I can’t believe it’s been only a week since the party and awards do. Still keep having flash backs but luckily all of them are good ones so far. There is nothing quite like an excuse to get a load of friends together and letting your hair down. In our youth it happened all the time and it only took a few hours to recover, sadly now the opportunities seem far apart and the recovery time runs into days if not weeks. Now it’s nose to the grindstone again to accumulate the necessaries to do it again.

So, lots more done this week with the potting for next year already underway and some more of the debris left from this year’s crops cleared away. We seemed reasonably under control at the start of the week although that can so quickly alter when the unexpected happens. Yes another puncture!
The microprop lab also had a surprise last week with the sudden change in supply plans of a major multiple outlet. Although we don’t supply them directly anymore we do supply young plants to those that do and a change in policy has resulted in a sudden loss of market for tens of thousands of plants. After the initial panic and a little more thought this looks like being in our long term interest after all. The usual scenario has set in of large volume but very low and decreasing margins and with demand for stock from the lab very strong for other stock, we will actually be left with capacity to take advantage of that. There may well be a short term penalty of a dent in the cash flow but it looks ok in the longer term. It is our customer I feel for, as the complete lack of understanding of the big buyers in how the horticultural supply chain works has completely messed up their plans, investments and cash-flow. Hopefully they will pull a new opportunity from the debris but it won’t be easy.

It is nice to see the ground damp again after all that dry weather although for us the timing could have been better. The massive trenching job for the turbines and mains cables has created a bit of a mess in all the wet. We had been hoping to get everything dug in and buried by the end of the week but a combination of weather and more archaeological hold ups has slowed it up a bit. The mains cable and biggest part of the turbine cable are in and mostly buried with just the cable jointing team to come in and do their bit connecting all the various ends together. We have two weeks now to get all the wiring and kit sorted out, foundations backfilled and track repaired to allow the turbine erectors access with a lorry and crane. In theory they could erect each one and commission it in a day to generate electricity although the way the admin is progressing I am struggling to see us having all the contracts and connections complete in time. This may delay commission and the commencement of generation by a few days which would be disappointing but it is just a few days and after waiting two years to get it all together that will be just a minor irritation. You never know it might all fall into place in the next few days, we live in hope.

The archaeologist was back on Monday and Tuesday to see the turbine cable trenches cut into the chalk. We had hoped for a quick run down the hill but complications appeared pretty quickly with the finding of a field boundary ditch followed by more possible ditches. The first one was fairly obviously man-made and he found a burnt flint and a small animal jaw bone in the bottom to prove it but the next four or five dips in the chalk profile on the top of the hill turned out to be natural but had to be checked out. Then there was another man-made ditch and a pit, both with very small shards of pottery (yet to be dated). It was all a bit time consuming but at least he now has some dating evidence of sorts and we were able to get on with putting the cables in eventually. The mains cable trench also showed up three ancient ditch profiles, one of which we already knew about and when we turned to look up the hill we could see the ditches sweep up the hill highlighted in crop markings. We hadn’t noticed them before although Caroline's Dad said that in dry years they had seen the crop marks from the adjacent hill. Hopefully we will be able to get a better idea of who was working and possibly living on our hill when the report comes in, but it does give a real feeling of continuity, history and commitment to working on the nursery. We and the turbines are just another step in the long story of people living their lives on this hill. Sitting on my desk in front of me now is a heat shattered flint I found near the bottom of the furthest trench, possibly used for cooking someone’s dinner on our field over 2,000 years ago.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries