Hairy Prep

 Hi Everyone,

An excellent week on the winter prep of lots of plants out there and still bowling along on the site projects. The weather was with for most of the week, so there is just the Frankenstein tunnel to recover now, which will have to wait until we have installed the new lab store. Everything else is covered and dry ready to keep the worst of the weather off the crops over the winter. We are going to have to remove a door lintel to slide the new lab store (refitted shipping container) into position as it is frustratingly about a foot too tall to get under the door frame, then we can get the new cover on. Not a mistake this time, it was all in the master plan, honest. Both twin skin tunnels are now inflated and the fan on only half the time. Result.

This is the time of year when I try to find the time to decide on what plants to grow for next year, how many and how to schedule them. With over 600 varieties and multiple deliveries of each, it is a mind bending task that needs a lot of thinking about. That then leads into sorting out the perennial colour label order so that the printers (Floramedia) have time to get it all sorted by the start of the new season. They have to secure the starch waterproofed card for the job, which is still only made in quite small batches. Having our holiday cut short has helped hugely and I am a week or two ahead of last year, which will hopefully bode well for having everything in place, although you just never know what is round the corner.

Once these key orders are finalised I can get on with updating the online catalogue for 2021. I know it's all a bit late in the year but we'll get there. There are quite a few new varieties on the perennial side of things as well as bigger volumes to contend with, 2021 looks like an exciting year for us as we try to guess how things will go.

Early indications on demand for next season are looking like we will need all that extra stock, we are already turning away potential new customers who are just too far away for us to sustainably service and deliver to. In the past when sales have been tougher we have spread our net a little wider than we would have liked, but we are never 100% comfortable with that approach as we know it is so much more difficult to maintain our levels of service, achieve sensibly quick box returns, keep delivery costs down and keep that carbon footprint as small as we can.

It looks pretty chaotic on the plant importation front at the moment. There are lots of helpful adverts from the government urging us to get ready, but we are having a really difficult time tying down exactly what we need to do. Luckily many of our young plant suppliers have a UK nursery base to distribute from, which means we avoid a lot of the hassle of any VAT deferment payments, paperwork, phytosanitary certificates etc. It will all come at a cost to us eventually and there will still be some imports where we have to do all or part of it ourselves. We are on the way with setting up an import agent and getting a VAT deferment account in place, although the forms are pretty daunting and the time lag is quite long before anything seems to happen. It's been three weeks since the deferment account form went in and nothing back yet. It also looks like we are going to have to set up with a multiple number of agents as many importers seem to be arranging agents themselves, so that they are sure their entire load has everything in place before it passes through the docks. Luckily we don't have any plants coming in very early in the year so hopefully many of the wrinkles will be ironed out by the time they are due in.

That's not the end of the extra hassle, when the plants arrive here we now have to seal the plants off from all other stock so that the Plant Health Inspectors can come and clear them for use. We can only do this if we have declared ourselves a Point of Destination and registered the import on the Peach government website in advance of its arrival. The form for registering as a POD needs the deferment account details, so we are currently marginally stuffed on that application too! Still no EU trade agreement sorted either so that helps add to the pile of unknowns. Fingers crossed all the plants I ordered will arrive. 

Wooden box returns

We have visited most of you now and collecting up our wooden boxes as this crazy season slows up for the autumn andmwinter. If you still have boxes needing collection please do drop me a line and we will try and get to you. We may not pick up every last box by the end of autumn, just as long as we have most of them.

Availability list highlights

A nice range of Helleborous are now on the list, ready to plant out now for a flower show this winter. We have sold out of a couple of lines already but still have some great niger and orientalis on the list with some bud showing on the niger. Ajuga's are still looking great, bold fresh foliage.

We have a nice range of the evergreen Bergenia's in stock. Watch out for the more unusual Dumbo which as it matures produces really big fleshy and rather hairy leaves, but this is a actually deciduous variety.

The ever popular Erigeron Stallone with bud on show and the odd open flower. They will often still be in colour at Christmas. Attractive foliage colour on our range of Heuchera. Young and fresh. Those were the days.

We have the longer flowering little Cyclamen coum available now as well. Only a few ready at the moment but they will flower all winter and into the spring. Only available this year in a mixed colour range and again in limited numbers.

Take care out there, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries