We started thinking about building the nursery during winter 2019, we'd been thinking about it for a while before then as we'd been growing plants for a long time and never had enough space!
I've been gardening since 2014 and have always prefered the horticultural side of it to the landscaping. Giulia just finished her Phd in Enviromental Sciences we are both now working at the nursery full time.
When we started it was a very overgrown feild with 4ft high brambles and grass covering everything, including a lot of old farming machinery buried in amongst it all.
Once the planning for the polytunnel was approved we were able to start building, we installed a 1m high rabbit fence around the whole nursery site to stop them getting into the tunnel and the outside growing areas. Around the fence line we installed a water pipe, this allows us to have sprayers on the fence posts keeping the outside plants watered and this then connects to our spraying system within the polytunnel.
We think doing our bit for the enviroment is really important, the whole site is run on Solar and our water comes from a well up the road. Keeping the running costs lower also means we can pass this on to our customers, so its win win!
Building the polytunnel was the biggest challenge, we had to juggle work and then spending every weekend doing a little bit to get it ready for the great guys at N & C Polytunnels to come and fit the plastic, its one single sheet and they are quite the job to install!
During lockdown we paused the gardening bussiness and began delivering plants locally, We started it on Monday and by the end of the week we were spending most of the day delivering. We don't just grow succulents, especially with all the garden centers shut down our bedding plants, shrubs and especially our veg plug packs we're selling extreamly quickly!
Having an online shop was something we'd always aimed for, but without the Covid 19 pandemic we had been planning on building up the site for an opening in the spring of 2021 with the online shop opening around the same time.
The online shop opened on the 6th of May 2020, we're still building the site to be ready for spring 2021. Please come in and visit but we're still working on it!
