Hairy and out of kilter

Hi

One day of sunshine and back to filling our rainwater sumps! Popped out this afternoon and there  is water everywhere in the fields, on the roads it is very wet out there. The silk screen printer has been rolled out this week after we got quite close to running out of fresh wooden POS  boards. We had the wood all precut  for us and then we prepared it for printing, with all the edges bevelled and corners rounded. 600 prints later all the big boards are done,  just the smaller sets and latex allergen notices to do over the next couple of days and we are ready  for another year. It’s not a job I relish as it is fraught with anxiety, when it goes well it’s fine, but when something goes slightly out of kilter the consequences are extremely messy. The very black, very permanent and slow drying ink is great  when it’s in the right place, but as soon as a little bit makes a break  for it, you are in trouble, It seems to take on a life of it’s own once  it escapes, turning up in all the places you don’t want it, just the tiniest smear repeats itself on everything you touch, and I mean everything!

More excitement in the office as our recent IT upgrade continued to throw up more and more challenges. Just as we think we are on top of it something else refuses to work, but at least we are more secure now. We are now at the end of the week and have  definitely made progress in some directions but there  is some trepidation that our favourite programs including the main nursery production and order processing program may be reaching toward the end of its life. I am hoping we can sort it out but it’s not going to be very easy. The frustrating thing is that it is working fine on two units but not on two others Luckily someone far cleverer and,  of course, younger than me is on the case.

Because we like a challenge, we have  also been looking at changing the accounts software and there  was a long teams chat about  that earlier today. Things have  moved  on a bit since we last looked at this sort of program but after huge  price increases from our previous supplier it is time for a shakeup. The hype on what could be possible with the new programmes is impressive and it all looks so simple. What could possibly go wrong?

I have  a treat for Greg tomorrow. Providing it is not raining too hard, he is descending into the near  empty rainwater sump to have  a spring clean. Long term  accumulation of silt in the bottom is getting into the submersed pump and blocking the sand filter and we are hoping a clear out will reduce drastically the amount of silt around the pump inlets. A portable ‘dirty water’ pump has been purchased to empty out the last of the mucky water and hopefully a quick scrape and flush will improve things. Fingers crossed it works and we remember to let him out at the end of the day!

Summary of the improvements to shelf life for 2026

We are introducing three  changes this season in how we prepare our plants for delivery to our lovely retailers. We know some sites struggle to maintain the quality of our plants once  they arrive on the retail plant sales areas. To help provide a longer lasting 'looking good' shelf life we are going to be doing the following:

1/ Adding a reusable, recycled wool capillary mat in the bottom of each tray which will hold onto extra water for the plants to take up. These are expensive and will need to be returned for reuse with the boxes.

2/ Adding extra wetting agent at despatch to allow the compost to hold onto more water and rewet more easily if dry.

3/ Adding a dose of organic slow-release feed as a top dressing to compensate for any leaching of nutrients. Do your 2026 retail prices need changing?

We have  increased our cost prices for 2026 by just 5p per pot, which is a little under  2%, to partially cover our ever-increasing costs. If you have  your stock pre-priced by ourselves, perhaps now would be a good time to let us know any changes you would like to make  for the coming season. We can then adjust our records accordingly and get started on printing the correct  price labels in advance of the fast-approaching madness of those spring sales.

Availability list.

Despite the very dull weather there  has been a surprising amount of growth over the last few of weeks in both the perennial and herb ranges, things are beginning to look quite Spring-like. The early spring bulbs are showing well with many of the Narcissus now in bud, White Petticoat and the pale lemon-yellow Julia Jane, both are crackers.

There  are two Scilla showing bud and a good colour and Muscari Blue Magic are now up and in tight bud. The first of our naturalising Tulips is in bud, but don’t hang  about  I don’t have  a huge  number left. Pulmonaria varieties are in bud, not far from showing colour. We don’t have  much Blue Ensign left but plenty of the others. Most Erysimum varieties are already showing bud and the odd flash of colour and stood up well after several hard frosts we saw a few of weeks ago.

Polemonium Heaven Scent are looking great,  bushy tight bronzed bushy foliage with tight bud just appearing. Cyclamen coum Silver-leaved are flowering and will flower from November through to March and April.

Best wishes from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.

Hairy coordination

Hi 

At last, the sun has made a showing today and Saturday looks promising too. This dull wet weather has affected a few plants, but most are now coming into spring growth with surprising enthusiasm. A little bit more brightness would be perfect but it looks like we are to return to topping up the groundwater levels again over the coming week, but at least it does help recover from last summer’s water shortages.

This week saw the first young plant stock arriving ready  for potting, so it really must be Spring. The potting machine has had its post-winter check-over and its chains tightened, and the tunnels are being prepared for their new inhabitants Over the past ten years or so we have  been gradually upgrading the site with what seems like miles of hand  dug and filled drains beside every tunnel on a mission to try and collect as much rainwater as we can,  to utilise in the irrigating of our crops. Over the winter, 3 years ago,  we had installed a collection of large interconnecting drains and sumps, together with pumps, a lot of pipework and cabling and a new large storage tank, all at huge expense. It has all been in use sporadically since then but has so far never  been the fully automated solution promised at the start. A series of issues kept tripping us up, incorrectly wired pump controls resulted in uncontrolled pump use on the auto settings, a faulty float switch which refused to stop the pump when running dry, silty water in the second ‘clean’ sump meant installing a large sand filter, a backflow of water in the main supply pipe from the tank to the sump needed a very large non-return valve inserting and then we eventually found an poorly fitted pipe connection 3 ft underground. This underground leak created the biggest mystery as we couldn’t understand why the storage tank was never  quite filling up despite the copious rainfall. What happened was, the sump pump would come  on, fill up the now empty large bore pipe work, and then turn off again before putting anything much into the tank. The pipe would then drain out again through  the leak before the pump turned  back on, and so the cycle would repeat. To add to the confusion the delivery pipe into the storage tank included a pipe that ran a third of the way down the inside of the tank, which would effectively syphon out all the water it could reach. Anyway, this week,  after a very long process, we have  achieved the initial aim of the project and the whole system now works as it should. Both pumps work together in a coordinated and automated fashion, so whenever we have  rainwater available in the sumps it gets pumped into the storage tank, and that water gets fed into the main irrigation tank, taking priority over the normal water supply. Result.  So now the system is working efficiently, the next fun job is to maximise the amount of run-off water we can capture and get flowing into the sumps. I have  a few ideas and fingers crossed they shouldn’t be expensive. Famous last words!

Summary of the improvements to shelf life for 2026

We are introducing three  changes this season in how we prepare our plants for delivery to our lovely retailers. We know some sites struggle to maintain the quality of our plants once  they arrive on the retail plant sales areas. To help provide a longer lasting 'looking good' shelf life we are going to be doing the following:

1/ Adding a reusable, recycled wool capillary mat in the bottom of each tray which will hold onto extra water for the plants to take up. These are expensive and will need to be returned for reuse with the boxes.

2/ Adding extra wetting agent at despatch to allow the compost to hold onto more water and rewet more easily if dry.

3/ Adding a dose of organic slow-release feed as a top dressing to compensate for any leaching of nutrients. Do your 2026 retail prices need changing?

We have  increased our cost prices for 2026 by just 5p per pot, which is a little under  2%, to partially cover our ever-

increasing costs. If you have  your stock pre-priced by ourselves, perhaps now would be a good time to let us know any changes you would like to make  for the coming season. We can then adjust our records accordingly and get started on printing the correct  price labels in advance of the fast-approaching madness of those spring sales.

Availability list.

Despite the very dull weather there  has been a surprising amount of growth over the last couple of weeks in both the perennial and herb ranges, things are beginning to look quite Spring-like.

The early spring bulbs are showing well with many of the Narcissus are now in bud, White Petticoat and the pale lemon- yellow Julia Jane, both are crackers.

There  are two Scilla showing bud and a good colour and Muscari Blue Magic are now up and in tight bud. The first of our naturalising Tulips is in bud, but don’t hang  about  I don’t have  a huge  number left.

Pulmonaria varieties are in bud, not far from showing colour. We don’t have  much Blue Ensign left but plenty of the others. Most Erysimum varieties are already showing bud and the odd flash of colour and stood up well after several hard frosts we saw a couple of weeks ago.

Polemonium Heaven Scent are looking great,  bushy tight bronzed bushy foliage with tight bud just appearing. Cyclamen coum Silver-leaved are flowering and will flower from November through to March and April. 

Seasonal best wishes from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.

Hairy surgery

 

HiStill too wet for my liking. We had one glorious day on Wednesday and the rest was decidedly damp. I support it's better than being snowed in! The warmth on the skin on that one day was enough to encourage some Spring like feelings but we won't go into that.Apologies if you have  had any emails from us this week without a proper  ‘signature footer’ on the bottom. Our IT upgrade is still having a few teething issues and the tech team  (not me this time) slightly messed up the set-up of automatic signing of emails. We were told all was ready  and we no longer had to select anything to have  our ID message on the bottom, but it didn’t happen. Apologies if anyone wondered who we were with our bare  bottoms. Fingers crossed all has been resolved.A productive week on the nursery, probably because I was absent on trade  show duties for some of it. Greg dug a massive hole to find a leaking pipe joint in the rainwater harvesting system. It has been messing up the pumping of the rainwater from the sump at the lower end of the nursery to the storage tank at the top. Despite all the rain we have  had,  the tank was not quite filling up all because the leak was siphoning off the top couple of feet of water every time the rain stopped! It was quite a challenge to fix it, but all is complete and the tank is already full again.
The 12,000  new capillary mats are all cut up and stacked on pallets ready  for the coming season, all the broken  pallets are sawn up ready  for the despatch wood burner,  and the FSC plywood for all the POS  boards are cut and prepared with chamfered sides and corners, ready  for silk-screen printing. We had our young energetic, coffee fueled, and very professional tree surgeons in again, on their cherry picker lift, to clear the tops of a runaway conifer hedge that was beginning to interfere with the power cables. There  were a few other bits to tidy up too and they did a cracking job overall, leaving us with a lovely pile of chippings to spread under  the solar panels and a good-sized invoice. Exciting to see such dramatic changes happen so quickly.

The Squires trade  show was a rare day out for me, but it’s good for me to interact with the real world occasionally, or so I’m told. Some lovely chats with lots of people, just reminding me that we aren’t alone in trying to make  things better,  alongside making a living.
Summary of the improvements to shelf life for 2026
We are introducing three  changes this season in how we prepare our plants for delivery to our lovely retailers. We know some sites struggle to maintain the quality of our plants once  they arrive on the retail plant sales areas. Peat-free compost mixes struggle to hold onto as much water as peat  and also don't grip the nutrients as tightly either. When added to the extra breathability of our Hairy Pots, quicker drying out can be an issue, especially if the ideal of 'little and often' applications of water is not a practical option. When the plants dry out they then tend to get over watered, which flushes out the available nutrients resulting in premature deterioration in condition. To help reduce these stresses and provide a longer lasting 'looking good' shelf life we are doing the following:1/ Adding a reusable, recycled wool capillary mat in the bottom of each tray which will hold onto extra water for the plants to take up. These are expensive and will need to be returned for reuse with the boxes.2/ Adding extra wetting agent at despatch to allow the compost to hold onto more water and rewet more easily if dry.3/ Adding a dose of organic slow-release feed as a top dressing to compensate for any leaching of nutrients. Do your 2026 retail prices need changing?We have  increased our cost prices for 2026 by just 5p per pot, which is a little under  2%, to partially cover our ever-increasing costs. If you have  your stock pre-priced by ourselves, perhaps now would be a good time to let us know any changes you would like to make  for the coming season. We can then adjust our records accordingly and get started on printing the correct  price labels in advance of the fast-approaching madness of those spring sales.
Availability list.The first spring bulbs are here,  and a few are already showing their first buds and colour.Two of the hoop-petticoat Narcissus have  bud, White Petticoat and the pale lemon-yellow Julia Jane, both are crackers. Bear in mind that both varieties look creamy lemon yellow when they first open,  but the White Petticoats fades to white as they age,  more than Julia who hangs on better  to the lemon yellow. Julia is also a more vigorous variety. Other compact Narcissus starting to show bud too
There  are two Scilla showing bud and a good colour, so spring must be coming up fast!There  are three  Pulmonaria varieties in bud and close to colour. We don’t have  much Blue Ensign left but plenty of the other two at the moment.Several Erysimum varieties are already showing bud and the odd flash of colour and are standing up well after several hard frosts we have  seen here.Cyclamen coum Silver-leaved are flowering and will flower from November through to March and April.Seasonal best wishes from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.

Hairy amphibians

 

Hi 

Still a bit cold and damp,  but it is January so we shouldn’t really complain too much. Hopefully the ground  water levels will have  recovered after last year’s dry spring and summer. We are definitely seeing signs of some fresh growth on the more confident hardy plants, in both the perennial and herb ranges, which does make  me think the madness of spring sales is not far away. The bank will be keen  to see that take off on the sales and income front as we continue to recover from my overspending last year on more nursery investments and improvements.

The smaller scale investment this winter, of the new IT and data  storage system, continues to throw up more practical challenges and more costs this week,  as we find bit’s that don’t work as they did before, resulting in the purchase of new software and extra subscriptions. Last week’s availability email was missing the ‘Word version’ due to a software issue but that was one we did manage to cure this week after a few long phone calls to the support desk and downloading £15 worth of program. At last, some good value spending! We have  had our tail feathers clipped with the loading of new software, as the ‘IT administrator’ role has been taken  away from us by the tech support team,  so that we don’t mess it all up by downloading something silly. Sensible really, as my grip on reality is getting looser.

We have  been doing a bit more site maintenance this week, just getting things tidied up a bit before the rush. We circumnavigated the site repairing the holes in the rabbit netting trying to slow up the comings and going of the rabbits,hares and the odd muntjak deer.  Two breaches were discovered, one created by the farm’s tractor mounted hedge cutter (no complaints, it’s a cheap option for us to get the boundaries trimmed), and the other was a reopening of an old repair by some critter pushing its way back through  the original hole. The narrow animal path was plain to see and the hole not huge, but definitely one to return to and check  later in the year.

It’s coming up to the frog spawning season so we had a tidy up in and around the main pond so that they can find the water to do their stuff. We kept is subtle, so we don’t frighten them off, but it definitely looks more inviting now than earlier, if you were looking to frolic in a pond in January! With three  ponds around the nursery we get to benefit from the successful breeding of frogs, toads and newts through  the season, we are always finding them tucked  under  the pots and trays as we work round the site. Most of the team  get quite excited by these discoveries, although not always positively!

Summary of the improvements to shelf life for 2026

We are introducing three  changes this season in how we prepare our plants for delivery to our lovely retailers. We know some sites struggle to maintain the quality of our plants once  they arrive on the retail plant sales areas. Peat-free compost mixes struggle to hold onto as much water as peat  and also don't grip the nutrients as tightly either. When added to the extra breathability of our Hairy Pots, quicker drying out can be an issue, especially if the ideal of 'little and often' applications of water is not a practical option. When the plants dry out they then tend to get over watered, which flushes out the available nutrients resulting in premature deterioration in condition. To help reduce these stresses and provide a longer lasting 'looking good' shelf life we are doing the following;

1/ Adding a reusable, recycled wool capillary mat in the bottom of each tray which will hold onto extra water for the plants to take up. These are expensive and will need to be returned for reuse with the boxes.

2/ Adding extra wetting agent at despatch to allow the compost to hold onto more water and rewet more easily if dry.

3/ Adding a dose of organic slow release feed as a top dressing to compensate for any leaching of nutrients. Do your 2026 retail prices need changing?

We have  increased our cost prices for 2026 by just 5p per pot, which is a little under  2%, to partially cover our ever increasing costs. If you have  your stock pre-priced by ourselves, perhaps now would be a good time to let us know any changes you would like to make  for the coming season. We can then adjust our records accordingly and get started on printing the correct price labels in advance of the fast approaching madness of those spring sales.

Availability list.

The first spring bulbs are here  and a few are already showing their first buds. Not much in the way of colour but it won't be long. Two of the hoop-petticoat Narcissus have  bud, White Petticoat and the pale lemon yellow Julia Jane, both are crackers. Other compact Narcissus starting to show bud are Jet Fire and the Tete A Tete.

There  are two Scilla showing bud and a bit of colour, so spring must be coming up fast! There  are three  Pulmonaria varieties in tight bud but close to colour, We don’t have  much Blue Ensign left but plenty of the other two at the moment. Several Erysimum varieties are already showing bud and the odd flash of colour and are standing up well after several hard frosts we have  seen here.

Cyclamen coum are coming on quickly. This selection is a champion winter performer, very hardy and just keeps on flowering, usually from November through to March and April.

Seasonal best wishes from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries.