Back to autumn which is good news for turbine production and my body. Might have been a bit over optimistic playing hockey twice last weekend in all that heat as it took me a while to get upright on Monday, in fact it wasn’t until Thursday that I felt I could give it another go. Better day yesterday with perfect cool weather and a more forgiving rubbery pitch and a 7-0 win, we won’t talk about last week’s results. Most parts are moving ok this morning, well, as many parts as usual anyway. Shame about the England performances this weekend, on the football and rugby pitches, but there you go, good job it’s only a game and played for fun.

We had another very full week again, I keep thinking we will get a quiet week but there seems to be so much going on Monday saw my last official PLATO Sustain meeting and a résumé of all the things we had all done over two years which was a surprising amount. The timing seems to have been perfect for those of us who stuck the course (9 out of 13) with sustainability coming much more to the fore in businesses of all sizes. OK I know some may only be playing lip service to it at the moment but those of us who are embracing it are seeing some valuable returns already with plenty more to come. We are going to continue our local group on a self financed quarterly basis, meeting up at each other’s premises to try to keep up the momentum and I’m looking forward to the first one at a rubber mouldings manufacturer!

The changing weather prompted some pre-winter repairs this week which seem to have gone really well. The lab growth room and mess room roof’s had sprung a few leaks where the covers had split. The mess room we re-sheeted which looks good and the growth room we repaired with some very expensive but hopefully effective tape (Eternabond). We have tried repairing this roof before with bituminous stuff, but it has dried and split again, the tape looks much more suited to the job was quite easy to apply. What did we do before the internet!

Had a trip to the solicitors to sort out the official lease paperwork for the turbine sites which are on the field above the nursery. 28 pages of legal stuff and a bill larger than the rent for 20 years! Everything odd ‘little’ job done for this project costs another couple of thousand, whether it’s bat survey, archaeologists, solicitors, planning stuff, servicing contracts, electric extras. If only we could charge these labour rates for our skills in horticulture, still at least we are not bitter, we do have such a lovely lifestyle after all!

It is that frustrating time of year when our computer security software comes up for renewal. Every year what should be a simple renewal of licensing turns into a long winded, hair pulling cock-up. That’s the advantage of having me as the IT department! I got a reminder from Symantec that it was coming up to renewal time and they gave me a renewal code number to use. Looks easy and if you have a domestic version or have a business in the USA or Canada it is, but in the UK you have to buy it through a reseller. Went to the company who sold it to us last year, sorry we don’t do renewals, searched the internet for the UK and no obvious candidates, it was easier and cheaper to buy from new again. Bought it and tried to load it, slow start as no instructions as to what to do until one of the 6 disc’s supplied goes in (no indication of which one first). Then have to stop loading to remove the old version first. Remove that then try again, window appears to say that this version won’t load onto Windows 7, hurrah guess what we have. Spend the rest of the morning finding and reloading the old version as
we have now have no protection on our main computer. Then I find out that I can load the new one onto W7 if I use another loading method. I’ve decided to take a break from this and will try again tonight, could be a long one.

Eco News

The turbines have been productive this week and are whizzing around again today, pushing up the daily average closer to what we were hoping for. Still need a few more breezy days to catch up with the plan although we are continuing to produce more
than we are consuming which was one of the main aims of the project.

We have been researching the latest Phillips LED Growlights to trial in the lab and have now ordered a couple to try out. They look bizarre as they only have red and blue bulbs so the overall effect is quite dark, but apparently the plants like it and they are said to be 60% more efficient as well as a lot cooler in operation which saves on climate control costs too. We will see how they do over the winter and when the cash-flow recovers in 2012 we will look at making another significant sustainability investment. One financial hiccup is that this investment isn’t as obviously beneficial as it could have been as we are now generating cheap electricity so the savings aren’t as great in £’s only in carbon.

The recent wooden tray returns have gone pretty well, we still are a few short, but looking back over the three seasons we have been using them we have achieved a return rate of 97.5% which is brilliant. Well done everyone, especially those who
have achieved a 100% return of which there are many.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries