Our Nursery
You can grow a lot of plants on a 30 acre nursery. We grow 2,823 different varieties.
And last year we delivered 600,000 plants to our customers.
It takes a lot of doing, but Karen, our nursery manager, has a fantastic team and every
year they come up trumps come rain or ….more rain! If you would like to see what
we are up to every month, click on this link to see the team in action.
We try to do things in a way that is as environmentally responsible as possible. We
are not perfect but we are doing what we can.
Peat free compost trials
For a long time gardeners and the trade were very resistant about moving away from peat, because it is such a valuable growing medium. However, there are now increasingly good alternatives and this year we will be using a reduced peat mix for all our plants. The mix is 50% peat plus a mixture of bark, wood fibre and coir. This is the result of trials we started in February 2011. It was a very wet and sunless year, nevertheless the 50:50 outperformed both the peat free mix and our existing (peat reduced) mix. Even though we will continue to trial until Spring 2013, we think we have learnt enough to make the switch now.
Water recycling
Despite 2012 being the wettest on record, water is becoming and increasingly rare resource. As a nursery, we use a vast amount of it. Over the last 18 months we have built a network of channels across our 20 acre site to collect the water from the nursery and buildings. This water is collected in a reservoir and then re-used on the nursery. Last year we reduced our mains water usage by 80%.
Warehouse heating from waste material
We used to use oil, but in 2010 we decided to install a wood burner. This burner is capable of burning most of our waste material – like pallets etc, which used to be sent to landfill. In recycling terms, it’s been a bit of a double whammy!
Recycled cardboard
Like any mail order company we have to package everything in order to get it out to customers. As we send out 650,000 plants each year, that’s a lot of packaging. In 2010 we made sure all our boxes were made from recyclable board. That way they can, in theory, be used again. The tape and plastic ‘nappies’ we use for the plants are not recyclable but we aim to change that in time.
