Nearly Two Years On How It All Went Wrong And How We Bounced Back

Well as you saw in my previous writings we were very excited to have found huge new growing space and were all signed and sealed and started growing ready for a new season last year and everything looked promising and we got off to a great start with the sowing and growing we took on an unemployed chap who showed great enthusiasm and promise and all looked great.

The owners of the nursery were starting to talk about us growing everything for their three garden centres and promising this that and everything else. But then as the summer went on we heard more and more rumour's about them and it was all being denied by them.

But when the staff from one of the garden centres started cutting up and collecting any metal round the site for scrap to pay their wages we new trouble was brewing in hind site we should have looked elsewhere then But we didn't.

Then in September last year they started demanding money we felt we didn't owe as we had been supplying them with plants and when we couldn't raise it they illegally chucked us out and stole all our stock and equipment and took it to their garden centres to sell leaving us with no where to grow no stock and loads of orders we could not fulfill they then went bust owing millions and leaving us no chance of redress.

But we clawed our way back found new premises to grow in which although substantially smaller has done us OK and we were back on track.

The Summer at the bigger nursery was a disaster we had loads of "free" help courtesy of a scheme to get unemployed working but in all honesty none of them wanted to work we even offered some that were slightly better jobs But none of them wanted them even taking on an apprentice was a disaster we only had one applicant and he had a condition that meant he was very difficult to teach and drove everyone mad all day repeating everything anyone said which distracted my packers to a degree they were making mistakes with orders so he didn't last longer than the first week of a two week trial.

At one point we had 14 staff and i was stressed to the hilt trying to keep them all doing a proper job. By the time we were evicted it was just myself and Sarah getting twice as much done on our own as we were with all the staff so this year we pruned the business back and did it on our own.