Hairy and warm

Morning all

All quiet on the nursery sales front as this cold snap slows everyone up. The plants are looking a bit sorry for themselves in this very cold frosty weather, although it always amazes me how quickly they perk up at the first sign of any thaw. It is another extremely frosty day today with temperatures down at -7C for most of the morning having been down at -9C over night, but at least the sun is out which makes everything look spectacular. We have been lucky and avoided all but the lightest of dustings of snow, so it has just been a matter of finding things to do that keep the fingers from dropping off. There has been a lot of broken pallet cutting and wood splitting to keep the home fires burning, as well as plant and tunnel tidying. The heated prop tunnel has been a popular venue with up to five people in there at a time, which has been quite a cosy and tight fit.

We have quite a surplus of untreated broken pallet wood, so I bit the bullet last week and lashed out on a nice big workshop wood burner to take the edge off the cold at break times. We have some small infrared electrical overhead units above each individual workstation, which are great for taking the edge off the cold when you are working under them, but not quite enough for a relaxing coffee break. A 20kW wood burner however makes a lovely focal point and having fitted it on Monday it has become the centre of attention and a very popular spot to meet up. It's not very posh, just a top loading black box with a flue and no window, but it certainly chucks out some heat. We had our in-house Christmas lunch gathered around it on Thursday which was great, although not too many coats came off, as it was so cold outside. Using waste wood rather than fossil fuels keeps our carbon footprint down as well as avoiding too much waste leaving site, so a hearty win all round. Baked potatoes and all the trimmings went down well and we even heated the beans up on the burner, although the stirrer got nearly as well cooked as the beans in the end.

Not the best time for the central heating to pack up in the house but hey-ho. Luckily the wood burner is going strong and the hot water still works so it could be worse. I had terrible trouble finding a heating engineer to come and have a go at fixing it, with several local ones saying they weren't taking on any new customers at the moment. Eventually I got one booked for Monday only for him to accidentally pitch up today (Friday). Turned out to be quite useful as he was able to take a look and order a couple of parts ready to come back and do the repair next week. Let's just hope he can get the parts, otherwise we could be huddled round the fire for the festive break and although it might sound romantic, having no chance of any radiators on is definitely not! This past few nights I've been not only sleeping under the winter duvet but adding the summer one on top too. Works a treat although I did wake up in a slight panic, tangled up in a multiple duvet overload.

It has been a bit subdued here for a couple of weeks and Christmas will be a quiet one after Caroline lost her dad a couple of weekends ago. He was 97, bright as a button but had been getting increasingly frail and passed away quietly at home with the family close by. You couldn't have asked for a nicer end really, but it's still a big shock to all those left behind when these things happen. We had tea with them on the Sunday afternoon and I was getting quizzed as usual on the nursery figures and all our plans and developments for the winter and next season. He was always so interested in what everyone was up to, and he will leave a big hole in so many people's lives.

2023 Prices.

Prices for next season, if you need to know them, are attached to the Mailchimp version of this email, together with a note about why the prices have risen as they have. Naturally it all comes down to those scary rising costs. We have desperately tried to keep our price rise as low as we can as we don't want to fuel inflation ourselves, or frighten off our customers, whether they are retailers or the final consumer, but margins are already pretty tight so there isn't much slack to accommodate these increases.

Hopefully the inflationary pressures will ease a bit next year, although we already have quite a few big rises already in the pipeline. The easing international container transport costs will certainly help and if Mr Putin would take a step back, life would get much easier for everyone.

Availability list highlights

Winter and spring flowering Cyclamen coum are now available in small numbers with more coming on stream for later. Most are in bud with some colour showing.

We have a good range of Helleborus in stock, to stretch those sales. The Christmas Rose Helleborus niger Advent Star have loads of flower and bud now. Not a lot of flower yet on the orientalis types but they are full of winter promise.

Best wishes  from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries and see you in 2023.

Hairy Footprint

Morning all,

Cooled off a bit this week, pretty grey and foggy here with the sun struggling to show its face. Even colder next week so bracing ourselves for that. Topped up the oil tanks this week, ready for heating the prop tunnel through the worst of the cold and the LED lights are adding a few hours to the day-length to keep the micro-prop stock growing away. It's not quite like spring in there but brighter and warmer than outside. Oil price was not too bad but we had a bit of a shock with the new electric contract signed up for this week, which starts in January. The cost for the year will nearly quadruple, although we should get a couple of thousand knocked off with the 21p energy cap in place for the first 3 months. It would be quite handy if they extended that but somehow I doubt that will happen. Sadly we did pick the cheapest option on offer, rather than the renewables option which was over £1,000 more. We decided we would be better off putting the £1,000+ saving towards installing some solar panels which we are hoping to do very soon. Another scary part of the bill was the daily standing charges which have risen from a few p to nearly £5 plus a new charge to us of a daily 'capacity charge'. That maybe the result of going to a Mickey Mouse operation for the cheapest deal (British Gas!). In the light of that increase, the smugness levels caused by having the turbines on site rose dramatically this week.

The little VW electric car we ordered in the summer of 2021 which has had its delivery delayed several times already, has just been moved again to late March 2023. We've nearly lost interest now, the excitement of  getting a new bit of kit has now worn pretty thin. Not even bothering to look forward to the delivery day any more, as it probably won't happen then either. Hey ho, worse things happen.

Made major progress this week on understanding and sensibly working out our complete Carbon Footprint, so we can map our path to Net Zero. I had a Zoom meeting with our advisors who are making major changes to their spreadsheet, so users can see exactly where all the carbon values have been put, among the huge number of categories where costs can be allocated. If anyone out there is doing this exercise I wish you luck, it's a major undertaking, but we have to start somewhere.

In the old days working out your carbon footprint revolved around your use of fuels, energy, water & waste (now called Scopes 1 and 2). You worked to reduce all these things, and pick more efficient or effective investments, and then hopefully your footprint reduced. Now we are all supposed to include Scope 3 which means putting a carbon value on all other purchases (materials, goods and services) to get a more complete picture. This is very much the right thing to look at, because for many businesses a very high proportion of their footprint will be created by their suppliers. However it is a nightmare to achieve a remotely accurate result, because so few people have a carbon value for their products or services so everything gets generalised and averaged out.

I haven't been sent the updated report yet as it is still going through the last stages of approval, but I know we have already reduced our footprint from the first report by 60 tonnes, simply by the assessors getting the maths right. On top of that there should be other major reductions with some reallocating of categories to get more realistic figures (our incoming young module plants went into 'agricultural produce' which turns out was very high carbon due to the element of farm animals in the calculation). I also have a carbon report on our own coir pot production and transport, which produced a net sequestration of carbon rather than net emissions, which should also produce a big swing in our favour. I am hoping it won't take too long to improve the accuracy of the sums and we could find ourselves with a very small carbon total to offset, then we just have to pick one or two projects to invest in to cover that offset. I'm almost excited, despite the still daunting spreadsheet and thought that this will need updating every year or so.

Wooden Box returns.

We have a barn full of dried, cleaned and stacked boxes which is very satisfying. If you have any more empties you would like us to pick up just drop us a line.

Availability list highlights

Winter and spring flowering Cyclamen coum are now available in small numbers with more coming on stream for later. Most are in bud with some colour showing.

We have a good range of Helleborus in stock, to stretch those Autumn sales.

The Christmas Rose Helleborus niger Advent Star have loads of flower and bud now. Not a lot of flower yet on the orientalis types but they are full of winter promise.

Best wishes  from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries