Morning all,

Slightly warmer this morning after another very cold week. Luckily the very coldest nights have been over the weekend so we have just about managed to keep things defrosted enough to keep us all busy. The new van arrived on Wednesday just in time for it to get snowed in on Thursday, so we haven’t yet been out in it. Disappointingly, it looks remarkably similar to the la st one, mostly due to the fact it is the same make with a direct copy of our previous body on the back. The paint job is new and it looks quite smart but for the amount these things cost it should have been more satisfying and made the blood pump a bit harder. I did try to find a more exciting alternative but I will just have to make do with a little bit of extra efficiency and its cleaner running.

I have been able to abandon the ‘Chums’ fleece lined trousers this morning which is a relief. They do a great job in the cold but  the combination of multiple fleece build up and vigorous movement does make for a sparky time. I can relight the wood burner by just earthing myself with the poker on the casing. As soon as I start removing layers the crackling and sparking starts and I know at some point I am going to find an earthing point. Caroline seems particularly sensitive to static at this time of year and any human contact is discouraged, offers of an earthing rod to help out are not very well received so I keep my distance.

As we get a bit closer to spring and you get organised for your first orders feel free to let us know if you need any new wooden pot labels to replace any that may have rotted away over the winter

This week I lashed out on a new computer programme to help created online fillinable availability lists. This means that with a bit of luck if you have MS Word on your computer you should be able to fill it in on screen and email it back to me. We haven’t had many requests for this but I know a few of you would like to use it so let me know if it works. Naturally it was child’s play to set it up, it converts, with one click, the pdf file our nursery stock production programme produces into a Word document which can then be typed over. It took me most of the week to get it to work, the programme is a lot cleverer than me. We can also combine multiple files into one which makes it simpler to send, so if you print it off just check you print only the pages you need.

Eco News

We are still hopeful that we might actually receive our first feed in tariff check this week. It will be 8 months since we st arted but eventually the stalling and rubbish organisation will sort itself out and the payments we come become a bit more regular, maybe. If we were this slow paying our electric bills we would have been cut off months ago.

If anyone lives in Hampshire and is short on house insulation go to http://www.insulatehampshire.co.uk/ where you can now get free cavity wall insulation and either free or very cheap loft insulation to top up to the minimum requirement of 11.5 inches. We paid a bit more for ours last year and did a bit extra ourselves under the floor too and it made a huge difference. There are lots of scare stories about on the internet about damp etc with cavity walls but there are long term guarantees with the installation and we have had no problems, in fact we have less internal condensation than we did before. The house is warmer and the bills much lower. If you have a good heating system you might not notice a temperature change but the bills will be less and that will save a little, or in our case a lot, every year, so the cumulative affect can be huge. If you are not in Hampshire check out your local area, this type of scheme is sponsored by the energy companies and I’m sure must be fairly wide spread.

Nature Stuff

The cold spell has brought a few extra visitors into the garden, we have a couple of very smart Fieldfares feeding on the remains of the fallen apples and a very aggressive male Black Cap on the suet feeder. It’s a shame they missed out on the RSPB Garden Watch survey of a couple of weeks ago, we only had plenty of the usual common garden suspects with no exciting ones to record at all.

We had been keeping an eye on the ponds over the week or two before the freeze, thinking the frogs might start up soon, good job they didn’t, but I suspect spring will leap on us once this snap gives up. Can’t wait.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries