The only real peace and quiet I get around here is when I am not “around here”. Working from home is to live at work, work begins at the bottom of our stairs. Fortunately I only live half a mile from absolute peace and tranquility. Last weekend I was out with my two hooligan dogs as the sun rose over the river Waveney……
G.
Vito’s (R.I.P) replacement started work this week and his first job was a run out to collect some new stock. Here are the trees just as they arrived, weeds and all. An old collection of trees that needs a bit of TLC. Over the coming months we will be preparing these for sale and restoring them to their former glory. Most are not for sale at this time but a few will be appearing on the site later in the summer once we know how they are responding. If there is something you like please drop me an email.
G.
If I say it’s been a busy few months around here I will begin to sound like a broken record, but what else can I say. Everyone is bugging me for new trees right now as spring is pretty much under way. Already this year we have had over 400 trees come in and there is a lot more to come yet. Getting all this lot cleaned potted and tidied up ready for sale is a simply staggering task not to mention the thousand to fifteen hundred plants we already had. Photographing, editing and posting plants onto the web site takes for ever in my fumbling hands and so I am about a decade behind where I need to be at this time of year. So just in case you thought we had lost interest here are a few random snaps taken around the garden this morning. All of these trees and a GREAT many more will be listed this summer……hopefully.
G.
We have suffered a sad loss recently here at KB. Ever since day one Vito has been the absolute backbone of what we have been doing. Without Vito, Kaizen Bonsai would simply not be here. Working tirelessly day or night and seven days a week Vito has been working hard doing all the grunt work and heavy lifting. Without thanks, praise or a second thought for his well being our great friend has suffered under the burden of brutal manual work for very little in reward. However this work load has taken it’s toll and now we have had to make some hard choices. As is the case with most staunch and faithful manual workers, who undergird our privileged modern lifestyles, Vito started to become a bit of a liability. Old, slow, smelly, breathless and with a bad skin condition and occasional incontinence we had to face the crushing truth that Vito needed to be retired. However rather than meeting the increasing cost of his healthcare and ongoing upkeep we simply decided to have him killed.
You will no doubt have guessed that Vito was not a far removed Italian cousin but my staunch Germanic van. I bought this twelve years ago for half what it was worth at the time because it was a bit rough. I spent many of our earlier years together driving the length and breadth of the country, at all hours of the day and night, seven days a week in all weathers. I could care less about modern vehicles, as a petrol head my appreciation of motors stopped somewhere in the early 70s. However, as I drove Vito for the last time yesterday I was close to tears. We have spent close to 150,000 miles together and every one of those were hard miles on both of us (unless I am on two wheels I hate driving). If I had the time, the stories I could tell of our adventures like the time Vito got stuck deep in the woods and had to make an escape across a plowed field.
Here are a few pictures of Vito hard at work with a single days load of soil and other supplies coming back from our warehouse. I am heart broken but have had to face the fact that this day would come. I always said I would keep Vito until the wheels fell off. Then one day the wheel did fall of, literally, so I bolted it back on and with a little surgery all was good again. However, largely due to my neglect Vito’s number has come up. For the last ten years he has be subsisting on just an annual oil change and a wash on Christmas eve every year (which he missed this year) and so now he’s being passed over by a new kid and once we have pilfered a few parts he’s off to the knackers yard, his travelling days are at an end.
Farewell Vito my faithful, flatulent old friend, you will be sorely missed and never forgotten 🙁
G.
I know I bang on a lot about being busy, it’s not a subtle ruse to drum up more business. Subtlety is NOT a characteristic I possess. Just to prove my point I thought you would like to see some of yesterdays orders going out. This is 6.30pm and our carrier is about to turn up. There is three quarters of a ton of soil products and fifty boxes. After this Catherine still has to process another 30 or 40 Royal mail small parcels. Today we have to do it all again, next week we are covering for staff holidays and just to spice up the mix I have four hundred new trees arriving, four tons of soil and two tons of Green Dream which will quickly be followed by an entire lorry load of yamadori tree stock.
All I ever wanted was a couple of nice looking bonsai to stand on the side of my pond! Be careful what you wish for 😉
G.
