It’s been a while since my last post. Our workload has continued to punish us all severely. Everyone here has been working flat out since we got back after the christmas break. Catherine has been spending 12 hour days at her desk. Ramon is a broken man and I have become accustomed to long days, just this week I got up at 3am and didn’t stop work until 8pm. Now I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for us (much) but I would like to thank all our customers for their patience. We have been pushing out up to 50 parcels a day for months now and shipping a quarter of a ton of soil a day is not at all unusual. That’s a lot of packing, a lot of labelling a lot of admin’ and a lot of organising to make sure the wheels stay on.

The good news is that we are entirely up to date now. Everything that can, has been shipped and we even got an hour to tidy up a bit. It’s taken three months but we made it. Sadly by Tuesday next week we will be all behind again and have more catching up to do. Ho Hum!

So far my re-potting work has covered 400 trees. We have now had over 500 new trees arrived from Chinese elms to stunning yamadori and everything in between. I am busting my hump to get these all ready for sale and so you can expect an absolute feast of interesting and unusual new plants to begin appearing on the web site very soon. I still have a hundred trees to process BEFORE i start on the evergreens or Mediterranean stock. This year we have our best ever selection of junipers arriving from next month. There are also a lot of exciting new large nursery grown starter trees that start arriving in the next few days. If you are looking to buy anything with roots this summer don’t go anywhere else. If we don’t have it, chances are it’s not out there.

So, all good and exciting news I hope. It’s now getting light and I need to get back out into the workshop and Catherine has VAT to do but I would like to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to all our customers and supporters and wish you a happy easter break.

It wouldn’t be a blog post from me without a little opinion so here’s something that tickled my bits….

G.

PASS THIS ONTO TODAY’S WHOOSIE KIDS, OVER PROTECTIVE PARENTS AND ALL THE DO GOODERS.

My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.  Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.Coli Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a  pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.  We  all took PE ….. And risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop daps instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us. We had 50 kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter……., FUNNY THAT!! We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion, sang the national anthem and no one got upset. Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t  got. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can’t  recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo,  X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren’t!! Oh yeah … And where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!  We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 2/6p (12p) bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked. Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a  threat. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that? We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?  LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.  WOULD NOT TRADE  IT FOR ANYTHING! AAAAh, those WERE the  days!!!! And we ALL survived.