What a lovely weekend, bright, sunny and springy. I have just had a nice walk round the nursery to check up on things and the skylarks are singing, grasshoppers rubbing legs, frogs croaking and rabbits are unfortunately trimming plants back. We still haven’t really got on top of the rabbit population we fenced in a few seasons ago. The cat keeps on top of most of the young ones as they appear but there always seem to be a few that get away and nibble away in odd places. Usually once the hedge undergrowth and grass gets growing they move onto this so hopefully won’t do too much permanent damage.

The plants are beginning to show signs of the first spring growth spurt which makes things look more positive after the recent cold snap which did knock a few things back. Hopefully seeing the green shoots of the spring will restore a bit of confidence in the customers and we can all get excited about growing stuff all over again.

We got quite excited yesterday with a night out in King’s Somborne village hall. Not a venue we frequent often, I’m not much good at village panto’s, I struggle to let my imagination go far enough to really enjoy that sort of thing! However they hosted a concert by The Wiyo’s http://thewiyos.com/ who are a fantastically talented band from New York we had never heard of before this week. We checked them out on the internet and they were well reviewed, so went to see. There was a sell out crowd of about 150 and they got a very varied show from polka’s and a waltz to rock and roll and bizarre folk. I think the song about ‘mother had a baby and its head popped off’ was probably the most surprising. Overall an evening when it was a good decision to take a risk. Bonkers.

Unfortunately the evening was spoilt at the end by the news that one of our great friends had gone to hospital earlier with chest pains. He is should be OK now as they have fitted a stent to sort out the problem so should be out on Tuesday. We were playing skittles together last Tuesday (could have been the excitement) and he was playing hockey when he felt unwell, so it all feels very close. Luckily he is such a lovely chap with such a nice family that there is lots of support to help and our best wishes go to all for a speedy recovery. Well done the NHS for sorting him out so efficiently and for the other three chaps I know of my sort of age who have had the same op in the last year or so. Years ago the outcome might have been different. On top of one of our staff sadly losing her mother this week it is a sobering time, I’m off for a therapeutic hug under the turbines.

Eco News

A quiet couple of days on the turbines but they are still up there doing their thing when conditions allow. We will really miss them when the leaves come out and we lose sight of them from the house, it’s always nice to see them greeting us with a wave when we open the curtains.

I came across this document last week which goes over the governments current feed in tariff review which is a bit log winded but does have some very interesting graphs and info in it. The current position on the number of solar installations in comparison with the other renewable schemes is included which is surprising. You can see why they wanted to lower the tariff early for solar, it has been taken up on such a big scale. http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/Consultations/fits-review/4311-feed-in-tariff-scheme-phase-2b-consultation-docume.pdf

If anyone lives in Hampshire and is short on house insulation check out http://www.insulatehampshire.co.uk/ where you can now get free cavity wall insulation and either free or very cheap loft insulation to top up to the minimum requirement of 11.5 inches. Alternatively contact your energy supplier as I heard this week that some are offering financial rewards for installing free insulation, as the take up was not high enough. Do it if you can, it seems like a really dull purchase but saves money year after year and will save more and more as energy prices continue to rise.

Nature Stuff

No frogspawn at 7.30am on Saturday, but loads by 10.00am. Spring has sprung.

Have a good week from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Central heating turned off again last week as the weather warms up and the insulation does its thing . The house copes well with the odd beautiful frost like this morning and it looks like it is only cooler for another 24hrs and we will be basking in 17C by the end of the week! What is going on?

Loads of exciting stuff last week, we had a new part time lady, Gillian, start work on Monday which is always fun for all and two of our regular agency staff returned after their winter break. It’s always nice to see regulars coming back for more. The orders have started picking up a bit so that has kept us busy and we installed a bigger trial of the capillary matting trial in one of our prop tunnels. We organised delivery of two more trials of different peat free composts to assess spring potting performance and managed to get the irrigation up and running again after the freeze up.

The new irrigation spray-line air flushing system seems to have worked so far with no split pipes. I had to flush again yesterday ready for the frost and as I have had to water a couple of tunnels today I will have to repeat it again this afternoon. The flushed water goes onto the crop so no waste there, it just needs the air compressor running for a couple of hours to push all the water out, the irrigation programmer opens and shuts all the valves in turn to work round the site so I only need to be here to set it going and turn off the compressor at the end. It’s nice when something goes to plan, it doesn’t happen often!

Other things I squeezed in were attending a local driver awareness course, oops. Got caught doing 35 in a 30 over Christmas. First time for me in 34 years driving, but still naughty. The course was very effective, sensible and practical. It highlighted the fact that we rarely read the highway code after passing our test, we forget stuff over that time and the code and law change. So we were updated on some basics, like if there are 3 or more streetlights you are in a 30 limit unless there are reminder signs advising otherwise and the 2 second rule for keeping your distance behind the vehicle in front (4 seconds in the wet). There were the horror stories of what happens when things go wrong, the Saab convertible that wasn’t one before the driver went to retrieve a text message and ran into a tractor trailer but most impressive of all was the extra damage caused to pedestrians if hit at only slightly high speeds. That few MPH extra does make a huge difference and can result in a changed lives for all concerned if things go badly. Take care, it can happen to anyone, 95% of RTA’s are human error.

On a brighter note last week saw Valentine’s Day come and go, so I hope you remembered. I took Caroline out for a delicious pizza which sounds pretty good for me. Mind you it did involve about 20 others and a skittles game so perhaps not perfect. Still it went down better than the bag of fresh spinach I got her a few years ago, it was organic.

Eco News

At long last we received our first FIT payment this week so we can start paying off the turbines.

I did a little 20 minute presentation to a farming group on Thursday on our turbine project along with a solar installer and an anaerobic digester expert. I think I was the light relief at the end, as my presentation perhaps wasn’t as slick as the pro’s but I did get more laughs! Does that count? Overall the reaction was very positive with the vast majority preferring wind power to the others despite the fact that in this area it is the others that are being installed. Still as long as someone is looking to do something we can move on.

If anyone lives in Hampshire and is short on house insulation check out www.insulatehampshire.co.uk where you can now get free cavity wall insulation and either free or very cheap loft insulation to top up to the minimum requirement of 11.5 inches.

Nature Stuff

There must be an influx of Blackcaps, we now have three in the garden and we have heard of several others locally in the last week or two. No frogspawn yet.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Morning all,

Slightly warmer this morning after another very cold week. Luckily the very coldest nights have been over the weekend so we have just about managed to keep things defrosted enough to keep us all busy. The new van arrived on Wednesday just in time for it to get snowed in on Thursday, so we haven’t yet been out in it. Disappointingly, it looks remarkably similar to the la st one, mostly due to the fact it is the same make with a direct copy of our previous body on the back. The paint job is new and it looks quite smart but for the amount these things cost it should have been more satisfying and made the blood pump a bit harder. I did try to find a more exciting alternative but I will just have to make do with a little bit of extra efficiency and its cleaner running.

I have been able to abandon the ‘Chums’ fleece lined trousers this morning which is a relief. They do a great job in the cold but  the combination of multiple fleece build up and vigorous movement does make for a sparky time. I can relight the wood burner by just earthing myself with the poker on the casing. As soon as I start removing layers the crackling and sparking starts and I know at some point I am going to find an earthing point. Caroline seems particularly sensitive to static at this time of year and any human contact is discouraged, offers of an earthing rod to help out are not very well received so I keep my distance.

As we get a bit closer to spring and you get organised for your first orders feel free to let us know if you need any new wooden pot labels to replace any that may have rotted away over the winter

This week I lashed out on a new computer programme to help created online fillinable availability lists. This means that with a bit of luck if you have MS Word on your computer you should be able to fill it in on screen and email it back to me. We haven’t had many requests for this but I know a few of you would like to use it so let me know if it works. Naturally it was child’s play to set it up, it converts, with one click, the pdf file our nursery stock production programme produces into a Word document which can then be typed over. It took me most of the week to get it to work, the programme is a lot cleverer than me. We can also combine multiple files into one which makes it simpler to send, so if you print it off just check you print only the pages you need.

Eco News

We are still hopeful that we might actually receive our first feed in tariff check this week. It will be 8 months since we st arted but eventually the stalling and rubbish organisation will sort itself out and the payments we come become a bit more regular, maybe. If we were this slow paying our electric bills we would have been cut off months ago.

If anyone lives in Hampshire and is short on house insulation go to http://www.insulatehampshire.co.uk/ where you can now get free cavity wall insulation and either free or very cheap loft insulation to top up to the minimum requirement of 11.5 inches. We paid a bit more for ours last year and did a bit extra ourselves under the floor too and it made a huge difference. There are lots of scare stories about on the internet about damp etc with cavity walls but there are long term guarantees with the installation and we have had no problems, in fact we have less internal condensation than we did before. The house is warmer and the bills much lower. If you have a good heating system you might not notice a temperature change but the bills will be less and that will save a little, or in our case a lot, every year, so the cumulative affect can be huge. If you are not in Hampshire check out your local area, this type of scheme is sponsored by the energy companies and I’m sure must be fairly wide spread.

Nature Stuff

The cold spell has brought a few extra visitors into the garden, we have a couple of very smart Fieldfares feeding on the remains of the fallen apples and a very aggressive male Black Cap on the suet feeder. It’s a shame they missed out on the RSPB Garden Watch survey of a couple of weeks ago, we only had plenty of the usual common garden suspects with no exciting ones to record at all.

We had been keeping an eye on the ponds over the week or two before the freeze, thinking the frogs might start up soon, good job they didn’t, but I suspect spring will leap on us once this snap gives up. Can’t wait.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Now that was a bit more wintery. I must admit we did turn on the central heating on Wednesday just to keep it nice and cosy. We got down to -9C on the nursery thermometer on Friday night and just a degree or two warmer the previous couple of nights. Last night we had a couple of inches of snow but this morning it is mostly slush and it is relatively warm so that might be the winter done for us in the barmy south. Despite the cold we still played hockey yesterday and although I wasn’t particularly looking forward to getting down to my shorts in this weather it was fine, partly due to foam shin pads, padded knee protectors and long shorts covering everything but an inch or two and partly due to scoring twice and setting up the third in a 3-2 win! Unfortunately my goals were not very pretty and the cross that set up the goal was supposed to be a shot but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

The cold weather did slow things up here a bit with a few frozen pipes in the loo’s and mess room but at least the irrigation system should be ok. A few weeks ago we set up the new system with a compressed air fitting so we can now blow out the water in the pipes and spray-lines onto the crop by running a specific programme on the irrigation controller, preventing any pipe freezing damage. Having suffered quite a bit of damage last winter this does give us a lot more irrigation flexibility in the cold season and confidence that we can cheaply and easily safeguard the system. Another step forwards. One new bit of kit I have discovered this winter is pipe heating cable which we had installed under the insulation on all our water inlet pipes around the storage tank and pump shed. It runs on low power electric cable which gently warms the pipe when temperatures drop, the colder it gets the more it heats. Although it does use a little bit of power it is much cheaper than fixing the damage that can be caused by frozen pipes. I will have to have a look at getting the pipe-work going into the portacabins done to help out these vulnerable spots which always seem to freeze up.

Sales were a bit subdued but the timing worked out well. We had been due to get our new van delivered this week, the old one has passed its sell by date and can no longer be used in the new London emissions zone, but it was delayed with some technical problem and never arrived. Hopefully it should be here in the coming week and we can have a play. It is a good illustration of how things move on in just 5 years, the emissions are far less and the fuel economy improved. We have gone with an automatic for the first time, as it is supposed to be more reliable (not a good start so far!) and save a bit on fuel.

Eco News

We are extending our LED lighting trial in the growth room of the microprop lab. The plants are doing really well under the trial lights but the light spread isn’t quite good enough for our narrow shelf heights, so we are going to try a different arrangement where the lights are individually mounted on a ‘string’ so we can spread them out over the whole shelf area. It will be more complicated to install but if it works could mean we can create more production area in the same room, while reducing energy costs for the lighting by 60% and reducing temperature control costs too.

Another example of technology moving forward for the better is the latest developments in air source heat pumps which we use for controlling the temperatures in the lab. We replaced one unit that died in the summer which was about 8 years old with a new unit which has an inverter in it. The running costs fell noticeably for us and the claims of between 35% and 65% savings in energy use looking true. The nice thing about this change is that the units are not just significantly cheaper to run but do the job better which can’t always be said of environmental advances. Basically an inverter changes the way the units work, rather than being on or off when heating or cooling, they make gradual changes adding a little more heat or cooling as the environment demands it. This variable control makes for more subtle temperature changes in the room, less cold draughts or hot winds and reduced energy use. Naturally the cleverer system is more expensive to initially buy but the payback is very quick if it is in constant use.

If you want to start on some environmental improvements where you are, the first steps are very cheap. Read, record and try and understand your energy use, it sounds really dull but it does focus attention but watch out it can get addictive! When I first started I was reading the meter several times a day to try and understand what was going on, but I have got it down to once a day now, well except for the turbine meter of course which gets read a lot when it’s windy!

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Looks like a bit of cool weather this week which is just fine with us. Better to get winter out of the way in January than deal with it in April. Hopefully it won’t be too bad as I know it can get a bit stressful for some, no matter how much the kids love it. Hopefully it will knock out a few more pests which have had it too easy so far this season.

Unfortunately, but not entirely surprisingly, the cooler weather is timed perfectly with the start of the microprop lab pricking out work, so the boilers are on and the lights programmed to get them off to a healthy start. At this time of year we can get big problems with humidity in the heated tunnel and associated problems with disease which have been tricky to deal with. The temptation in the cold is to seal everything up to prevent the expensive heat escaping, so we have a double skin on the tunnel and all the draughts reduced to keep it cosy, now I understand more about water content held in air after attending a seminar on a house plant nursery, we can manage the resulting humidity much more efficiently. The key is that cold air holds on to far less water than warm air, so the warmed air in the tunnel gathers lots of moisture which condenses on any cooler surfaces giving rise to the disease growth and transfer issues, but by occasionally flushing out the warm moist air with cold dry air (because the cold air can’t hold onto the moisture) you remove the water laden air. Then it is just getting the balance right between the occasional flush of cold dry air and keeping the heat loss to a minimum. We use the lights to extend the day length so that the plants are active enough to grow away in their new tough nursery environment after years in 21C and 14 hrs a day under lights in the lab.

Lots of whittling got done this week as we completed one of our winter jobs of repairing all the broken wooden trays that were returned through last year. It looked and sounded like a scene from Santa’s workshop with our own busy pixies and their little hammers tapping away. We have spares for any unrepairable tray sides so very few are beyond putting right, we also remake the inserts up from bits of the broken one’s and we have a few spares for those too. So don’t be embarrassed about sending the odd casualty back we can always do something with it and please bear in mind that careful/tidy stacking the empty trays does help reduce damage. The repairs didn’t take too long and we now have another couple of pallets of strong reusable trays to use again. The wooden tray return idea is working nicely for us, it may be less convenient than the throw away trays of the past with having to collect, clean, dry and repair them, but after the initial painful investment they are now beginning to save us money too. The reduction in waste we have to deal with now is a bonus and hopefully you will have noticed how much less material ends up in landfill from our deliveries compared with some others.

I widened my retail experience this week with my first trip to IKEA in Southampton on Thursday night (only opened 3 years ago). No I don’t get out much. It was a bit overwhelming for such a quick visit. The scariest bit was the multi-storey car park and especially the spiral ramps which had obviously been constructed on the same flat pack principle as all of the furniture. As we drove home we started to recognise IKEA show rooms through people’s windows, so it must be as popular as it was rumoured to be. Naturally the one item we went for was out of stock. We will go back for a proper look round one day. The meat balls looked good.

Eco News

We used our first borehole water this week to apply a bit of irrigation. It worked really well, the new pump set produced a very consistent pressure even when we turned on multiple lines, so this summer looks like a less stressful one for all those trying to water in the potting. The key to this was a more energy efficient pump selection. The two variable speed pumps adjust output to the demand so there isn’t the constant on/off scenario with big pressure vessels etc as we used to have. Not only is the supply more reliable but the pumps use 30-50% less energy which should quickly pay back the extra cost. By controlling our water use we are able to keep daily consumption below 20 cubic meters for most of the year which we can take from the borehole and we are looking to top this up with some harvested rainwater in the future. The neighbours will now benefit from a higher pressure supply, as we will only be using a fraction of our previous mains usage and the water company will no longer be wasting treated pressurised drinking water on plant production.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Just a quick one today as I can’t sit still too long this morning. I over did it a bit this week and my over-eating and lack of exercise has caught up with me. After collecting, moving and splitting a load of logs last weekend ready for next winter I felt a bit stiff. Rather than holding back I tried to keep up with a couple of youngsters on the nursery during the week, helping shift and spreading tonnes of soil and a bit of road-stone as we finished off tidying up the turbine sites. Naturally I still attempted a game of hockey yesterday and although I didn’t play a whole game as I was substituted quite quickly when it became obvious I could do little else but imitate a slow moving pregnant goose. I am now dosed up on muscle relaxant and need to move gently about on a regular basis to prevent complete seizure. Oh to be 30 again.

I am hoping to attach a couple of images to this note of the new tray insert we have been working on to make the watering of our hairy pots quicker and easier. The shallow tray provides a slow draining pool of water allowing the compost more time to absorb the irrigation overspill. The tray corners are open so the water does get away after a few minutes preventing the pots from sitting in a permanent puddle.

There is also an image of the new collection of POS boards we have had made. They each explain a little more detail about the whole hairy pot thing to give more depth to the whole hairy story. It has taken us a while to identify the right style of POS to use to create a complimentary, informative and good value effect and we feel we have pulled it off with these free boards. They simply fold into one of our display boxes which effectively act’s as a picture frame. You can simply lean it on or close to your display, or insert a hook or two and hang the box in an appropriate position.

Eco News

It has now been six months since the turbine were plugged in and as expected we fell just short of anticipated output. The wind forecast was about right but the one turbine with the sensor problem meant that we fell short by just under 2,000 units. At this time of year that is about 6 days wind, so not bad. Mind you will are still waiting for the first FIT payment so payback hasn’t really started yet.

Having tidied up each of the three turbine sites this week by topping the levels back up to ground level, I can see that they should look nicely established by the summer. The hedge plants we cut back to get the foundations in are already showing signs of rejuvenating so they will quickly grow back towards the towers and I’ve got a nice chalk wildflower seed mix to re-sow around the rest of the foundation area.

The water system is up and ready to go, the borehole pump is now running the right way, the leaks are sealed and all the time-clocks and heat protection are all more or less in place. Now we need to save a lot of water to pay for all the new equipment and work done to install it. If only horticulture paid as well as electricians.

We planted some more native hedge plants this week in small clumps around parts of the nursery that are a bit far from other natural habitats. We are hoping that we might get more overwintering of natural predators nearer the tunnels.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Just a quick message to wish everyone a happy Christmas and a jolly festive break.

It continues to be very busy this end, getting things sorted for the winter and attempting to get through the list of jobs to do that were left for the long winter period when we have loads of spare time! We have got through a few of them but spring will be here in a couple of weeks and most of that time will be spent doing Christmas stuff. I’m looking forward to my annual Christmas shopping trip in a couple of days, there’s nothing like a bit of pressure to get things done! Why don’t they just move Christmas to a quieter time in the shops? It would be so much nicer. Mind you it sounds from the TV reports that there may be no-one in there when I go anyway.

All the Christmas decorations are up here. We ran our usual competition for the best decor in the style of Blue Peter and I must say the standard was well up, or should that be down, to the usual level. Hugh won with a very tasteful window decoration and Jamie was runner up with his food contribution, shepherd’s pie! My nativity scene which took minutes of my valuable time to put together, was the equivalent of the UK in Eurovision and received nil point in the judging, must try harder.

Our old homemade tree is all decorated again up in the house, so we are ready for all the fun to begin. As we are expecting guests we are considering turning on the central heating, it is Christmas after all!

Eco News

After a quiet November for wind, December looks to be recovering well so far. The storms early in the month kept things moving although we are finding that the turbines tend to be more productive in steady moderate wind conditions rather than in the more erratic storms. We have not quite caught up yet with the anticipated output, due to a sensor problem on one of the turbines, but our continued success in reducing consumption has meant that we are generating more than we are using.

The trial of LED lighting in the lab growth room is going well so far despite initial concerns that the light distribution on our closely spaced shelves didn’t look brilliant. The Phillips units use a combination of red and blue lights, selected specifically for plant growth. They look bizarre, dark and not very plant friendly but the growth under them is really good and may be even better than the old fluorescent tubes. We will continue with the trial until the summer when we will make a decision on expanding their use. They are expensive to install but with potential savings of over 60% on energy use they could save us loads as we do have a lot of them.

Novembers figures on electric use are still encouraging, a saving of 4.5% on 2010 and 36.82% on 2009. If we include the turbine output in the figures that brings it down to 26.65% and 51.50% savings for the same periods. For 2012 we should be in generating surplus all year with the turbine contribution, which will help offset our heating and some of the transport carbon output.

Please enjoy lots of sprouts and parsnips to keep the wind speeds up.


Have a good Christmas and New Year, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries