Morning all,
Not the best weather yet for kicking off those lively spring sales, but it’s early days yet. We are looking forward to the new season and getting that cash-flow moving again after the lean winter break. For all nurseries it’s always a bit of a juggling game getting through the winter and into the early spring without upsetting the bank manager, especially in these tricky times when the banks are a bit hesitant about lending. With low margins in our sector for a long time, we can be particularly vulnerable to the current practice of passing financial decisions further up the management line at bank. It’s no longer enough to convince your local manager of your security and prospects, it has to go further up the line, I suspect, to one of those lovely chaps who earns those lovely bonuses! Luckily we look to be getting through this winter with slightly less excitement than usual, other than the slight hiccup of wanting to borrow some dosh for 3 wind turbines! I’m sure we will wangle it somehow, just not quite sure how yet. The joys of trying to make progress.

A few exciting things this week, the main one being the introduction of the new CC tags which can be scanned to check their authenticity. Thanks to all those who replied to my request for info on your trolley situation, it should help make the deliveries a little smoother. We now have a scanner to check the trolleys here, but we can’t afford to give all our drivers one each, which would have cost us just under £2,000 just to look after our 75 trolleys. So far we haven’t had a single centre say that they have a scanner, although most are in the CC system, so I’m not quite sure how the system will hold up.

The other news is that we are one of the finalists in the Nursery Stock Grower of the Year Awards. Hopefully it is recognition of our achievements rather than a ploy to get us to buy rather expensive tickets to the awards dinner when the results are announced. I don’t get out much, but I imagine that this price includes a room and you get to take the table, chair and crockery home afterwards too!

New Year, New Season, New Price Point?

We managed to get all the catalogues printed and posted so you should all be in possession of the latest version. There is a download available on the nursery website if needed. Don’t forget that the prices have gone up by 7p/pot after the big coir pot price rise and increases in labour costs. Then there is also the VAT increase on the perennials to consider too. This means you may want to review your retail price points before getting stocked up. Many of you have your stock pre-priced, so you will need to let us know ASAP of any changes so that we can get ahead on the plate making and printing. Thanks.

Over the last couple of months we have been having a really refreshing end of an era winter clear out. With the end of plastic pot production and a focus on recycling we have sorted and shipped out loads of recyclable material. We have a new plastic recycling man (Grassroots Recycling, Warminster) who charges an annual subscription fee but will take all the plastic we can pallet up (sorted and clean(ish)) if we deliver it to him. This has been great for the final post-plastic era clear out, of all those collections of pots and trays that ‘might come in handy one day’. Once we clear this lot we should only have the odd tunnel cover to send in and the tubs and lids from the micro-prop lab. We had accumulated a large scrap metal stack over the years where we upgraded tunnels from gantries to trolley paths and the money we got from that (£180/tonne) will help pay for those areas of recycling we get charged for. Pallets of card have gone back to our backing board supplier, used pallets to the farm for their seed packing plant and old timber scrap is chopped up for the wood burner/heater. Even a collection of old gas bottles we no longer use was collected by a Calor Gas supplier for reuse or refurbishment. Hopefully we will find enough time before the season takes off to finish the job, as it does great things for the morale to see old rubbish finding a new life and the business getting back to efficient and organised chaos!

An accumulation of little projects gets you there in the end. One such ‘little job’ started this week, which was filling the gap between the tunnel bed edges and the side of the tunnels with mulch, to reduce herbicide use on the nursery. We don’t use herbicides on the crops but we do use them around the tunnels to reduce the potential for weed infection. That means filling an awkward narrow strip just under 3 kilometres long! Hopefully this will have quite a long term benefit, we will see.

Thanks, have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries