Hairy Perudo

Hi
I'm back, did you miss me? No, I don't think they did here either. But that's it for another year, only 49 weeks to go before we can do it all again. Mega diet now, to try and regain pre holiday status before it all goes out the window again at Christmas. Had a great time, with some wild seaside weather making for some spectacular seas. A few friends came along and a number of pasties and beers were consumed, between dodging the rain. Now I need a quiet rest, it's surprisingly hard work all that relaxing.
One relief on our return was that the new drains, finished as we left, seem to be doing a good job with no issues so far. Fingers crossed. Otherwise, there was the usual mountain of emails and a bit of post to sort out, which took a while, but I'm just about there now I think, just a few big ones needing a bit more research.
All the boxes returned over the last few weeks have been cleaned, dried and stored away, and the broken un-repairable ones have been knocked apart and cut for the wood burner. So that part of despatch looks pretty organised and tidy. The top part however, is still full of trolleys of potted bulbs just waiting for growth to start up, before putting down in the tunnels. Quite a few are down already, but we try and keep them out of reach of hungry pests as long as we can, they can decimate crops very quickly if they work out where they are and get a taste. A few well placed, covered traps, help keep on top of anything getting a bit too adventurous but it is an ongoing battle.
It's been a bit of an eye opener this week, with the realisation of the scale of the work needed to get on top of the new Plant Passport regulations, that come into force on December 14th. It is something that has been rumbling around for a while, but we have been waiting for everything to settle down before committing to any major changes. It is a great idea in principle and we definitely need to be able to track down where plants have originated from, to improve the UKs level of bio-security. Unfortunately it has all come to a head, right in the middle of Brexit and the election, which means that the officials are unable to give clear direction on any queries (something to do with purdah, which I believe means they are playing the pirate dice game). I have spent a long time on the phone and email over the week, trying to pin down exactly what we need to do. There is plenty of contradictory advice available from various different 'high up' sources and it's been a tricky job to get the detail right. In fact we haven't sorted all of it yet, but we have all been told to just to have a go, as best we can, and APHA and DEFRA will sort it out over the coming year. So our plastic free, colour label design, for next spring's new labels has been adjusted to include all the PP details (including the EU flag which is likely to need to be changed to a UK flag should we leave Europe), I have changed the software here so we can print our own colour labels with the new details, and I have created a little program to print little sticky labels to over-stick the old label stock (approx 160,000). Then the most fun will be to make an entire set of new printing plates for all the wooden herb labels and start printing new labels. All our wooden labels are made in-house which gives us a lot of flexibility in what we can do, but when something like this pops up it does seem a job too far. Trouble is we are good at it and we can't afford the cost or inflexibility of passing it over to an outside printer. Luckily the work for this has peaked at a relatively quiet time for us, so we have a few weeks to get on top of it, but the cost in time and materials is going to exceed £10,000, which isn't a great start to our new financial year or for the cash-flow going into the winter. I just hope they don't make too many changes to the system, once we are underway, or it could get worse.
Wooden box collections
We are just about done now with the collections of our wooden boxes. If anyone still has any trays ready to go, just drop me a line and we will pop in when next close by. Thanks for all your help, on the whole we have kept up a great return rate, which helps the whole system continue to work sustainably.

Availability highlights
Cyclamen coum varieties are now beginning to bud up and flower. These hardy stars will flower from now until mid Spring. Nicely subtle bloomers with a constant feed of new flower rather than one huge flush. Autumn evergreen coloured foliage seems to be a popular theme at this time. We have fab looking Ajuga in an attractive range, along with the lovely Euphorbia's. Winter interest lines in evergreens bowls along too, with just a few Hellebore orientalis in stock and plenty of the Bergenia's.
Erigeron Stallone is still producing the occasional bud and flower although I haven't marked them on the list as they could stop any time. we had some still in colour at Christmas last year outside the back door, it just goes on and on. The neat little Erodiums still have the odd flower opening. Neat and tidy, they will flower for ages.

Have a great week from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.