Hairy New Year!

Morning all,

Happy New Year everyone, here's hoping it's a good one. We had a very quiet Christmas ourselves and are getting back to something more normal now with the nursery gradually coming back to life after the break. Looking forward to getting organised for another busy season.

The overwinter plant tidying has been a bit easier to push on with once the cold snap passed with many tunnels looking surprisingly fresh and almost spring like, although there are still several looking very 'end of season'. 

At last I have managed to pin down the groundwork contractors to come and start our rain water collection installation, after 15 months of trying. A large deposit has been paid and weather permitting they are due to start at the beginning of February. They are hoping to be done in a month, which hopefully will mean minimum disruption to our season and the water savings coming on stream quickly. It's a big investment for us (about £70,000) with remarkably little direct financial benefit, but it is the right thing to do and should help add some level of future proofing into our longer term water security. If it works well then the last step will be to install a bigger storage facility, but let's not run before we walk.

One of the winter improvement projects is to rescue our tool-shed which was in danger of becoming overrun with detritus. Years of saving stuff that 'might come in useful one day' made it impossible to find anything or actually use it as a workshop. It has taken many hours but it is all looking much more organised in there now and a monster amount of broken or useless kit has been recycled. The last main issue to sort out was the ingress of water whenever it rained. The shed is tacked onto the end of an old grain storage barn and the main valley gutter has leaked badly for years. It isn't actually our barn so repairing the old gutter was always going to be tricky, especially when we looked into the potential cost of getting a specialist team in to do it. So we have installed an internal guttering system to catch and redirect the flow, which has worked pretty well so far but will need extending to achieve closer to total capture. It's great to feel we are regaining control of something that had really got away from us.

The domestic chaos pre Christmas was eased with the warmer temperatures, but continued to be exciting. In preparation of the heating engineer coming to fix a dodgy valve in the hot water system I went into the loft to clear the way to the system header tank, only to find the tank empty. The ball-cock had got stuck shut. A quick wiggle and it opened and all seemed well. The system refilled and a degree of heating was recovered. Feeling rather pleased with myself I tucked into a light lunch, only to then hear the rather loud crackling of the fire in the wood-burner. I went to check it, only to find it wasn't thefire, it was running water coming through the light fittings in the utility. The water tank had filled and not stopped, overflowing into the bathroom below and then down into the utility. Ace. Luckily I caught it in time, so although we had no electric for a bit, the ceilings stayed up and all was recovered over a few days. Still no engineer has appeared, but main panic is over.

Another 'no-show' this week was the meter contractor to change our faulty smart meter, the third appointment missed despite being a 'priority visit' and no call to let us know. Is it just me? Stayed in for 6 hrs waiting but hey ho, worse things happen. Like the cat tearing a tendon on Christmas Eve (out of hours of course), one of the turbines breaking down on the same day (should be repaired next week) and the potting machine tripping out (electrically not recreationally).

2023 Prices. 

Prices for 2023, 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 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.