Another month gone and still waiting for the spring sales to get going. It’s early May and I’m sitting in the office in sweatshirt, fleece, coat and woolly hat wondering how the sales are progressing in the nurseries and garden centres. Hopefully the pent up demand for all things green will show its credit card soon and we can sell enough plants to see us through another year. Still there is not much we can do about the weather we just have to make the most of it. I know some suppliers have tried to shift some extra stock by reducing prices but if there is no one on site they are still not going to buy anything and the onl y result will be low sales volumes at lower prices which will only make the situation more difficult.


The rest of the week was full of fun things, the drains had to be cleared, two of the turbines gave up, the carbon monoxide alarm gave us a scare and I failed to master Caroline’s smart-phone. Luckily the drains cleared ok and the alarm just needed replacing. The turbine however needed some technical input which involved a mobile call from in front of the control panel. I borrowed Caroline’s smart-phone having been instructed how to wave at it in a certain way to get it to start up and which bit of the screen to touch to make my call. It was rubbish. By the time I had walked to the turbine I had already accidentally made 2 calls with the phone jiggling in my pocket and the touch screen being so sensitive. I then discovered that I could barely see the screen in the sun (it must have come out one day) but I did manage to dial the technician’s number after overcoming the screens repeated attempts to foil me by registering completely different numbers to those I was pressing. Naturally he was on another call so I left a message and awaited a response. The call eventually came back and where had the green phone symbol gone to pick up the call? Heaven only knows. After pressing just about all the screen I lost the call, not once but three times! Apparently you have to do some sort of flick motion across the screen to answer calls which makes perfect sense. I managed to call him back eventually and made my excuses. Between us we managed to get this turbine going by altering a sensor parameter in the control box, which is a temporary fix until he visits on Wednesday. This got all three going for 2 days before a recurring fault stopped a different turbine. This one looks like it is reading the wrong wind speed as the controls think the wind is too strong when it obviously isn’t. It has been doing this since we had a power surge during a thunderstorm a couple of weeks ago. For a while it just stopped for ten minutes then restarted but now it won’t restart as I suspect it has sussed out that there is a sensor fault. I suppose it is good that it is monitoring these things but it is frustrating when it won’t go. Hopefully the Wednesday visit will sort this problem too.

Great news that Southampton made it back into the Premiership. I celebrated with a pork chop on Saturday night. We know how to party! On Sunday we went to see a young blues musician Ollie Brown at The Brook in Southampton , who was really good and very loud. On Wednesday we went to the Anvil in Basingstoke where Jools Holland was playing the first night of his latest tour. This was a sell out gig unlike the one we were at next door where only 30 people had showed up and 4 went home at the interval! It was a shame for the band (JT and the Clouds) who were from Chicago and very talented. Not quite my cup of tea but Caroline thought they were brilliant. The lack of audience was slightly embarrassing so we all had to be extra enthusiastic to compensate which only exasperated the embarrassment. However a good night was had by all and Caroline now has a new favourite CD.

A highlight from this week was the arrival of a lovely card made by the kids from the local primary school in Sparsholt. We donated a batch of herbs for their school garden and they made the card as a thank you. Who needs money?

Eco News

House martins are back. A group all turned up on Tuesday evening and roosted in the nests on the house.

Have a good week from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries