Hairy hearing

Hi,

Another week passes with more cool damp weather and another stormy weekend to come, but summer is due to return later in the week which hopefully will get the visitor numbers back up again. The nursery here is rapidly filling again with all the stock getting potted for next spring sales. I thought we were well ahead but I'm panicking again now that growing season is slipping past us with still lots to do. Christmas must be just around the corner with the football season starting tonight and Saints playing at Sheffield in the Championship League. We got walloped last season and relegated from the Premiership. They are keen to bounce back this season but we'll see what happens, it's a tough league to get out of unless, like last time it happened, we went straight down another league! Hopefully the England women's world cup team will do us all proud and the netball ladies too. Lots to cheer about in reality.

Luckily the cooler weather has greatly reduced irrigation demand as we are having to manually turn the sprinklers on and off on one third of the nursery where we seem to have developed a wiring issue which means the solenoids aren't responding to the controller. It will now involve a weekend of checking each decoder, control valve and wiring connection until I find the break. Might leave it until Sunday as tomorrow looks a bit wild at the moment and I will be damp enough from the repair work without adding rain into the equation too.

Electricians are due back next week for more fun and games testing and reconnecting the replacement cabling. There are a couple of distribution boards to replace and then possibly the rain recycling will be up and running. I must admit they aren't promising anything, they will have to wait and see what the test results are to see if we have any other issues that need resolving. One day.

The new car is working a treat and despite the salesman telling us it didn't have 'heads up display' or the capability to do bidirectional charging, it would appear to be able to do both. Quite excited about the bidirectional bit as it means that we can potentially use a good chunk of the 77kW battery capacity to feed back onto the nursery, or into the house, when we need it. It's all fairly new technology and I might have to wait a bit to put it into operation because it's not the cars capabilities that matter it is the wall charger that need to be special. There are very few bidirectional chargers available yet and I found out this week that rather than £600 for a standard charger it is likely to be £6,000 plus installation fees. We would have to save a lot of imported power to make that viable at the moment. I also found out that with a 3 phase supply, as we have on the nursery, we would need battery storage on each of the 3 phases not just on one, so I don't think the car on its own would work. More investigations to be done there.

As the sales slow down a bit we have started on a bit of maintenance, just trying to get things back on an even keel after a hectic spring season. The sprinkler replacements have progressed nicely and the re-hanging of some of the lines that have sagged over time has been completed. We have a collection of tunnels to recover which split over the winter and early spring, but just need some warmer and still conditions to get it done. 

My own maintenance has been hectic too, with eyes, teeth and ears all having to be seen to over the last couple of weeks, what fun it is getting old! Best result was the ears earlier today with a thorough hoover out after a week of softening, A bit noisy but very gently done and very dramatic results, I'm back in full stereo with a full pass on the post operative hearing test too, so quite relieved that there is no further action needed. Everything is suddenly so loud and clear. I still can't hear what Caroline is asking me to do, but apparently that is a different type of deafness.

Availability list.

The available range is steadying as sales slow a bit and extra potting volumes work their way through the system. Numbers available are still a bit limited on some lines as batch sizes tend to be smaller at this time of year but with reduced demand the pressure isn't quite so manic.

There are now a few more buds showing up and there are still more new lines growing nicely which will appear on the lists fairly soon. Our list constantly develops over the season so it's always worth just keeping an eye out for the new appearances.

Wooden box collections

Don't forget that all our wooden boxes are the property of Kirton Farm Nurseries so will need to be returned at some point. It will take us a while to get round everyone, but if you have any of our wooden boxes ready to return and aren't expecting to order anytime soon, then please do drop us an email and let us know. A rough idea of numbers might be handy but not essential. We will get to you as soon as we have a vehicle with space in your area. Thanks

Take care out there,

from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.