After over a week of real wintery stuff we are suddenly bathed in fantastic warm sunshine and the thought of selling a few plants reawakens. The longer term forecasts had not filled me with hope, I could see the snow and frost going on for months if some of the newspapers were to be believed. Not great for cash-flow at the most difficult time of year for most hardy plant growers. Sales are about to lift off and costs accelerate just at the time when income is dribbly and overdraft stretched to its limit. So to see the sun out is a real bonus and I am very pleased to see it.

This is the time of year when a bit of inspiration and innovation can bring some real hope back into the frame. We have just about finished revamping despatch, the potting tunnel and the pricking out areas and we have some great new toys to play with. A new layout in despatch is slick, clean, simple and efficient and is now complimented with a new label storage system. Many of our colour and wooden labels are prepared in bundles of 12 each in their own basket in advance of the manic (hopefully) spring sales period which makes order processing so much easier. The problem we have had is that the light that
hits the shelves perishes the elastic bands, the baskets and eventually the labels too if we don’t use them quickly enough. We have now clad all the shelving with spare woven black plastic complete with pull up curtains to eliminate the light. Not only should it slow up the light damage but it keeps everything cleaner too.

Inspiration and encouragement can come big or small. I attended Contact 2013 (conference for ornamental growers) a couple of weeks ago and was treated to speaker after speaker of amazing quality each giving their insight on the future path of ornamental horticulture. Quite a bit of it was pretty scary but still full of opportunities if you don’t stick your head in the sand. The effect of population, energy, climate, food and resource challenges were all in there in big chunks as well as IT and career
development stuff. Lots to think about especially the lack of joined up thinking in such a diverse industry. Everyone does their own thing and we don’t work together enough to sort out the sensible stuff. There are something like 1,500 horticultural nurseries with only 11,500 people working in it (from Contact 2013), that’s a lot of small businesses. Our NBIS business group where we seek to sort out problems together is still going strong but with only about 8 active members, there is now only one
other regional NBIS group running. Only about 45 nurseries attended the Contact conference. Look at logistics, how many individual nurseries still run around delivering small orders all over the country and coming back empty, service is often slower than the customer needs and it is very inefficient for everyone. The logistic companies don’t seem to be able to solve it and the nurseries don’t work together to help either but there will have to be a solution sometime or we will end up pricing ourselves out of the market.

Tiny inspiration now with our latest purchase from Lakeland (other designs available I am told). Having cleared out the loft of ancient accounts ready for the insulation a while ago we have been looking to fuel the wood burner with the unwanted paperwork. But putting on sheets of old invoices etc just clogged everything up. I have looked at making papier-mâché briquettes but life is too short for some things, but we now have the answer. We now just roll up a thick wad of paper and pop it into a ‘Logsaver’, a simple wire frame holds the roll and it burns brilliantly, very thoroughly and for quite a while. Need to
be a bit careful lifting it out to cool down as it gets very hot.

Watch out for customers looking for ‘Value Optimisation’, taken to the extreme with the big boys it can lead to burger ingredients galloping away with you. There is so often a price to pay for a bargain.

Nature notes

RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch this weekend. No eagles to report but plenty of activity around all 11 feeders. I suspect we are keeping the bird seed industry going on our own. The growing interest in this sort of thing just keeps the momentum building for better things to come.

Have a good week from all at Kirton Farm