Well today our bulbs, bags and stamps arrived!
We have a whole variety of daffodils from pheasants eye to minnow. We also have varieties of crocuses and hyacinths including heat treated hyacinths! We dedicated a whole morning bagging up the bulbs and creating the labels for each bag just to find that we managed to run out of bags! Luckily more are on order and we can finish this job before our big Macmillan event on Saturday 28th!
Photos of the bulbs in the displays are to follow!
Sunday 22 September 2013
Saturday 21 September 2013
Autumnal Stock!
Well today was a busy day changing the nursery displays to our autumnal stock! We need to take back the summer stock to our poly tunnels, greenbouses and cold frames before we could bring out the new stock and prepare it for sale. After running what felt like 300 wheel burrows full of plants back to the nursery growing areas we then had to carefully find a home for it all and prepare the less hardy plants for the first frosts.
Photos to follow!
Once we had put these away we then had to load up the wheel burrows again and start carting out the new stock and arranging it on the displays! Laura was once again on hand to label up the plants and run the plants out to the displays. I've included below some pictures of our delightful pansies, we have some beautiful morpheus, sangria, sorbet, deep and pale blue, pale purple, orange and yellow pansies ready for sale now.
After the pansies were out we needed to bring out our other autumnal stock, these plants ranged from Ornamental grasses to Photinias (little red robin and the red robin), Heleniums to heathers and Heucheras to name but a few!
More photos to follow!
Saturday 7 September 2013
Minestead Summer Fete
After the success we had at the Bartley Horticulture Society Fair we were invited to come along to the Minestead Summer Fair which we were very keen to go along too! After stuffing the cars full again of plants, apples, tables and the gazebo we were on our way!
The weather was very interchangeable, one minute we had glorious hot sunshine and the next was a torrential down pour with some distant rumbles of thunder thrown in for good measure! Luckily people were not put off by the weather and came to see us! We sold many of our plants - the semps were very popular with the children! We also had some rather strange customers too...some lovely New Forest cows decided to wonder in and have a sniff of our plants!
Our Bramley apple tree has been very successful this year and we sold out of apples within the first hour - luckily we were close to home and Laura shot off in her car to quickly pick some more! Within 30 mins Laura was back with 3 enormous bags full - they were so full they were almost bursting at the seams! As it had quietened down we started weighing out the bags and putting them back out on display. It seemed that we could not replenish the stock fast enough before we sold it again! Just as we thought we were going to sell out again the event came to a close - I believe we came close to selling nearly 30kgs of apples if not more!!
Our cut flowers were also very popular so in between the bagging up and selling of apples, the storing of plant orders and selling of plants we were putting together some hand posies and some small bouquets! Safe to say when it cam to home time our cars were decidedly much less full than when we arrived!
Please see some pictures below of our stall!
The weather was very interchangeable, one minute we had glorious hot sunshine and the next was a torrential down pour with some distant rumbles of thunder thrown in for good measure! Luckily people were not put off by the weather and came to see us! We sold many of our plants - the semps were very popular with the children! We also had some rather strange customers too...some lovely New Forest cows decided to wonder in and have a sniff of our plants!
Our Bramley apple tree has been very successful this year and we sold out of apples within the first hour - luckily we were close to home and Laura shot off in her car to quickly pick some more! Within 30 mins Laura was back with 3 enormous bags full - they were so full they were almost bursting at the seams! As it had quietened down we started weighing out the bags and putting them back out on display. It seemed that we could not replenish the stock fast enough before we sold it again! Just as we thought we were going to sell out again the event came to a close - I believe we came close to selling nearly 30kgs of apples if not more!!
Our cut flowers were also very popular so in between the bagging up and selling of apples, the storing of plant orders and selling of plants we were putting together some hand posies and some small bouquets! Safe to say when it cam to home time our cars were decidedly much less full than when we arrived!
Please see some pictures below of our stall!
Monday 2 September 2013
Preparations!
Well our next big event is sneaking up on us...the big Macmillan coffee and cake morning! Macmillan is a charity that is very personal to us all here at Whinwhistle and when we heard about this years event we decided we absolutely must get involved!
After ordering our pack and setting the date we realised that we had a lot to organise from the construction of benches to ordering refreshments, organising the raffle and child tombola, making the cakes to preparing the nursery for some tours and arranging the parking in the field! Not forgetting to arrange the marketing!
Luckily I was able to arrange getting two big banners made up which we have proudly mounted outside the nursery , we have also had some flyers included in our local papers as well as advertising on our web site and on Facebook.
Photos of the banners to follow!
After ordering our pack and setting the date we realised that we had a lot to organise from the construction of benches to ordering refreshments, organising the raffle and child tombola, making the cakes to preparing the nursery for some tours and arranging the parking in the field! Not forgetting to arrange the marketing!
Luckily I was able to arrange getting two big banners made up which we have proudly mounted outside the nursery , we have also had some flyers included in our local papers as well as advertising on our web site and on Facebook.
Photos of the banners to follow!
Saturday 31 August 2013
Bramley Apples!
After all the glorious sunshine and rain this year our apple trees have gone absolutely crazy! We have lots of Bramley apples, golden delicious and galas! We've kept the edible ones for ourselves but decided to sell the Bramleys and they have been going like hot cakes! I've popped some pictures below of our trees!
Wednesday 7 August 2013
Bee hunting!
As we now have our beehive I wanted to share some pictures of the types of honey bees we have in the garden. As it would happen it seems the bees have gone to ground and actullay finding them is proving difficult! Thankfully though I have managed to capture a couple so have included these below for you to see:
Below are some pictures of bees captured previously:
Below are some pictures of bees captured previously:
Sunday 4 August 2013
Bees!
As our first year cutting garden is noticeably attracting many bees, we decided to take the advice of our local bee keeper Tim Moore. Tim found the perfect quiet spot in a private area of the garden to site a decoy hive, which hopefully will attract a swarm who will take up residence.
Honey bees like to occupy vacant previously occupied hives. Tim has created a very desireable residence from parts of old hives. To allow a colony time to establish and thrive can take three years so we will not expect a harvest too soon. Fortunately we can watch the hives progress from our sitting room window and with Tim's guidance hope to be able to update the blog with a hive of activity!
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| Our bee hive |
Honey bees like to occupy vacant previously occupied hives. Tim has created a very desireable residence from parts of old hives. To allow a colony time to establish and thrive can take three years so we will not expect a harvest too soon. Fortunately we can watch the hives progress from our sitting room window and with Tim's guidance hope to be able to update the blog with a hive of activity!
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