2013 Review
Well as i sit here on a cold crisp October Sunday evening it is time to reflect on 2013 and another some what challenging year.
First we had the Spring that barely never was the coldest in 50 years and boy was that cold and all that snow i think we have become to accustomed to mild Winters so when we get a bad one it comes as a bit of a shock
To make my life easier i decided i needed to put a greenhouse up at home after a few hitches i eventually got a nice 8ft x 6ft greenhouse up at home and benched it out ready to get sowing, which i was also able to heat with a 3.5kw propane gas heater which was badly needed with the weather not letting up well into Spring and even in May we were still getting ground frost so i delayed sowing as long as I could.
The biggest problem i had was heated space I have nowhere at the derelict nursery we rent to heat so once things were up at home they really had to take their chance. It did cause me some major headaches and was one of the toughest starts to Spring i have ever had even worse than when we got snowed in for 2 weeks in March down in Cornwall.
Then out of the blue we had a glorious Summer i think that was as much a shock to most people as was the cold Spring.
For us it was the latest we have ever started dispatching plants I usually manage to start dispatching at least something by the end of March but this year it was the last week in April when the first orders went out and we never really caught up from their.
We launched two new websites this year one dedicated to Tomatoes with now over 250 varieties listed and loads of information on the Tomato and how to grow them as well and the other website for flowering plants I have also dramatically reduced the number of veg varieties we have on the vegetable website for 2014 we are in a restructuring phase of the business at the moment with some major changes before next year that I am still working on.
The launch of the Tomato website came as a bit of surprise in how it took off I did not expect it to be that popular that quickly and the demand alongside the cold Spring did cause us a few supply issues.
By all accounts it has been a really difficult year for Tomato growing even the professional growers have had huge problems even with the highly technical climate controlled greenhouses they say that growth was poor early season and they have never caught up and i know many people have reported that crops ripened very late this year.
I will be starting my Tomato sowing much earlier next year and on a much larger scale to hopefully be ahead of the demand .
The flowering plant website is more to give me something to sell during the leaner months for veg plants and we have some lovely perennial plugs ready now from a massive sowing in seed trays that i did back in August that have now been pricked out into 44mm Jiffy plugs
www.tomato-plants-direct.co.uk/
www.vegetableplantsdirect.co.uk/
www.mailorderplantsdirect.co.uk/
