I can’t believe it’s still January, so much seems to be happening already. Not too many orders, but definite signs of activity from the glorious gardening public, the nurseries and garden centres and best of all from the plants. Despite the rather cold weather it doesn’t take much for the early starters to show signs of new spring growth, the Delphs and Lupins are starting off despite a hammering in the December cold period. On the nursery this winter, we have been trying to keep the pots drier in an effort to naturally reduce the liverwort and moss growth, this has certainly helped, but with the start of the new plant growth we have had to start irrigating in some of the driest areas. Seems a bit odd running the new spray lines when it’s still so cold at night, but it does the trick, I just have to remember to drain them again after so that they don’t split in the next freeze.

Pre-season preparations continue at pace, lots of plumbing, drain laying, shelf building, label printing and plant tidying. Even plant production is whizzing along with the first batches of microprop weaning started and first batches of ‘spring’ seed sowing underway.

We had a top up on our heating oil this week, ouch. Luckily we buy enough to get a competitive price so we are not paying some of the rates mentioned on the news over the last few weeks, but it is still over 50% more than we were paying last year (we get really good competitive rates by buying all our energy via the FARGRO energy team, who do all the donkey work for you, constantly searching the best deals). We are fortunate that we actually use very little heat on the nursery and each year use a little less but it certainly brings home the consequences of energy supply and demand. In the house which is also oil heated we are feeling very smug, having put in a wood burner and insulated walls, loft and under the floor. Oil consumption looks to have more than halved, which should mean a slightly lower bill than last year, but the extra cost if we hadn’t taken these measures would have been huge. The extra exercise sawing and splitting wood keeps me fitter too, in theory, although after a long session with my chopper, I come in and demolish cakes and crisps at a frightening rate, so no BMI improvement yet!

Eco News
After last week’s physical effort spreading 3km of mulch we turned to office savings this week. I have set up a generic email to send to all those senders of useless or little used catalogues that turn up each day in the post. I have given my email address for them to send me anything they want and I can delete those without the paper waste and extra printing and postal cost to them. Naturally as soon as you do something like this they stop arriving! However I have done two so far, both achieving a positive response, although it could take Viking up to 6 weeks to stop!

I have also managed to get several of our customers who receive fax availability lists to go for the more reliable email alternative which is more reliable (at this end) and should save you paper. We are happy to receive fax replies as it is a nice, simple way of getting a physical record of an order for us to then process. For those who like to do everything online, personally I prefer the real thing sometimes, I am working on a fillinable email order form but it isn’t as simple as I had hoped to tie it in with own availability list generating programme.

Nature stuff

Getting great vermin control this winter with several cats patrolling the nursery and the new policy of leaving cat access points open into the locked barns. Our odd mystery of the one legged cat has been solved. It is our newest one Spare. We get used to wet paw-prints about the place in damp weather but we have repeatedly seen just the occasional paw-print spaced out about every 40cm or so. Spare is quite young and has obviously never mastered lapping, so to drink, he dips in one paw and licks it off that, then walks off with the one wet paw.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries