Hairy and holistic

Hi

The warmer sunnier weather produced another little flurry of orders this week and a few planting schemes have obviously got underway, so quite pleased on the sales front. Production is catching up a bit as September rushes by, but we are still suffering from holiday and illness absences which meant we move forward quite as dramatically as I had hoped. However the plants are loving the weather and growth is looking very healthy so hopefully even though we are a bit later than planned on the potting front, we may get away with it in the end.

My week was very broken up, which made it feel pretty short, in that I got even less done than usual. I had the whole of Wednesday away from the nursery with a trip to Hyde Hall in Essex for a peat-free propagation workshop and nursery visit. A total of 7 hrs on the road was a slog, road works and accidents added that fun level of stress as to whether you are going to get there in time, or get home at all afterwards.

I always feel very inadequate at these technical events, there are a lot of very clever people delivering all this information about how best to manage your propagation, potting and crops, as well as irrigation and feeding regimes. They talked about all the data we should be collecting and testing we are bound to be doing on compost conditions, salt levels, water quality etc, expecting us all to be actually doing it. I could tell there were a few in the audience that were, but I know one for sure who wasn't. At times I was thinking it's astonishing that anything we grow actually lives, let alone makes it to a saleable plant, we must have had an awful lot of luck over the years!

Anyway, if I put my dented confidence to one side, I did pick up on a few good pointers on where we might make some improvements with our module management, increasing the speed of establishment in the pot after potting, improving uniformity and reducing losses. It was all to do with a combination of a sensible feed regime and 'priming' modules for potting.  Using a high phosphate liquid fertiliser shortly before potting to boost the root activity and applying bio-stimulants as well, to toughen up the plants is all part of the priming process. Getting the moisture levels in the plug and potting compost equal and even, over the batch, will apparently help too. So a few fun things to sort out for next season.

It was very much a technical session rather than political, so there wasn't much discussion about the RHS and National Trust setting a 2026 deadline for being 100% peat-free, including the module. One speaker did outline the RHS plans and said that they were prepared for a possible supply shortages for a few seasons, until the commercial propagators caught up with producing in peat-free composts. This may be fine for the RHS and National Trust to say, but if some of your biggest customers are going to refuse to take stock for several years while we (the producer) wait for the propagators to catch up, we are going to potentially lose a lot of sales. So do we downsize production while we wait, or do we find new customers elsewhere? We are doing more propagation ourselves to fill some gaps, but we can't do it all over such a short timeframe. One module supplier is already peat-free, but substantially more expensive, so do we increase prices to cover this and how would other customers feel about this extra price pressure? All this hassle is to remove the last 0.8% of peat from our final product and completely ignores all our other innovative sustainability efforts to remove all plastic from our plant deliveries (labels, pots and marketing trays), capture rainwater, install wind turbines and cuddle trees. They may find other suppliers and remove that 0.8% but the use of plastics and carbon production will then go up as a result. The bigger picture has been completely ignored in the crusade to get to that 100% result too quickly. Now I need a beer.

End of season wooden Box returns

We have already started collecting a lot of our wooden boxes back from many sites and will continue to do so over the next few weeks. If you have empty boxes ready to go please do drop us a line and we will pop in when next in the area. Availability list.

Summer is rushing by and the Autumn flowering Cyclamen hederifolium are well ready with the bud and flower. Not many of the pink variety left, we may sell out this coming week, but still a few more white. Unfortunately after a poor seed harvest we only have one Cyclamen coum variety this winter (Silver Leaved), we have a few extra in stock to make up for part of the total shortfall and they are just beginning to produce the very occasional flower. They will go on right through until April so no rush! Premium variety Tiarella Pink Skyrocket are ready with attractive foliage and now also in bud and flower.

The other winter star is the Helleborus range, a few varieties already showing signs of flowering but a bit early for most. Good strong plants with plenty of potential. The more classic Aster varieties are coming on strong now, after all the new early Alpha range has sold out. Most are now coming into bud ready for their late summer and autumn display.

Summer colour is still there with Gaura Rosy Jane and its bicolour flowers plus the lovely delicate white Whirling Butterflies, New range for this year is the Helenium Hayday series, Strong and compact and still showing good colour and bud.

Best wishes from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.