Seeing the hairy light

Morning all,
Apologies for the break in communications, I bet you'd not noticed I'd gone. We took a long break in sunny St Ives and it has taken a little while to get back on top of things. Now I feel like I need another holiday. Only another 11 months to go and we can go again, can't wait. We just rent a house above one of the beaches and have a few friends to stay, just perfect. We had a huge number of fabulous meals from simple grilled mackerel and chips to full blown mega fancy stuff, now I'm on a
starvation diet in preparation for the upcoming Christmas excesses. Lucky the current trend in waistbands is elasticated, or is that just the shops I go to?
I popped into the Winchester Guildhall a couple of weeks ago to pick up our Green Impact Gold award from the Mayor. Group picture in the Hampshire Chronicle, so now getting plenty of recognition in the streets and autographs needing to be signed. Very pleased with the award, it's great for the business to get recognition for all our sustainability efforts, but we are also ever hopeful that others are seeing what we are up to and think perhaps they could do more too. It's a great scheme, we particularly like the little nudges it gives us to change things in areas perhaps we hadn't look at before.
So much to fit in before Christmas and so little time. The new online catalogue will be out very soon, I just need to get the last few images and updates in there and I can publish it. We are going to splash out on a mobile/tablet version for 2019 as I know there are a few of you out there who have asked for this. Not quite sure how it will work but hopefully it will be useful.
This is the time of year when we try and have a think about what other improvements we can make to the nursery. The biggest new thing will be the non-plastic coloured pot labels we are introducing early next year, but there are plenty of other bits to play with and inevitably spend money on. The rain this week highlighted the next few tunnels that need drains installing and this is now already underway with a couple of new trenches dug and the pipe-work arriving today, The old office is getting leakier with each passing storm so the pressure is on to get on with demolishing it and erecting the new super insulated log cabin, the list goes on.
We saw some of our aging HPS propagation lights go out this week, so replacing those with LEDs has moved up the agenda after spending a fortune on electricians unsuccessfully trying to identify and rectify the fault. The lighting issue also highlighted our vulnerability to potential losses if the heating went off too. We have more micropropagated module stock in there than ever before and it is growing away really well, but if we got caught out on a cold night with a tripped out power supply in that
tunnel, the heating would go off and we wouldn't know. So it was onto the internet to find a plug-in power cut sensor (with a backup battery and sim card), which will phone your mobile to let you know when the power goes out and also when it comes back on again. Then we lashed out on a new generator battery and trickle charger to make sure that whatever time of night the power is lost it is easy to get the backup system going. Now I can sleep easy.
Just the leylandii hedge to remove and replace, the catalogue to finish, labels to print and a few orders to do. Plenty of time, it's ages until Christmas.

Availability highlights
Helleborus orientalis in a variety of colours are now well under way, for that winter interest and early exotic colour. Stonking bushy plants which are mostly from a strain (Crown series) that has a high percentage of first season flowering. I hardly dare mention it, but there are a few odd plants threatening to flower already. I haven't put them on the list as being in bud as there aren't that many yet.
The winter and spring flowering Cyclamen coum varieties we grow are now showing colour. The strain we grow has an exceptionally long flowering season with colour usually showing from November through to March and even April. They rarely get swamped with masses of flower at any one time, they just keep going on, producing a pretty and dainty show for ages. We still have a few of the hardy autumn flowering Cyclamen (hederifolium) left with attractive evergreen winter foliage. We have a load planted in the garden by a hedge and they make a lovely winter ground covering.
There are a few purple flowers beginning to show among the Primula Wanda, there will be loads more next spring.
I'm not sure for how long they will continue flowering but we have late potted batches of Armeria maritima (both the pink and the white forms) which are in flower with more bud still coming.
Compact and chunky Leucathemums are generally pretty evergreen throughout the winter. There are several varieties looking very strong.
The massively popular Erigeron karvinskianus Stallone is still sprouting a few flower buds. If the weather is not too harsh we have had these still flowering at Christmas before now and they could well do that again this year. Foliage starts to be of interest at this time of year and there are some good shows of colour from the Carex Evergold, Ajuga, Lamium and Euphorbia.
Have a good week from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.