Hello all, it’s been a while since I posted a blog so I thought it would be a good idea to update you on what’s been going on here at the nursery.
While January is our quietest month (we close the plant centre in January) we’ve been busy on a couple of projects to improve the nursery. Firstly, we’ve almost completed the first phase of our improved irrigation system on the nursery, about 1/3 of the nurseries watering will now be automated. We can now control the watering of thousands of plants from our ipad, from anywhere in the world (not that we will be going far in the height of the season!). The main benefits will be a huge time saving, we’ll be able to more closely match our watering schedule to the water requirements of the crop which will improve quality. We also hope to save water as we can schedule the irrigation to come on at night or early morning when evaporation will be minimal.
We’ve also installed a new compost loading machine, we now buy our compost in bulk pallets and simply load the pallets into the machine and it deposits the compost into our pot/ pack filling machine. Again we hope to generate a considerable time saving, giving us more time to focus on growing our crops and serving our customers. It’ll also reduce the amount of packaging the compost comes in and we’ll be able to get more compost on a truck, reducing the number of deliveries we’ll need each year.
In February we will be making some small alterations to the plant centre and then bringing in new additional ranges into the plant centre in March. More about this in my next blog post! I’ll also update you on some of our new varieties for 2017 and what to look out for.
Our plant centre is back open this week, we have plenty of home grown bulbs, primroses, italian herbs and new items coming into the plant centre each week from here on in.
Hoping we’ll get some early spring days to get into the garden to get the 2017 gardening season underway!
