Hairy team

Morning all,

Christmas is creeping up quickly, it's Secret Santa on Monday, I must get out and to do my gift shopping. In the light of high covid rates and the appearance of the new variant, we opted for an in-house socially distanced gathering in despatch, which is big and airy. Jacket potatoes and a selection of stews is the order of the day, followed up with mince pies and brownies, and all is, I believe, organised and ready to roll. Our decorating expert Danny is currently erecting a light display to rival any Mickey Mouse grotto and the heaters will be turned up to max. What excitement there is in store for us all.

The first set of replacement printing screens arrived this week, along with some slower drying ink and thinners, and yesterday I bit the bullet and had a go with them. It's not a job I used to look forward too, as it was fraught with impending disaster. Large volumes of permanent quick drying thick black ink and clumsy old folk are never a comfortable mix. Last time I managed to relegate a perfectly nice old sweatshirt to decorating duties within minutes of starting to 'help out'.

Thankfully one disastrous session actually prompted new investigations and some major improvements. Conversations with experts prompted a change of ink, some tweaks in technique and the production of the new set of screens The upshot of it all was a relatively stress free and very productive session, of fairly mess free printing,. Quality and consistency of print improved and output rate more than doubled. Who says you can't teach an old dog and all that. Ok, so I won't remember tomorrow how we did it, but luckily with a few younger minds about someone will remind me. Just another 9,500 slats to go, no worries.

With confidence in screen printing revived, this week I sent off our old printing screens for the wooden POS boards for re- hanging. A refresh of the wording on some of them to bring them up to date, and we will see a fresh start to everyone's displays in the New Year, when you receive your first orders. It might mean getting right into the printing groove very early in the year, but now we are so much better at it I'm sure it will be fine.

I finalised the staff kit range early in the week and put out a display of the stuff on offer so everyone can make their own decision on what they would like to adorn themselves in. It was surprisingly tricky selecting for the variety of weather conditions, peoples individual dress styles and jobs we have to endure on the nursery, and at the same time sourcing only sustainable items, When buying in quite big quantities the temptation is to go cheap and cheerful, but I eventually bit the bullet and went for the right kit, not based solely on price. Some of the designs look really sharp, so I think we will get more for our money than just organic or recycled, time will tell. With a choice of 22 items, some in a choice of colours, it is going to be quite a mash up of looks, but being a member of an exciting team shouldn't stop you from standing out.

Despite the covid scares we squeezed in a bit of socialised this week, pub quiz with fab food Monday and a great blues gig on Thursday. Oli Brown at the cosy Farnham Maltings venue was sensational and luckily not too crowded. Such an astonishing talent on guitar, with a great voice and very, very loud. It was only his bands second gig of the year and the last, such was the disruption caused by the chaos of the last 20 months, but he was so excited to be there doing his thing, it was infectious (but in a good way!).

Autumn wooden box collections are now just about done

Most of our wooden trays have now been collected up, but if you have a collection of trays ready to go, please do drop us an email and we will call in a pick them up as soon as we are in your area. At a replacement cost now in excess of £10 a box now, we can't afford to lose too many. Just been informed of another timber price rise, so definitely need them back!

Availability list highlights

Things are getting really very quiet now and most plants are settling into their winter rest. There are still a few stars shining out there, but fewer each week.

The long flowering Cyclamen coum varieties are coming along with flowers opening already. This coum series we are growing, flowers continuously from September to April given reasonable winter conditions, it is really hardy although the number of flowers open at any one time is more subtle and modest than some of the very showy modern and less hardy pot cyclamen. A favourite of ours,

Some of the Helleborus niger are in bud and flower, Christmas has come early. Helleborus orientalis are looking strong with the occasional bud showing. A slightly enlarged range from us this year with the introduction of the Pretty Ellen range of a red, white and a pink.

Take care out there, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Hairy charging

Morning all,

Getting some nice results now from our winter endeavours which is great for feeling like we are making progress again rather than just juggling endless demand. I was surprised how exciting it was to get the new EV charging station wired up and running. We have had the trench dug and concrete pad prepared for ages, just waiting for the kit and installer to arrive, which they all did on Tuesday. By lunchtime we were up and running with a system that more than surpassed my expectations. It is a Zappi smart charger so it doesn't just charge up the vehicles, it manages itself over the Wifi and selects when and how to do the charging. We have it set so that it only charges when the wind turbines are generating more than we are consuming and it constantly adjusts the charge it uses to match the amount being exported. This means the effective cost of charging comes down from about 18p/unit if we used imported power to 5p which is what we get paid for exporting it. That brings to fuel cost down to just over 1p a mile, once we get our car delivered. Hopefully it won't be too long before we can get our first delivery van plugged in as well, although that might be a year or two yet. The electrician has an electric van so we were able to test charge that for a while just to make sure it all worked ok. An app on the phone gives us real time data and records of all power imported from our site, exported and used for charging, so we can see what's going on whereever we are. Can't stop checking it out now! Luckily it's been fairly breezy over the last few days so the graph looks pretty good at the moment, even though I know in reality that the year as a whole has been the lowest turbine output since the turbines went up 10 years ago.

We have got through all our end of season wooden tray drying and cleaning and the barn is full of pallets of neatly stacked trays, very satisfying. Now we are getting stuck into the construction of the new tray stock. As demand has increased and some of the old boxes bite the dust, we are having to replenish supplies in a fairly major way. The huge increases in timber prices and difficulties in getting the components printed and constructed has meant we have had to bring the job in-house. It's a monster amount of work but at least at this time of year we have a few of the team more available to get it done. We had a problem with the screen printing last week but a new set of screens and fresh supplies of ink should see us back into full production again. It gets a bit scary when I think about 4,000 new boxes being made at about £10 per box, but because we started some in the summer we are nearly halfway through, so we will soon be on the easy slide down to completion. The propagation tunnel had its climate control computer repaired and reset on Monday and a heater fan repaired on Wednesday, so fingers crossed it will hold out through the cold weather keeping all the microprop crops toasty, although it sounds like the whole system may be close to the end of its serviceable life. Might be time to check out the air source heat pumps suitable for the job.

The tunnels are looking more organised with each passing week, as the rest of the team crack on with tidying and top dressing the pots and cutting the dormant plants back. It's surprising how much growth is still going on despite the cooler weather, I think winter has still to really get a grip on things.

Nursery Christmas lights are on already around the mess room entrance, anything to brighten up a December day and alleviate my guilt at sitting in a comparatively warm office while everyone else wraps up and gets going in the unheated net- sided tunnels. Now where are those crumpets?

Autumn wooden box collections are now just about done

Most of our wooden trays have now been collected up, but if you have a collection of trays ready to go, please do drop us an email and we will call in a pick them up as soon as we are in your area. At a replacement cost now in excess of £10 a box now, we can't afford to lose too many. Just been informed of another timber price rise, so definitely need them back! 

Availability list highlights

Things are getting really quiet now and most plants are settling into their winter rest. There are still a few stars shining out there, but fewer each week.

The long flowering Cyclamen coum varieties are coming along with flowers opening already. This coum series we are growing, flowers continuously from September to April given reasonable winter conditions, it is really hardy although the number of flowers open at any one time is more subtle and modest than some of the very showy modern and less hardy pot cyclamen. A favourite of ours,

Some of the Helleborus niger are in bud and flower, Christmas has come. Helleborus orientalis are looking strong with the occasional bud showing. A slightly enlarged range from us this year with the introduction of the Pretty Ellen range of a red, white and a pink.

Take care out there, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries