After over a week of real wintery stuff we are suddenly bathed in fantastic warm sunshine and the thought of selling a few plants reawakens. The longer term forecasts had not filled me with hope, I could see the snow and frost going on for months if some of the newspapers were to be believed. Not great for cash-flow at the most difficult time of year for most hardy plant growers. Sales are about to lift off and costs accelerate just at the time when income is dribbly and overdraft stretched to its limit. So to see the sun out is a real bonus and I am very pleased to see it.

This is the time of year when a bit of inspiration and innovation can bring some real hope back into the frame. We have just about finished revamping despatch, the potting tunnel and the pricking out areas and we have some great new toys to play with. A new layout in despatch is slick, clean, simple and efficient and is now complimented with a new label storage system. Many of our colour and wooden labels are prepared in bundles of 12 each in their own basket in advance of the manic (hopefully) spring sales period which makes order processing so much easier. The problem we have had is that the light that
hits the shelves perishes the elastic bands, the baskets and eventually the labels too if we don’t use them quickly enough. We have now clad all the shelving with spare woven black plastic complete with pull up curtains to eliminate the light. Not only should it slow up the light damage but it keeps everything cleaner too.

Inspiration and encouragement can come big or small. I attended Contact 2013 (conference for ornamental growers) a couple of weeks ago and was treated to speaker after speaker of amazing quality each giving their insight on the future path of ornamental horticulture. Quite a bit of it was pretty scary but still full of opportunities if you don’t stick your head in the sand. The effect of population, energy, climate, food and resource challenges were all in there in big chunks as well as IT and career
development stuff. Lots to think about especially the lack of joined up thinking in such a diverse industry. Everyone does their own thing and we don’t work together enough to sort out the sensible stuff. There are something like 1,500 horticultural nurseries with only 11,500 people working in it (from Contact 2013), that’s a lot of small businesses. Our NBIS business group where we seek to sort out problems together is still going strong but with only about 8 active members, there is now only one
other regional NBIS group running. Only about 45 nurseries attended the Contact conference. Look at logistics, how many individual nurseries still run around delivering small orders all over the country and coming back empty, service is often slower than the customer needs and it is very inefficient for everyone. The logistic companies don’t seem to be able to solve it and the nurseries don’t work together to help either but there will have to be a solution sometime or we will end up pricing ourselves out of the market.

Tiny inspiration now with our latest purchase from Lakeland (other designs available I am told). Having cleared out the loft of ancient accounts ready for the insulation a while ago we have been looking to fuel the wood burner with the unwanted paperwork. But putting on sheets of old invoices etc just clogged everything up. I have looked at making papier-mâché briquettes but life is too short for some things, but we now have the answer. We now just roll up a thick wad of paper and pop it into a ‘Logsaver’, a simple wire frame holds the roll and it burns brilliantly, very thoroughly and for quite a while. Need to
be a bit careful lifting it out to cool down as it gets very hot.

Watch out for customers looking for ‘Value Optimisation’, taken to the extreme with the big boys it can lead to burger ingredients galloping away with you. There is so often a price to pay for a bargain.

Nature notes

RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch this weekend. No eagles to report but plenty of activity around all 11 feeders. I suspect we are keeping the bird seed industry going on our own. The growing interest in this sort of thing just keeps the momentum building for better things to come.

Have a good week from all at Kirton Farm

Morning all,

Just a quick one this week as I have to get back to computer mending. My favourite job! How come everything goes so smoothly for months on end then all of a sudden it all goes pear shaped.

We had a great start to the week with getting all this seasons picture labels delivered, bundled up and filed away under our new storage curtain (keeps the light off the elastic bands to prevent perishing and storage baskets from going brittle, as well as keeping things cleaner). We also ‘redesigned’ the waxed card tray inserts which are supposed to slow the drainage from our wooden trays allowing a little more time for the plants to absorb the irrigation or rain water. The original design had only very small gaps in the corners to allow water escape and was performing a bit too well, holding the water too long, especially apparent when last year proved to be a little on the damp side. We are enlarging the drainage outlets in each corner with the highly skilled application of the office guillotine. We have more of less finished resetting out despatch after a major lean management project was done, just a bit of price label organisation and storage to complete and we should be there.

After that I decided to tidy up the computer backup problem we had with the link failing between the computer and the external hard drive. I also tried fitting a small device in the lab growth room which is supposed to send us an email if the temperature goes out of its safe range. All seemed to be going well when it became apparent that something had gone wrong with a lot of the devices connected to our network. Sometimes they would talk to each other and at other times they would not. The computers seemed ok it was all the other stuff. By Friday morning we had no printers working other than the fax, the hands-free dect phones were out of action and the backup refused to find its destination folder. At some point the IP addresses of a lot of the stuff on the network changed and consequently the network path was lost. After spending all Friday and Saturday morning on it we now have everything back except the phones. This morning (Sunday) I found a ridiculously simply fix which allowed the devices to find each other automatically, which they were supposed to be doing anyway. Thank goodness for Google searches coming up with a solution. Not actually sure it has sorted it 100% but fingers crossed. Catherine helped me out on Saturday trying to get things right, she would read out an ‘easy solution’ and within 3 or 4 words a haze came over both of us, it just didn’t make any sense, it was like a foreign language. Just tell us what to do and which buttons to press.

Hopefully I will have time on Monday to do a little preparation for my appearance at Contact 3013 on Thursday. I am part of a panel of growers and compost producers sharing our experiences of peat reduction and peat free composts in a couple of workshops. Unless I write down something I will end up forgetting it all, gone are the days when I could retain more than a couple of facts at a time.

Nice to see the sun out today, and a nip in the air is right for the time of year. Just hoping the cold doesn’t get to bad. We still haven’t put the central heating on yet this winter, the wood burner, aga and insulation have done us proud so far.

The extra insulation on the pipes in the prop tunnel has done well too. We now have to put a heater on when we are working in there! Can’t believe we didn’t do it before.

To take a look at or download our 2013 wholesale catalogue follow this link;

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7wtu2qyspp3p26/herbaceous%26herb%20catalogue%202013%20Dec12%20nopr.pdf

It is also available on the nursery website www.kirtonfarm.co.uk For pricing details please drop me an email.

Nature notes

Owls all over the place this week. Barn owls hunting down the road and a couple of tawny owls calling around the nursery and garden at most evenings.

If you need a fax list please let us know, pick it up from the website or alternately send an email address.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Morning all,

Happy New Year to all. Great to be back after a lovely break. We had a very busy but fun few days with loads of socialising and a monster Christmas lunch. I failed to compensate the extra number of items to fit on the plate with the volume of each and ended up with a small mountain. Luckily I had had only a light breakfast so managed to squeeze it all in and manage pudding too. Haven’t eaten since. Ok, that’s not quite true but serious rescue mission on the way to save moving up a waist size.

First day back got 2013 off to a great start with a few orders to put together and deliver which is always encouraging. At some points through the early winter you always wonder if anyone will ever buy anything again, especially after the previous year’s rubbish weather. So to be able to get things moving was a good welcome for those few who actually returned to the grindstone on Wednesday. I can’t say things went terribly smoothly in the admin and label printing dept, our just-in–time printer toner management bit me in the bum when on the first morning both printers ran out of the same coloured ink and refused to print despite one of them having plenty to spare in the drum. Usually we can swap toner from one to printer to the other but no, nothing would work. I also managed to detach a small piece of plastic and a spring from the drum mechanism which I couldn’t get back together and brought up a another error message but luckily consumable delivery is next day so I ordered up what we needed and printed out a few odd bits of paperwork on the multifunction fax instead which saw us through. The toner arrived early and the printers were instantly perfect again, it’s those little chips they put in consumables now that force you to buy new and in theory stop you fiddling about. By this time I had also messed up the label layout in the programme so needed to reinstate a backed up version to cure it. Naturally this is when we found out that the backup storage drive had stopped working a couple of weeks ago with a damaged cable so I had to manually reset up the label design. While trying to tidy up the printer list on my PC I also managed to delete all the driver set ups to the label printer and couldn’t find the disks to reinstate them! What fun. Just the nice relaxed start you need to a new year! Anyway, all sorted now, other than replacing the backup cable so no real harm done.

A full 5 days coming up this week with a full contingent of eager helpers so hopefully we will get stuck into loads of work. The weather looks a bit drier which is great although the local water table is still rising and appearing as pools in the lower local fields. The ex pub at the bottom of our hill has just been redeveloped as a private home and gone on the market again, I wonder if anyone has realised yet that the cellar is about to fill with water as it does in peak years?

Time to go and collect some straw for the donkeys so they don’t go hungry when the snow comes.

I have managed to put together our 2013 catalogue with all the latest info, and paper copies will be whizzing through the post to many of you. If you need to take a look on-line at the new list please take a look on the following Dropbox link; (Dropbox is a very useful site I found this year for posting large files on, instead of actually emailing them. I then send the link to the file and you can download them or just look at them. It is free to use)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7wtu2qyspp3p26/herbaceous%26herb%20catalogue%202013%20Dec12%20nopr.pdf


It is also be available on the nursery website www.kirtonfarm.co.uk For pricing details please drop me an email.

Nature notes

Don’t forget to keep feeding the birds, the hedges look a bit bare here and we have loads of visitors to the feeders at the moment. Blue, great, coal and long tailed tits, gold, green and chaffinches, sparrows as well as the odd winter migrant like the male and female blackcaps that have been around now for a few weeks. Greater spotted woodpeckers are regulars and the big stuff hoover up the fallout. I shudder to think of the food bill as we are getting through sacks of seed and suet. Christmas brought another stand and four more feeders which are hopefully a bit more squirrel and jackdaw proof just to slow them down a bit. We are missing the Fieldfares this winter which are usually attracted by the apples from our old russet tree but there was no crop this year so no food.

If you need a fax list please let us know, pick it up from the website or alternately send an email address.

Have a good festive break, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Morning all,


Christmas Eve and the end of another year. Firstly I should thank everyone who has supported us through 2012 from customers to staff, through to suppliers and supporters, we couldn’t have survived without you. We are certainly looking forward to 2013 in anticipation of a much better year especially on the business front. We are basing this anticipation on the hope that the weather can’t be as bad again for a whole year, can it? I can’t believe how wet our ground is, we are luckily on a hill and on very free draining chalk soil but even so it is sodden and I’m sure the local low lying villages are a bit anxious about the rising groundwater levels that usually peak in late Jan-Feb. It is raining again as I write this but at least there is a good breeze to get the turbines turning. Every cloud ......

Considering the weather, the rubbish cash-flow and profitability I am actually feeling quite energised and excited. Luckily we have managed to do lots of positive stuff recently which helps boost morale and there is of course the prospect of a visit from Santa tonight!

We have all but completed our Lean Management course with just a little bit of tidying up of our projects to do in the New Year. All the exams were passed by everyone with flying colours through December, so a little celebration might be on the cards next month when we all get awarded our NVQ’s. We are still applying our upgraded skills to various projects around the nursery so we hope to be more organised than ever when the rush of orders comes that we have been waiting for since 2011.

Despatch, potting, the pricking out areas and the lab work room have all received fairly major attention and some serious investment in time to perk them up, although our resourcefulness in sourcing materials to complete the work has been remarkably inventive and frugal as the current situation demands. It’s always a nice boost to see things continue to improve especially when times are tough.

I managed to squeeze in a couple of concerts which has added to the excitement, Madness in Bournemouth were very entertaining, slick and professional but the best was the fantastic Ben Waters playing boogie-woogie piano in the attic of the Railway pub in Winchester. An intimate venue, warm, cosy and beery, perfect Christmas warm up. He has played this year with most of the Rolling Stones and travelled the world to gigs yet we could still pile into a pub in Winchester to see him do his stuff, we were very lucky. Also booked two tickets to see The Beat there in February, can’t wait.

I might just mention my last hockey match as I don’t expect anyone has told you but I scored two cracking goals in a 2 -2 draw at Bournemouth. One was a great team move which I buried in the roof of the net and the second was a long defence splitting pass which I managed to catch, with only the keeper to beat. As he hurtled towards me I lobbed the ball high over his outstretched arms and it dropped in just under the bar, the crowd (of one) went wild!

Our annual Christmas card making on the nursery was a fun morning with everyone making a very valuable contribution. Those of you lucky enough to receive one will I’m sure realise what a ‘special’ bunch of people we look after here. Some of them had even been practising beforehand although it is difficult to tell which these are!

Among the many chores to get sorted before the break I managed to update next year’s wholesale catalogue with all the latest info, and copies will be whizzing through the post to many of you. If you need to take a look on-line at the new list please take a look on the following Dropbox link; (Dropbox is a very useful site I found this year for posting large files on, instead of actually emailing them. I then send the link to the file and you can download them or just look at them. It is free to use)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7wtu2qyspp3p26/herbaceous%26herb%20catalogue%202013%20Dec12%20nopr.pdf

It will also be available on the nursery website (www.kirtonfarm.co.uk) very soon. For pricing details please drop me an email.
Naked Coir pots

Our pot supplier is now offering you the chance to retail cartons of empty coir pots (10 pots in a carton). The pots are a slightly smaller size than those we use but the pack looks great and I said I would attach his promo flier for a while. The whole deal is an entirely separate operation from our nursery, not run by us, so please contact Joe if you are interested. His details are on the flier.

Nature notes

Don’t forget to keep feeding the birds, the hedges look a bit bare here and we have loads of visitors to the feeders at the moment.

If you need a fax list please let us know, pick it up from the website or alternately send an email address.

Have a good festive break, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Morning all,


I can’t believe it has been a month since my last splurge. Lots of excitement especially with having a couple of weeks away to recharge the batteries after a testing year. Mum popped down to watch over the house and animal contingent to allow us to get away, while all the crew knuckled down to prove how much they don’t really need us here anyway, which was all brilliant.

St Ives was lovely as usual, we must have had one of the driest fortnights of the year and we did all the usual walking, bird and art spotting and archaeology between far too much eating and quenching. Spotted long tailed duck, spoonbills, crossbills, reed bunting, black redstart, cream teas and pasties. Despite the lack of rain it must have been the muddiest holiday we have been on, the washing pile was huge. Caroline picked up a couple of nice prehistoric flints, one fragment of a blade from a freshly cleared field and a lovely big scraper from a path above the cliffs at Porthgwarra. The nice thing about finding a flint high up in this area is that it is not a local natural geological land feature so it must have been carried there, usually from flint pebbles on the beach. This means there is a good chance that if you spot a fragment it will have been worked by ancient human hand. Then it is just a matter of identifying the telltale signs on the stone to confirm it, like a platform, a bulb of percussion and signs of nurddling along the working edge, all very exciting stuff. Not entirely sure of all the correct terminology but I have earwigged on a few conversations and picked a few things up, a bit like running the nursery.

We feel much revived and I am told that in some lights it has taken years off me, although it turns out that it’s not the light that makes the difference it is the hat! With the colder weather the woolly hat has come out but only after Caroline had put it through the wash. At first I could hardly get it to stretch over a tennis ball but I have now got it over most of the head. Still nice and warm but the constant desire of the hat to return to its new size does have a definite wrinkle reducing effect and gives me that slightly startled look of a stubbly Joan Rivers.

After one month of hostilities being unleashed on the mice, rabbits and pigeons we seem to be making some progress. Although it has taken some time and effort to get everything set up we do seem to be achieving results. We have caught nearly 100 mice, netted out the pigeons from the tunnels and re-homed 6 or 7 rabbits. The nursery has been re-rabbit proofed with some recycled gates from the farm and a little new netting and we are not seeing quite as many wandering about the nursery. These pests will always be a constant threat but hopefully we are now getting the upper hand.

We mended the phone system on our return by installing a new cable from the office to the house, ending up doing the work ourselves to avoid rather high quotes to fix the problem, so that is a relief.

Our Lean Management training reaching its conclusion with three online exams for everyone over the next couple of weeks and a few odd projects to tidy up. Then we will all have some new qualifications to wave about, hurrah. Looking forward to finishing it off as it seems to have gone on a long time and we are already armed with some very useful tools to tackle most things between us on a very practical level, without the need to complete 18 pieces of paperwork every time to get it done.

Sustainability promo

The propagation heating is on frost protection at the moment. After jiggling about with all the pipe temperatures and mixing valves etc to further reduce oil use we just added some new ace insulation to some of the water pipes where the heat is not needed. This means that the heat is only released around the plants rather than in the area next to them. I can’t believe we hadn’t already done this before as the payback time should be very quick, especially as we fitted it all ourselves. It’s scary when I look back a few years at how much we used to waste when fuel was cheap. Insulate, insulate, insulate. Office thermostatic heater is on but only getting to 8C so time to get outside in the sun and do some wood cutting to warm up a bit.

If you need a fax list please let us know, pick it up from the website or alternately send an email address.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

The joys of modern technology. Just when you want everything to run smoothly for a couple of weeks it all goes bonkers. Part of the phone system is misbehaving and after several engineer visits and replacement bits, the blame moves from the phone system to an erratic power supply upsetting the system. This means buying a special bit of kit to even out the supply and cover any power drop outs which naturally isn’t cheap. So onto the internet to source the kit and order it up for next day delivery so we can install it ready for my Mum to use when she is in the house next week. Ordered a special power cable to connect it all together and what happens, the cable arrives but without the unit! Good job I paid extra for quick delivery. I’m not even convinced myself that it will solve the issue but what do I know.


Project Colditz continues apace, with wire netting and traps all over the place trying to reduce the pest population. We have secured the site from incoming rabbits unless they start sneaking in on the back of the lorries, we just need to catch the resident set to relocate them elsewhere. Carrot is the current bait of choice but we are open to other suggestions if anyone knows any better attractants. Just the one rabbit so far, but plenty of mice lured to an early meeting with their maker. The anti pigeon wiring at the tunnel ends looks good and that should be finished over the next week or two if all goes well.

The lean management training is gradually bearing fruit as we get together and spot things to improve around the nursery. Had a good go at despatch this week and made some useful tweaks here and there to make things run more smoothly with less waste and more efficiency. Hopefully by the spring we will have had a close look at lots of areas and completed our improvements to get things moving more smoothly. We already have a long list of jobs to do, some quite big and some tiddlers. We took a saw to the despatch work benches this week removing an annoying little design flaw that gave us all a couple of extra inches to work in, which doesn’t sound much but when you process thousands of boxes of plants it all adds up. The nice thing was it only took a few minutes once the issue was identified to get it done. If only all the solutions were that simple.

Sustainability promo

Just put the propagation heating on for the winter which always hurts. Heating oil has got so expensive. We have just reinsulated the tunnel, getting all the bubble plastic and seals repositioned. It is a double glazed tunnel with a little fan inflating the space between the sheets which works well until you get a major leak which we found and repaired this week. We have also readjusted the pipe temperatures and mixing valves to further reduce any heat waste and now just need to get a bit more pipe insulation to keep all the heat inside until it is really needed. It is only on frost protection at the moment but it is always a tricky balance with plants and heat conservation. To keep the humidity from getting out of control we have to compensate for the heat retention and sealed environment by forcing some ventilation through from time to time when the weather allows. Running a fan periodically to ventilate at quite low temperatures in the winter seems odd but it does pay dividends.

Insulate, insulate, insulate.

Ok, office temperature has dropped below 10C time, to go.

Things to do, pubs to visit, so no burblage next week, so hang onto this if you might want some plants the following week. If you need a fax list please let us know, pick it up from the website or alternately send an email address.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries

Morning all,


End of October and a cool blast brings Christmas a bit closer. Good for those seasonal sales if you are into that sort of thing. Mild panic this end as I haven’t got my wood supplies fully sorted yet for this winter and we are off on our short Autumn break towards the end of the week so too much to do before then to get wood ready. Ooops. Luckily we have enough in to get by so no chance of getting too cold too soon and I suppose we could always turn on the central heating.

We have started updating our pest control measures this week. The rabbits, pigeons and mice have had a field day over the last year or two as numbers have built up as the cats age. We have never seen so much pigeon damage as we have had this year, they seem to pick on a few crops and decimate them. The tunnels are open ended which has allowed easy access, but no more. We are wire netting the tunnel ends with the entrance way covered with a small split plastic curtain, cut up from spare tunnel cover bits. The netting is wide enough to allow in the smaller birds which feed on a lot of flies etc but keep the big ones out. It will take a while to fit all this as we have 112 panels to net and 66 curtains to make, but at least we will be making a stand and hopefully eliminating the losses. We are re-rabbit proofing the nursery boundary with some recycled farm gates and a couple of patch repairs to the existing fence, so by Tuesday we hope to be secure again. Then all we need to do
is remove the resident population that lives inside the fence. This all started when we installed the fence 12 years ago, we hemmed in a small population which somehow got bigger. Should have paid more attention in Biology. The one working cat is still knocking off the occasional smaller bunny to bring into the house and consume and yesterday we caught our first adult in our new trap so we hope to win out eventually. Carbon costs a bit high as I had to drive the rabbit a couple of miles away to release it! The mice don’t get off so lightly with 40 snappy traps about to be laid under little lengths of guttering.
As well as having a productive week I had a great day yesterday. The sun was out, we did the holiday grocery shop (the excitement mounts), had a tasty breakfast, went to Alton for a hard fought game of hockey, collected and stacked a load of straw for the donkeys on my return (enough until Christmas) and went to Newbury to see Marcus Bonfanti (young award winning blues musician). Although the concert was brilliant and Caroline got a kiss from Marcus (never washing again) the best bit was the hockey game. A bit of a tough local derby and we only had 10 men, so to win 3-0 was great, especially as I scored the opener with my best goal of the season so far (it was my first!). Even better than that was the second goal which was completely against the run of play. We were under lots of pressure when the ball was cleared to me inside their half, I split the defenders with a diagonal cross field pass for our right winger to run on to, putting him in behind the defence, the ball got returned to me at the top of the circle and I put it in the top left corner past the diving keeper. Quite pleased with that as
you can probably tell. Might retire now as it won’t happen again.

Naked Coir pots

Our pot supplier is now offering you the chance to retail cartons of empty coir pots (10 pots in a carton). The pots are a smaller size than those we use but the pack looks great and I said I would attach his promo flier to our lists for a while. They would make an ideal stocking filler, if a little scratchy. The whole deal is an entirely separate operation from our nursery, not run by us, so please contact Joe if you are interested. His details are on the flier.

Sustainability promo

Had my visit from the bankers from NAT West to see our sustainability efforts last week. I think they just wanted to see how things look in the flesh when you apply sustainability from the core of a business rather than as a tack-on feature. Slightly disappointed with the lack of ambition to change their own organisation, but they seem keen to promote and financially support sustainable projects to their own customers which must be a help.

Sustainability is not all nut cutlets and sandals, this is important stuff that everyone needs to think about, not just for the good of their planet but for the health of their jobs and businesses. Look at the energy cost increases over the last few years and that is in a recession when demand is subdued. What will happen as the population increases, supplies become more difficult to get at and economies start to move again. Then there is all the other stuff associated with population growth and increasing worldwide standards of living . Where are all the raw materials going to come from and the food? Now take a look at the waste we create with our life style. There is no point blaming anyone we just need to start addressing it and do stuff, big and small. These changes don’t all need to be painful, it depends how you approach them. They are challenges, which create opportunities that can be exciting and rewarding. Over to you.

If you need a fax list please let us know, pick it up from the website or alternately send an email address.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries