Monday 7 January 2013


Morning all,

Happy New Year to all. Great to be back after a lovely break. We had a very busy but fun few days with loads of socialising and a monster Christmas lunch. I failed to compensate the extra number of items to fit on the plate with the volume of each and ended up with a small mountain. Luckily I had had only a light breakfast so managed to squeeze it all in and manage pudding too. Haven’t eaten since. Ok, that’s not quite true but serious rescue mission on the way to save moving up a waist size.

First day back got 2013 off to a great start with a few orders to put together and deliver which is always encouraging. At some points through the early winter you always wonder if anyone will ever buy anything again, especially after the previous year’s rubbish weather. So to be able to get things moving was a good welcome for those few who actually returned to the grindstone on Wednesday. I can’t say things went terribly smoothly in the admin and label printing dept, our just-in–time printer toner management bit me in the bum when on the first morning both printers ran out of the same coloured ink and refused to print despite one of them having plenty to spare in the drum. Usually we can swap toner from one to printer to the other but no, nothing would work. I also managed to detach a small piece of plastic and a spring from the drum mechanism which I couldn’t get back together and brought up a another error message but luckily consumable delivery is next day so I ordered up what we needed and printed out a few odd bits of paperwork on the multifunction fax instead which saw us through. The toner arrived early and the printers were instantly perfect again, it’s those little chips they put in consumables now that force you to buy new and in theory stop you fiddling about. By this time I had also messed up the label layout in the programme so needed to reinstate a backed up version to cure it. Naturally this is when we found out that the backup storage drive had stopped working a couple of weeks ago with a damaged cable so I had to manually reset up the label design. While trying to tidy up the printer list on my PC I also managed to delete all the driver set ups to the label printer and couldn’t find the disks to reinstate them! What fun. Just the nice relaxed start you need to a new year! Anyway, all sorted now, other than replacing the backup cable so no real harm done.

A full 5 days coming up this week with a full contingent of eager helpers so hopefully we will get stuck into loads of work. The weather looks a bit drier which is great although the local water table is still rising and appearing as pools in the lower local fields. The ex pub at the bottom of our hill has just been redeveloped as a private home and gone on the market again, I wonder if anyone has realised yet that the cellar is about to fill with water as it does in peak years?

Time to go and collect some straw for the donkeys so they don’t go hungry when the snow comes.

I have managed to put together our 2013 catalogue with all the latest info, and paper copies will be whizzing through the post to many of you. If you need to take a look on-line at the new list please take a look on the following Dropbox link; (Dropbox is a very useful site I found this year for posting large files on, instead of actually emailing them. I then send the link to the file and you can download them or just look at them. It is free to use)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7wtu2qyspp3p26/herbaceous%26herb%20catalogue%202013%20Dec12%20nopr.pdf


It is also be available on the nursery website www.kirtonfarm.co.uk For pricing details please drop me an email.

Nature notes

Don’t forget to keep feeding the birds, the hedges look a bit bare here and we have loads of visitors to the feeders at the moment. Blue, great, coal and long tailed tits, gold, green and chaffinches, sparrows as well as the odd winter migrant like the male and female blackcaps that have been around now for a few weeks. Greater spotted woodpeckers are regulars and the big stuff hoover up the fallout. I shudder to think of the food bill as we are getting through sacks of seed and suet. Christmas brought another stand and four more feeders which are hopefully a bit more squirrel and jackdaw proof just to slow them down a bit. We are missing the Fieldfares this winter which are usually attracted by the apples from our old russet tree but there was no crop this year so no food.

If you need a fax list please let us know, pick it up from the website or alternately send an email address.

Have a good festive break, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

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