Hairy hosting

Hi,

Must not be long on this one as Mum has come down for a weekend visit and I'm already in trouble for being too late home.

First exciting trip out for her was to drive to the van garage in Andover to pick me up after dropping off the 7.5t one off for one of its 10 weekly inspections it has to have then back home for a quick cuppa and back down to the nursery to plant a few new pond plants in one of our refurbished wildlife ponds. The house cleaning has already started and we can now see the floor colour of the conservatory again which is always a nice surprise.

Busy week as usual with lots of well earned holiday absences knocking back the work schedule a bit. Several visits this week from suppliers checking up on how our season had gone and revealing a few new things on the horizon that they would like us to buy into. We are trialling a few different peat-free propagation modules at the moment to see if we can improve on the existing ones, so there was a lot of inspecting and ideas floating around as to how the best results. I think we are a bit further forward especially with a potential option to extend the use of reusable module trays which we would definitely welcome. Another visit was from Stuart our trusted advisor on all things pest and disease orientated from Fargro. On our tour round the nursery he was very kind about how healthy everything looked especially considering that we were growing it all in our peat- free compost. Lots of people are doing lots of trials at the moment in an effort to get themselves ready for the upcoming peat- free change over and many are having major quality and crop damage issues. Every nursery and crop is different and unfortunately it can take a while to find the right compost mix and crop management regime to be a consistent as the tried and trusted peat based alternatives. Luckily we have been testing for well over 10 years and have been peat-free for 8, so I am hoping we have sorted out a lot of the issues we had in the early stages. It might have cost us a bit over that time in extra costs and a few plant losses when things went wrong, but now we are glowing in the warm realisation that something we invested in has actually paid off!

Anyway I have wandered off the subject of advancements in Pest and Disease control and our discussions with Stuart. It looks very much like the number of available chemical controls is going to continue to fall as a combination of legislation and economics combine to make selling into ornamental horticultures tiny market impractical for the big chemical companies. So the focus may well change to improving plant health and leaf cell strength so they can resist the pests and diseases more vigorously. Application of more natural additives like seaweed extracts and other bio-stimulants should give us better resistance together with continued use and development of high value (to the suppliers) predators and bio-chemicals. Unfortunately a lot of the things that need to be applied are preventative treatments so need spraying every couple of weeks and this is a major labour issue at present. We currently only spot spray on the odd occasion when something gets out of hand, to minimise the spraying operator costs which are the main cost involved. So to add total nursery spray regimes for multiple stimulants on a weekly or fortnightly basis is just no longer practical and will need new application methods. I had seen that Fargro had been doing shade spraying demonstrations with flying drones doing the job, but the follow up has not yet been done to apply mixes within growing houses, because the pesticide regulations are just not up to coping or allowing such use, despite the fact that you could remove the spraying operative from a potentially harmful situation. Now the interesting thing that came up in conversation this week was that the bio-stimulants are harmless additives which don't come under the pesticide rules, so could in theory be applied by drone inside the production tunnels we just need to get the drones set up right. Discussions are progressing, watch this space!.

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.