Hairy hope

Morning all,

Another week flies by and here we are again putting together another availability list, but this time with a little bit more meaning behind it. The signs are encouraging that garden centres are gradually gearing up to some sort of reopening but nobody is quite sure in what sort of format it will take. I can quite understand the reasoning behind not wanting to release the brakes too soon and risking a sudden breakdown in social distancing but it is very difficult to reopen things overnight. All the perishable plants will have to be restocked as well as centres having to rethink their layouts and procedures under whatever the new rules are put in place.
Having had weeks of super stress levels and daily changing plans, we are now ramping up again for more unknowns and heavy workloads trying to manage the unlocking during potentially an intense level of peak season. The adrenaline is pumping and I'm cramping up inside just thinking about it now, and when it all does kick off I'm afraid we are not going to be able to function perfectly. Crop planning and production are all over the place, staffing options and demand both are unknowns and we still have no idea if this intensity of effort will pull us through at the end of the year. Needless to say we are going to do our very best, in a situation that is really tough for so many people in society at the moment. I just hope those lucky enough to find themselves in an easier position, will be forgiving of those of us under pressure.
Our Plants for People project is now closed and it has been a huge success. We are not out of the woods financially but we are much better off than it looked like we would be a month ago and it has given us hope. We have to thank all the hundreds of volunteers who safely delivered the plants to individual households in the local communities, as well as our hero volunteer drivers and nursery helpers who have put in so much work supporting our rather thinly stretched nursery team, we couldn't have done it without you all. We delivered to approximately 14,500 households in the end, distributing over £480,000 of plants (retail value), all over a four week period. I will never regret doing what we did. It has been such a fabulous experience.
We have spent most of the week with the potting machine going full tilt so we can restock all that newly emptied space and have loads of fresh good looking stock ready to roll in a few weeks. I'm hoping we can keep it going next week, although I can see the orders are building up already, where the retailers are refreshing their stock in anticipation of some level of reopening. Please take care out there, there are still going to be some tough times ahead, but hopefully a huge amount of good things
will come out of it in the end.
Our pot producers in Sri Lanka have been pretty anxious about our plight and the lack of a market for our plants, so it was an big relief to tell them of the success of our little project and how we have managed to cleared so much stock. We are now rattling through our existing pot stock and I was able to give the go ahead to ship the next container which is ready to roll at their end. Production of the following container will now go ahead, for delivery later in the summer, and the last one for the autumn should be ok too, barring a reversion to lockdown, which as far as the economy goes would get pretty scary. Although the overall bigger picture is still very much unknown, we do have one underlying favourable factor as a plant producer, that in times of economic downturn plant purchases are often a treat that the general public will turn to when bigger purchases are off limits. We are luckier than many, so we must count our blessings.
We've seen the first few swallows fly over the nursery this week, but none have hung around. House martins must be imminent now. Just hoping they find their way back to our house which after years of multiple nests (13+) we didn't have any last year. I really missed their chattering outside the bedroom window in the mornings, it is such a summery sound. We've made extra efforts to keep the puddle in the yard filled and the vans parked out of the way to try and attract them down for nest building muck. It's worked before and we would really welcome some more signs of summer joy to lighten our days. Fingers crossed for you all out there.

Availability list highlights
We have some customers now taking a few plants for home delivery services they have started up since the lockdown took effect, so I have updated the availability list again as best I can at the moment. We have cleared so much stock under the Plants for People project that we are quite short on a few of the lines, so we may have to adjust the order content slightly to get the numbers right, so apologies for that in advance, Circumstances do mean we are going to have to be a bit flexible at the moment. Hopefully in a week or two things might settle into some sort of normality again, although at the moment I find that hard to believe.
Take care out there, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.