy organic vegetable plants online without then being bombarded with plastic packaging
- Making growing veg more accessible to everyone
Also important to Mike is to make the farmland nature-friendly. Over the past few years he has turned several fields over to wildflowers and meadows designed to feed birds, butterflies and bees. This gave him the idea for selling wildflower plug plants came, which have proved to be one of our most popular products.
This year, his big mission is to find ways to ship the plants even faster, so that we can get more customers planted up for spring earlier in the season. He’s also got a big project underway to improve the rainwater irrigation systems as long, dry spells seem to be becoming increasingly common and we need to be able to keep plants alive and well through the summer months.