Gardeners flocking back to Shropshire Seaweed

The days might be slowly drawing out, and we’ll soon be in British Summer Time, but for most people in the UK it still doesn’t feel much like spring. Yet despite the frightfully cold temperatures endured in February and March, it seems that our dedicated legion of Shropshire Seaweed fans are already preparing busily for the summer.

We’re delighted that so many of last year’s converts have again placed orders for our organic seaweed fertilizer ahead of the new season. There is, after all, no greater endorsement for a company’s products and service than a happy, returning customer.

What’s more, we are humbled with how many growers actually took the time to leave us feedback on their first year of using Shropshire Seaweed Growth Enhancer.

"I can honestly say this growth stimulant works a treat,” wrote John, from Lincoln, “and that's allowing for the worst spring/summer weather I can remember!” He urges other gardeners: “Get some and give your plants a treat!"

He was not alone in commenting on the transformation he had seen after using the product. Carol, who lives in Blackburn, had “totally given up” on her garden - until a friend recommended Shropshire Seaweed at the start of last year. “It brought my plants back to life,” she said.

Meanwhile, Christopher from Winsford, Cheshire, was pleased to report that his last bottle of Shropshire Seaweed was “just as good as ever.” In fact, he had decided to get another bottle for his mum for a Mother’s Day gift; we’re sure she would have been delighted!

Alongside the potency and versatility of Shropshire Seaweed, customers seemed to have been equally impressed with its value for money. Peter in Dublin had had “great success” using the product, noting in particular that it was "highly concentrated and goes a long way.” This time, he said, he had decided to purchase a larger, five-litre bottle and use it throughout the garden.

As the 2013 growing season begins, hundreds of new gardeners are learning about Shropshire Seaweed and trying it for themselves. We’re hoping that in time more and more of them will join the ranks of the converted.

If you’re yet to try Shropshire Seaweed, hopefully Benjamin from Ipswich can convince you: "If you grow anything, you need this in your life!"

Click here to find out more about the benefits of Shropshire Seaweed Growth Enhancer - or view comments from our customers on Amazon and eBay.

Everyday Uses for Seaweed

If you've come across The Shropshire Seaweed Company before, you probably know all about using seaweed as a fertilizer or as an organic compost maker. While this traditional use of seaweed extract is well known, there are new applications for these amazing plants being developed all the time, many of them here in the UK.

You may have read, for example, about the ongoing exploration of seaweed as a biofuel, to help power cars and planes, or of how doctors recently used seaweed to help save a mother who had complications during childbirth. Whilst the widespread application of these pioneering technologies may be some way off - they still have more than a hint of Tomorrow's World about them - there are many seaweed products already on the market, with benefits for you and your family in the here and now.

For example, seaweed now offers a safer alternative for anyone has ever struggled with Oven Pride or any another chemical oven cleaner. The discovery of 'surfactants' - a sort of organic detergent - within the Laminaria Digitata seaweed has redefined what can be achieved using a natural oven cleaner - with performance far beyond the old citrus based options. Developed by Sea-Chem, the Sea Clean Eco Friendly Oven Cleaner was initially developed as an industrial strength degreasing product and as such is now being used widely by professional cleaning franchises as a totally safe oven cleaner - one that can be taken into customers' homes without any health and safety worries.

Seaweed's high nutritional value also makes it incredibly effective during the water purification process. In effect, it's a sort of Red Bull for the bacteria that break effluent and waste down, heightening their activity and allowing them to multiply rapidly. For this reason, seaweed's use in municipal wastewater treatment facilities is growing, but there are domestic applications as well. Over a million UK households are fitted with stand-alone septic tanks. If this is you, you'll know that septic tank problems can cause a significant degree of anxiety. Here, seaweed is providing part of the solution, combining with augmented bacteria to assist in septic tank shock treatment and septic tank maintenance.

Indeed, seaweed's ability to fuel the activity of micro-organisms has led to its wider application in the bioremediation of contaminated soil, such as is found at old gasworks, petrol stations and industrial units. Again, these developments are not without domestic applications, with products such as our own oil stain remover for driveways, drawing on much the same principles. Meanwhile, the use of seaweed in cosmetics and nutrition continues to gather pace here in the UK. You may have read, for example, that in November 2012 the first licence to harvest seaweed for food purposes was awarded in Cornwall.

As a sustainable and green resource, with a unique biology, seaweed will come to play more and more of a role in our everyday lives over the coming years. Hopefully this blog will have opened your eyes to what is already out there.

David Ross, Business Development

The year ahead for The Shropshire Seaweed Company

With 2013 upon us, The Shropshire Seaweed Company would like to wish all our customers and suppliers a very prosperous new year. In this short blog, I'll run through some of the changes we have made since last year.


We are currently ramping up production of our seaweed fertilizer to meet anticipated demand over the coming weeks and months. For our smaller units -- Shropshire Seaweed Growth Enhancer (1 Litre) and Shropshire Seaweed Growth Enhancer trial bottle (500ml + 25% free!), as well as Shropshire Seaweed Compost Accelerator (1 Litre) -- we will again be using the Fulfilled by Amazon program. This basically means that these products are stored on our behalf in Amazon distribution centres across the country and can be delivered free of charge in the UK using super saver delivery or free next-day for Amazon Prime customers. One of the other bonuses of FBA is that customers can combine their Shropshire Seaweed purchases with other products in the Amazon catalogue -- a new pair of gardening gloves or a compost bin, perhaps -- and check out just once. Our customers were extremely positive about this service last year, which is why we are expanding the scope of our FBA offerings in 2013.

Elsewhere, all Shropshire Seaweed orders over £25 now qualify for free-next delivery for most parts of the UK -- a change we have made in response to customers eager to get their seaweed products more quickly! Customers in Northern Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and Islands and Channel Islands get free delivery as well using an economy courier service.

Another minor change we have made is to our payment methods. We now accept Google Wallet on our website, alongside PayPal, which, if you've ever used either of these services, makes the whole checkout process a lot quicker and easier.

The Shropshire Seaweed Company website has also been completely redesigned over the winter. We aimed to create a site that was more colourful and interactive and would allow our customers to engage with our products more readily. Customers can now upload their photographs and stories onto our website. We have also revamped the Shropshire Seaweed Facebook page, the Shropshire Seaweed Twitter feed and launched a brand new Shropshire Seaweed Pinterest board. We hope to make much better use of these social media channels over the next twelve months.

Also on the horizon in 2013 is our collaboration in new project called the Seaweed Industry Association. This new body aims to bring together manufacturers and suppliers of seaweed based products from around the globe in a single online marketplace. More details on this to follow in a forthcoming blog.


We have had unprecedented enquiries about our products over the winter period - and with the growing season just weeks away, we anticipate being very busy indeed over the coming months. Furthermore, since the Christmas break, we have already received a record amount of orders from gardeners eager to get to work with our liquid seaweed plant food. In fact, sales since Christmas have exceded the same period last year by over four times, which all bodes well for a busy and successful year!

All the best,

David Ross, Business Development

New Ecwid webstore boosts sales by 250%!

At the start of September, we replaced our old Amazon powered webstore with one based on the Ecwid platform. We are delighted to report that this switch has resulted in an increase in total sales by over 250% in the last quarter. This result was all the more impressive given that the period September to December is out of season for most of our organic garden products.

As I see it, the Ecwid system has a number of key advantages that have helped improve our e-commerce set-up.

Quick to Set-up

With no background in web development, we found the quick and easy integration of the Ecwid store to be a breath of fresh air. You simply build your product catalogue and stipulate payment methods and shipping zones in the back end. Then you copy chunks of HTML code into your website wherever you want products, carts and categories to appear - or make use of the special Joomla and Wordpress extensions. It was that simple. Compared to other e-commerce software we've used, this was a doddle, allowing us to get up and running in just a few hours.

Facebook Integration

Being able to plug our Ecwid store into The Shropshire Seaweed Company Facebook Page also gives us another string to our bow. We are increasingly trying to engage with our customers on the social web; and having a functioning shop within Facebook itself makes the whole experience more complete.

Clear Checkout Process

Our old Amazon platform never gave us the capacity to closely integrate our website and store, meaning that customers had to be diverted to a special Amazon site in order to buy products. We felt this was the single biggest barrier to our e-commerce development, putting potential customers off carrying on with their transactions and generally looking unprofessional. Thankfully we have now been able to overcome this problem: the Ecwid system allows a close integration between our e-commerce widgets and the main body of our website right the way through the checkout process.

Multiple Channels

One other great advantage Ecwid has for us is the ability to offer our products on a range of different websites. This is important because The Shropshire Seaweed Company is a subsidiary of Sea-Chem Limited, which also has its own, quite different, product lines. Furthermore, we have just launched a third website devoted entirely to our septic tank treatment products. We wanted a solution that would allow us to sell a range of diverse products across different specialist websites, but retain just one back-end order manager and payment system. For us, this is what makes Ecwid so great: we have one store, customised for three different websites (plus Facebook), all controlled and administered from one place.

Based on our experiences, we would definitely recommend Ecwid to start-up businesses looking to get themselves selling online quickly and who also require flexibility in the way they sell. What's more, the best thing about the system is that it is completely free (although there are premium service plans available).

Coupled with The Seaweed Store on eBay and The Seaweed Store on Amazon.co.uk, we are hoping our new Ecwid platform will allow us to expand our e-commerce activities rapidly in the coming months.

If you have any questions about our experience of using Ecwid, please leave them below.

David Ross,
Business Development, The Shropshire Seaweed Company

Seaweed Fertilizers for Newbies

To kick off the blog, I thought a rough guide to seaweed fertilizers might be appropriate. Field any questions below and I'll try and answer them. - D.R.

The Popularity of Seaweed Fertilizers

Seaweed’s application as a plant feed is as old as agriculture itself. Over centuries, countless generations of seaweed farmers all over the world used storm-cast kelp on their fields to help ensure stronger, healthier crops. However, due to the high costs involved in collecting, drying and transporting fresh seaweed, this practice was restricted only to coastal regions until relatively recently. It was only in the 1950s that liquid seaweed extracts first appeared in the market place.

Traditional seaweed or 'vraic' harvesting in Jersey.

The 'Organic Boom,' coupled with the drift away from chemical fertilizers since the early 1990s, has increased the demand for environmentally sustainable growth enhancement products in recent years. Liquid seaweed has therefore become increasingly visible on the shelves of garden centres and farm shops across the globe, and the list of the converted now stretches far beyond the curious or eccentric grower. Hundreds of farmers and groundskeepers are now using these products on a huge scale; meanwhile seaweed’s share of the domestic garden market has advanced significantly since 2000.

About Ascophyllum Nodosum

There are some 12,000 known species of seaweed in the world’s oceans. However, because many contain high levels of salt – which would have an adverse effect on plants if it were applied as a fertilizer – only a small proportion of these are actually suitable for agricultural use.

Locations where Ascophyllum Nodosum grows naturally.

Ascophyllum Nodosum, a genus of seaweed that contains a relatively low level of salt, has therefore become a popular choice for growth enhancers. Given that this plant can be found in abundance in the cold waters of the North Atlantic – and as such it can be harvested sustainably on a large scale – it is not surprising that the vast majority of seaweed fertilizers currently on the market in the UK are derived from Ascophyllum Nodosum, including our very own liquid plant feed.

Five Benefits of Seaweed Fertilizer

Growth enhancers derived from Ascophyllum Nodosum offer five key benefits, the combined effect of which produce stronger, healthier crops, turfs and plants.

• Increased Yields: Seaweed extracts contain cytokinins and betaines, which act in effect like plant hormones. These compounds help to promote growth in almost any plant. What is more, besides the increased yields,  the shelf life of seaweed grown produce is greatly extended, whilst storage losses are much reduced, especially in soft fruits.
• Improved Soil Microbial Activity: Seaweed fertilizer also stimulates beneficial soil micro-organisms, which convert unavailable nutrients present in the ground into a form that can be more easily utilised by plants. This leads to increased nutrient and trace element uptake, meaning stronger root systems and an overall improvement in plant health.
• Increased Chlorophyll Levels: Chlorophyll is the pigment found in all green plants, absorbing the solar energy needed to convert water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrate. Research has shown that seaweed extracts increase chlorophyll levels. This ensures more efficient use of solar energy and leads to stronger and healthier looking plants. 
• Improved Resistance to Pests and Diseases: Seaweed feeds enhance plants' natural defense mechanisms against pest and disease attack. Research shows a decrease in the incidence of some fungal infections and a reduction in nematode infestations and attacks by aphids and red spider mites.
• Increased Water Retention: Seaweed fertilizer contains unique biological compounds called surfactants which help to improve the water retention capacity of soil and fortify plants' resistance to drought.

Find out more about the horticultural benefits of seaweed fertilizers.

Why Seaweed Fertilizer Works

It was once thought that seaweed’s range of benefits could be attributed to the abundance of nutrients and trace elements contained within it. However, whilst it is true that seaweed possesses a high level of beneficial nutrients, subsequent research has proven that it is the quality of these nutrients that is most telling. This being the case, seaweed products are highly effective at very low concentrations, which also makes them extremely cost effective, especially when used on a large scale.

Find out more about our Shropshire Seaweed Growth Enhancer. 

Welcome to The Shropshire Seaweed Company Blog!

Welcome to the first post on our new blog. I'll be using this platform to share ongoing and behind-the-scenes information about our products and activities. In particular, I'll be sharing tips on how to get the best out of our best-selling liquid seaweed fertiliser during the 2013 growing season, as well as other information relating to seaweed and kelp cultivation in the British Isles.

More generally, I will also use the blog to discuss the challenges that we face as a small independent eco company and some of the tools and techniques we use to market ourselves and engage with our customers.

Hope you enjoy the blog,

David Ross,

Business Development Manager, The Shropshire Seaweed Company