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