Hairy Tornado

Morning all,

Just a quick note to say that the attached list should cover both this coming week and the one after that.

Sales are going to take a breather over the next couple of weeks, as the availability takes a dip while the stock goes through that rather sad autumn dull patch. We have some strong Helleborous and a few odds and ends, but the other winter stock is yet to come into its own. Some of the spring bulbs are already showing a few shoots but not strongly enough to offer for sale yet and the winter/spring flowering Cyclamen coum are well on the way but not quite ready.

We had a lucky escape last Sunday when a tornado ripped through Up Somborne, a village which we can see from here, just down the valley, it ripped up sheds, greenhouses and knocked down trees and telegraph poles. It only lasted a few moments but did a lot of damage, with the telephone lines still awaiting repair and plenty of clearing up work still to do. I shudder to think what would be left of our tunnels if that had happened here. I'm sure the crops would be ok as they are not heated, but the chaos of re-sheeting at this time of year would have been a nightmare. Unfortunately the tunnels are not very insurable structures despite our reliance on them, but hey-ho, most of the time they are no trouble.

We are busy mulching the tops of the pots at the moment and knocking up another batch of wooden marketing trays ready for the spring rush. The mulching reduces the liverwort growth on the compost surface overwinter, which in turn saves on tidying time in despatch when we are run off our feet in the spring. It always hurts, doing so much work on the crop so far in advance of a sale, but we know it pays in the long run, so any temptation to cut back on labour at this quieter time and save a few pounds is resisted as much as I dare. The cash-flow has already begun its post sales season descent, but hopefully spring sales will rush along and save us before the wolves pitch up. We have plenty of spring bulbs which should get those early sales back on track, just as long as someone out there still has some cash to spend.

I did hear this week that in Holland a lot of the bedding growers have cut back hugely on their young plant orders, especially for the early crops, because to their reliance on heating to get them through the cooler periods. The costs are now so high that it simply isn't worth growing the crops. The same is happening in the UK with both heated plant production and heated salad crops, with the heating costs and labour shortages making the crops so unprofitable it is safer to shut up shop and sit it out. Overall it could create opportunities for cold grown ornamental crops to claim extra shelf space, but who is going be brave enough to grow extra in such a financially strained economy? I know most growers are being very conservative in their forecasts for 2023 so there could well be shortages again next year if demand turns out to be ok, time will tell. In the past plants usually fair pretty well in a recession, even if the big treats (cars and holidays) take a dive, the little treats still have their more affordable appeal. The unknown element this time, is will the cost of living crisis be worse than anything we have witnessed before and affect the little sales too? We will have to wait and see.

Wooden Box returns.

I have a barn full of dried, cleaned and stacked boxes which is very satisfying. We still have a few dotted about at a few sites, but the vast majority are now back home. If you have any empties you would like us to pick up just drop us a line. It may take a little while to get there as we are not on the road quite as much now, but we will get there eventually.

We have about 10,000 boxes in total, which on average get used 3 to 4 times a year and last about 10 years. Repetitive use is the key to their success, because at £10 each we can't afford not to have them out there earning their keep. The more times we are able to reuse them, the cheaper the cost to us and ultimately the customer. They have a huge potential stock value and quite an expensive annual repair and replacement cost with 1,000 new boxes a year needed to maintain stock levels.

Availability list highlights

The range is getting quite low now as the autumn lines sell out or finish flowering. We will have a good colour range in the winter and spring flowering Cyclamen coum coming on again in a few weeks, just not quite ready yet.

We have a range of Helleborus in stock to stretch those Autumn sales. Not a lot of flower yet but full of winter promise. Evergreen Lithodora looking smart as are the Liriope.

I added a range of hardy Agapanthus varieties which are mostly evergreen, they are looking so strong I thought, why not? Erigeron Stallone still in flower although quite big plants now. Likely to still be in flower at the end of the year if we don't hit a sudden mini ice age. Ours outside the back door, is usually still showing colour at Christmas.

Best wishes  from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Hairy reflections

Morning all,

Mild but unsettled seems to be the order of the day, and the same will the weather over the next week or two. The trees round us are looking stunning and very autumnal with quite a few already shedding a lot of leaves. Difficult to believe it was so dry only a few weeks ago with puddles all over the place at the moment. We are still officially in a hose pipe ban here but I think with all the other excitement in the news the thoughts of drought have already faded from most people's memories.

We are pressing on with our long term project to collect and use more rainwater harvested from our tunnels and barn. I worked out earlier that over the last 3 winters 'we' have hand dug nearly 2km of trenches between the tunnels to incorporate french drains and connecting pipe-work. We just have to get the last few bits or infrastructure in place to join it all together to clean and collect it (twin sumps) and install some pipes and a pump to move it to a new storage tank. Unfortunately it isn't a project that will save us any money as the cost of the limited amount of borehole water we currently use is so cheap, especially when we use the turbines to run the pumps. But with water use generally coming under so much pressure we feel it is the right thing to do and should help future proof the nurseries water security, especially if we manage to catch enough extra to fill a big pond over winter.

My mild but unsettling part of the week was giving a talk at a local village hall to the new gardening club. It's something I never do, standing up and waffling in public scares the pants off me and I avoid it like the plague. This one-off was a specific request from the club to update them all on how Covid and the Lockdowns affected the nursery, especially after our Plants For People giveaway during the first Lockdown. They had all had deliveries of pots over those mad three weeks and were keen to hear how it all went once it was over. After all the generous donations we had received at that time it was a request difficult to refuse and after two previous cancellations due to more covid outbreaks this week the chickens finally came home to roast.

That first lockdown period was something we sort of remembered but actually had mostly blanked out, especially as we have been so busy since then. I thought I could just pen a few words and fly by the seat of my pants as I do most days, but I quickly realised that to get a more accurate picture I had to be quite specific with a lot of the facts and timings. This meant a thorough setting of the scene prior to that first lockdown and a precise recall of the events during it. I set it all out on my second ever Powerpoint presentation, what fun, and trawled through a load of Google pages and in the end read a lot of emails sent around the period. This was at that moment I was reminded myself of the enormity of what happened, the fears and unknowns at the time for everyone were tough enough, but to have to embark on some hair-brained scheme that no-one else had tried on this scale in an effort to save a 36 year old business, was taking a step into the complete unknown. Luckily the emails helped hugely with setting out all the timings for what happened and forced me to recall the day to day development of the idea and its deployment. In retrospect the project all went brilliantly and did more than we could have hoped for, we gave away over 90,000 pots to about 15,000 households, but of course at the time we had no idea what the next day would bring, let alone the next year. I managed to set it all out in a fairly coherent manner without reading too many upsetting emails and off we went.

The talk started brilliantly with the overhead projector refusing to speak to the laptop, but after a 30 minute delay, turning it all off and on again worked perfectly. The microphone battery ran out after 10 minutes and I forgot to check the clock to see how long I had, but otherwise all went swimmingly. Well over an hour later, with hardly anyone falling asleep I finished up a job well done. Lots of people were amazed at what we had done, before, during and after that lockdown and all very pleased that things had turned out so well. Caroline says she had to hold back a tear when I was talking through the early lockdown drama, so I think I hit the mark about right. I only mentioned the National Front once (meant to say National Trust) and hardly swore at all so .all in all not as bad as I had feared.

Availability list highlights

The range is getting quite low now as the autumn lines sell out or finish flowering. We will have a good colour range in the winter and spring flowering Cyclamen coum coming on again in a few weeks, just not quite ready yet. We have a range of Helleborus in stock to stretch those Autumn sales. Not a lot of flower yet but full of winter promise. Evergreen Lithodora looking smart as are the Liriope.

I added a range of hardy Agapanthus varieties which are mostly evergreen, they are looking so strong I thought, why not? Erigeron Stallone still in flower although quite big plants now. Likely to still be in flower at the end of the year if we don't hit a sudden mini ice age. Our outside the back door is usually showing colour at Christmas.

Best wishes from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Hairy offset?

Morning all, 

Potting is all done, and no compost left so I can't even be tempted to slip a few more through. We have had a thorough clean up in the potting tunnel and emptied out the new machine so we can oil up all the nuts and chains etc and get a grease gun to all the bearings etc. The compost that goes through the machine is quite abrasive and damp so I'm hoping this action will get the machine through the winter in better condition and it will last for a few extra years. Certainly a 'feel good' job, it almost looks like we are professionals. Everyone else is getting stuck into the pot mulching, trying to get a layer in place before the liverwort gets too much of a hold and slows up the trimming back later.

Trying to get to a position of 'net zero' on carbon output is the new favourite business target out there, and there are loads of people offering to help measure your performance to assist you on your way. As a business very interested on being as sustainable as we can be, while retaining a sensible level of commercialism, it is something I thought we should be able to have a good stab at and achieve this goal early on in the game. We have had quite a bit of experience over the years in measuring and reducing our direct carbon output in the areas we can actually measure ourselves. We have looked closely at energy use, waste output, transport emissions etc, but the one thing that has always bugged me was how do you measure the carbon cost of all the things you buy into the business. All those materials (pots, trays, tunnels, compost, young plants, consumables etc) plus all those services we use (accountants, waste disposal, electricians, servicing companies etc). All those things have a carbon cost, but I doubt if at this stage many of our suppliers could give us a carbon cost of what they deliver. At this point the net-carbon advisors start to apply generic estimated values based on the amount of money you spend with each supplier, allocated to very generalised groups and here things start to get a bit out of control, to the point of the whole exercise becoming farcical.

We put a lot of work into measuring and reducing our direct carbon emissions over the years and as a company our direct carbon output is just over 8 tonnes per year which is not bad considering we are employing 26 people, producing 450,000 hairy pots and a similar number of micro-propagated modules. However in the overall report carried out for us, they have estimated we also lose 51 tonnes from 'fugitive emissions' (I had to look this up, it means leaks from pressurise equipment), which can't be right, plus 751 tonnes from all our purchasing and material use! There is no breakdown of what materials or services these values have been allocated to, so how we are supposed to find a way to reduce them I'm not sure. I suspect the answer lies in the conclusion of the report, that to make ourselves net zero we pay someone (possibly the team who do the report!) to buy carbon offsets and fund carbon capturing projects.

I am awaiting to a response to a whole series of queries I made, but I suspect they would rather I take the easy way out and just pay up for carbon offsetting, which would currently cost just over £6,000. What I am actually now doing is gently harassing our suppliers for their carbon footprints for the materials and services they provide. I suspect that quite a few of the sort of things we are buying in have, either minimal carbon output, or indeed a negative one. We spend a monster amount on our coir pots for which I now actually have a carbon footprint and it comes out at a healthy negative figure, even after all the production, packing and transport costs are allocated. This is because the two main ingredients are coconuts and rubber sap which are both harvested from perennial tree crops which sequester carbon. I suspect there will be a similar outcome for the bamboo skewers which are also harvested from perennial croppers, but those sums are yet to be done.

The main issue I have with the whole thing, across all industries, is that most people will be working from guesstimates and generic data which doesn't actually help anyone. A quick payment to carbon offsetting and you are free to call yourself net zero. Even more frightening was an offer we had from our bank to work out our carbon footprint from our bank account activity, how accurate or meaningful is that going to be? The idea of these projects is that we find ways to improve but so far I see little evidence of this going to happen for most participants.

Wooden box returns

We have collecting up lots of our wooden boxes already, but if you have some ready for collection, just drop me a line and I will add you to the list for a visit. It may take a week or two to get round to you as we will be trying to tie them in with deliveries at the same time, to keep those transport costs in check. Thanks.

Availability list highlights

We have a range of Helleborus in stock to stretch those Autumn sales. Not a lot of flower yet but full of winter promise. Evergreen Lithodora looking smart as are the Liriope. I added a range of hardy Agapanthus varieties which are mostly evergreen, they are looking so strong I thought, why not?

Best wishes  from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Hairy bulbs

Morning all,

Nine Red Kites were circling over the nursery a couple of hours ago, the most I have ever seen together in these parts. What a difference a few years makes, it wasn't long ago when they were a major rarity. It was perfect weather for them, a stiff breeze and clear, bright visibility, they were just scouting the ground and dancing on the wind, a lovely sight.

Back down to earth and we are nearly through with the annual stocktaking, just a few more tunnels to count. Our usual stock-taker is off work at the moment so two new ones have been armed with clipboards and calculators and sent off into the wilds. They are doing a grand job but just as I thought we might get it all tied up, one got called away and the other distracted by us selling some of the stock! Not a bad thing at this time of year as the bank balance lurches back in the wrong direction and a long winter looms. Luckily our 'Spring' sales get going in January, weather permitting, so not too long to wait before it all kicks off again.

Finished potting the spring bulbs today which was a relief for all. It always starts off as a bit of a novelty, counting the bulbs into the pots and getting them the right way up, but after a couple of weeks of it we can't wait for it to end. That should mark the end of this year's potting, but I just might slip a few modules though the machine on Monday to finish up the last tiny bit of compost in the compost bay. Then we can have a proper end of season clear up in the potting tunnel, clean and service the machine and perhaps update the facilities again so we can be even more efficient next spring. Then a round of buns might be the order of the day, in celebration of another milestone in the production season. Any excuse will do.

After being unable to tempt any ground-works contractors to help us out getting our water recycling sumps, pumps, pipe- works and tanks installed, I suddenly have two on the hook at the same time. I have been in contact with both for months but after one site visit from each, nothing happened. I was beginning to think it was my long lived talent resurfacing, for being unable to get the attention of the waiter, but this week has seen a flurry of visits and correspondence and I think something might actually get done in the not too distant future. I have had all the kit lying about and paid for since March so it will be good to see some action.

One of the big winter jobs coming up is constructing another new batch of our wooden marketing trays to keep stock levels healthy. We can't afford to run out during the season as it makes life really difficult and it simply isn't practical to construct them during those hectic months. Luckily timber prices have dropped back slightly, although still at levels 4 times higher than we were paying 3 years ago, and today we took delivery of 6 pallets of component parts all ready to print, treat and construct over the next 4 months. That will be enough to replace or repair about 10% of our stock and give us a few spares just in case. Although the total cost of a new box is now pushing past £10, the long term economics of using them still work for us. The average life of a box is currently 12+ years and we reuse the box just over three times each year, so we are averaging 40 uses out of each tray. I know we are achieving many more uses out of a lot of the boxes where we are able to get them back quickly, so special thanks to all those returning theirs in a timely manner, it only works with your help.

Wooden box returns

We have collecting up lots of our wooden boxes already, but if you have some ready for collection, just drop me a line and I will add you to the list for a visit. It may take a week or two to get round to you as we will be trying to tie them in with deliveries at the same time, to keep those transport costs in check. Thanks.

Availability list highlights

Japanese Anemones are flushing nice. Plenty of strong flower stems although the plants are getting quite tall now. Erigeron Stallone is still in flower. For us it is often still showing colour at Christmas! Autumns' flowerers are on the march with more and more Asters coming into bud and colour.

We have a range of Helleborus in stock to stretch those Autumn sales. Not a lot of flower yet but full of winter promise. Tiarella with it's pretty 'foam flowers' are looking great. Lovely coloured foliage on Ajuga's and Heuchera. Evergreen Lithodora looking smart as are the Liriope. I added a range of hardy Agapanthus varieties which are mostly evergreen, they are looking so strong I thought, why not?

Best wishes,

from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Hairy counting

Morning all,

End of the month already and feeling a bit autumnal as the rain patters on the roof of the office and wind turn the turbines.

It's that time of year again for us, another financial year ends and all the fun of stocktaking gets underway. A weekend packed with counting and spreadsheet filling, never my favourite job, although when it's finished it gets us off to a lovely clean start, where we know exactly where we stand and all the stock lists are up to date and accurate, well for a couple of weeks anyway. Despite a disappointing summer with all those scorching hot days and slightly subdued sales, we are hopeful that we have kept travelling in a positive direction and will be able keep the bank happy enough to see us through the winter. Our stock levels are going to be up a bit, so we will have plenty of plants for a busy spring (fingers crossed), and we have secured plenty of dry stock in advance, to secure both the supply and fix the prices. It's been an expensive exercise and I'm sure the bank and accountant would rather we had the cash in hand instead, but I'm moderately confident that our plant sales will hold up well, given some reasonable spring weather.

The national economic mood is not exactly buoyant at the moment and I do wonder what might be coming round the corner next, but we are where we are, and we are still looking to make the most of it. Luckily we haven't got to make any major purchases over the next few months that involve dollars, although if things don't improve, the container shipping cost reductions we have seen over the last few weeks are going to be more than wiped out by the exchange rate changes.

The spring bulbs arrived this week and we were able to get stuck straight into potting them which is great. I hate leaving them in their boxes any longer than I have to, some varieties can really suffer if not dealt with quickly. We have done our usual trick of potting them all onto trolleys to keep them out of reach of the mice and voles, at least until they start to shoot when we put them down in the tunnels. In the past we have had entire crops wiped out by the little tykes, but we seem to have the upper hand at the moment (famous last words). Fritillaria are the tastiest and the one we have to put on the highest shelves.

We have decided to keep on some of our summer staff further into the autumn, with a run of long term sickness hitting us badly. A couple of home falls, and two illnesses have knocked out four staff for several weeks if not months, and we still need to get through a lot of stuff. Even without many sales over the next few months, there is a big list of jobs to get through and I really don't want to fall too far behind.

The cooler evenings prompted the lighting of the wood-burner a couple of times this week, just to take the edge off. We usually burn wood but occasionally stick on some rolled up waste paper (like the old accounts), but the burnt paper does have a tendency to slow the airflow allowing small pockets of gases to build and then ignite. These wood-burner 'farts' blow a smoke ring through the door seal prompting a quick opening of the vents to increase airflow. Last week we had such an episode which inexplicably led to one of those joyous uncontrollable reoccurring fits of the giggles. A single comment about 'trapped wind' set us both off with repeated attacks, pebble-dashing the fireplace with dinner and drinks. No explanation for it, just one of those mad stress relieving moments. Felt much better, especially once the mess was cleared up. 

Wooden box returns

We have collecting up lots of our wooden boxes already, but if you have some ready for collection, just drop me a line and I will add you to the list for a visit. It may take a week or two to get round to you as we will be trying to tie them in with deliveries at the same time, to keep those transport costs in check. Thanks.

Availability list highlights

We have our our dwarf garden Chrysanthemums in bud, showing flashes of colour. Japanese Anemones are flushing nice. Plenty of strong flower stems although the plants are getting quite tall now. Erigeron Stallone is still in flower. For us it is often still showing colour at Christmas!

Autumns flowerers are on the march with more and more fresh Asters coming into bud and colour. We have a range of Helleborus in stock to stretch those Autumn sales. Not a lot of flower yet but full of winter promise. Tiarella with it's pretty and short 'foam flowers' are looking great. Gaura Rosy Jane looking fab with lots of buds.. Lovely coloured foliage on Ajuga's and Heuchera. Evergreen Lithodora looking smart as are the Liriope.

I added a range of hardy Agapanthus varieties which are mostly evergreen, they are looking so strong I thought, why not?

Best wishes, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries