Morning all,


I can’t believe it has been a month since my last splurge. Lots of excitement especially with having a couple of weeks away to recharge the batteries after a testing year. Mum popped down to watch over the house and animal contingent to allow us to get away, while all the crew knuckled down to prove how much they don’t really need us here anyway, which was all brilliant.

St Ives was lovely as usual, we must have had one of the driest fortnights of the year and we did all the usual walking, bird and art spotting and archaeology between far too much eating and quenching. Spotted long tailed duck, spoonbills, crossbills, reed bunting, black redstart, cream teas and pasties. Despite the lack of rain it must have been the muddiest holiday we have been on, the washing pile was huge. Caroline picked up a couple of nice prehistoric flints, one fragment of a blade from a freshly cleared field and a lovely big scraper from a path above the cliffs at Porthgwarra. The nice thing about finding a flint high up in this area is that it is not a local natural geological land feature so it must have been carried there, usually from flint pebbles on the beach. This means there is a good chance that if you spot a fragment it will have been worked by ancient human hand. Then it is just a matter of identifying the telltale signs on the stone to confirm it, like a platform, a bulb of percussion and signs of nurddling along the working edge, all very exciting stuff. Not entirely sure of all the correct terminology but I have earwigged on a few conversations and picked a few things up, a bit like running the nursery.

We feel much revived and I am told that in some lights it has taken years off me, although it turns out that it’s not the light that makes the difference it is the hat! With the colder weather the woolly hat has come out but only after Caroline had put it through the wash. At first I could hardly get it to stretch over a tennis ball but I have now got it over most of the head. Still nice and warm but the constant desire of the hat to return to its new size does have a definite wrinkle reducing effect and gives me that slightly startled look of a stubbly Joan Rivers.

After one month of hostilities being unleashed on the mice, rabbits and pigeons we seem to be making some progress. Although it has taken some time and effort to get everything set up we do seem to be achieving results. We have caught nearly 100 mice, netted out the pigeons from the tunnels and re-homed 6 or 7 rabbits. The nursery has been re-rabbit proofed with some recycled gates from the farm and a little new netting and we are not seeing quite as many wandering about the nursery. These pests will always be a constant threat but hopefully we are now getting the upper hand.

We mended the phone system on our return by installing a new cable from the office to the house, ending up doing the work ourselves to avoid rather high quotes to fix the problem, so that is a relief.

Our Lean Management training reaching its conclusion with three online exams for everyone over the next couple of weeks and a few odd projects to tidy up. Then we will all have some new qualifications to wave about, hurrah. Looking forward to finishing it off as it seems to have gone on a long time and we are already armed with some very useful tools to tackle most things between us on a very practical level, without the need to complete 18 pieces of paperwork every time to get it done.

Sustainability promo

The propagation heating is on frost protection at the moment. After jiggling about with all the pipe temperatures and mixing valves etc to further reduce oil use we just added some new ace insulation to some of the water pipes where the heat is not needed. This means that the heat is only released around the plants rather than in the area next to them. I can’t believe we hadn’t already done this before as the payback time should be very quick, especially as we fitted it all ourselves. It’s scary when I look back a few years at how much we used to waste when fuel was cheap. Insulate, insulate, insulate. Office thermostatic heater is on but only getting to 8C so time to get outside in the sun and do some wood cutting to warm up a bit.

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Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries