Progress

Isn’t it great now that summer’s here and we can all relax at the beach? Ha!

It’s all go at the nursery at the moment:

Our open week end was a great success and the weather warm and sunny. Good delphiniums, well grown, are a wonderful sight and the oohs and ahs from the visitors are a treat to hear.

The builders are making excellent progress erecting the new plastic growing house and the pollinators are now well into the swing of things.

We have three builders climbing over steel framing now. After starting with the foundations last Thursday progress has been swift and no-one has fallen off yet. They tell me it will be completed by Dec 18^th and I believe that they believe that. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

The new growing house is 45 metres long x 19 metres wide with three metre high walls - the apex being about 4.5 metres high. The side walls can be rolled up and the roof has ventilators over about 40% of its area. The house should be cool and great for growing and pollinating delphiniums.

Right now I’m trying to sort out the irrigation, floor covering and storm-water. The rain will be collected from the roof and piped into two 25,000 litre tanks, supplementing the metered supply from the local farm water scheme. From there is will be injected with fertiliser and fed, over 10 times a day, to our breeding delphinium stock.

While all this is happening we have half a dozen staff pollinating delphiniums and it also coincides with local contractors spraying weeds in preparation for us planting our steep gullies with native trees and shrubs. I’m really looking forward to returning some of the land to native bush.

This season has seen us producing more plants for sale in New Zealand and although the plant season is coming to an end we still shipped a hundred or so flowering delphinium plants in 8 litre bags today. These plants range in height from 1 to 1.8 metres (up to 6ft).

Life is quite busy right now and I still haven’t got round to sowing the superb hybrid day lily seeds that are waiting patiently in our frig. Tomorrow – well next week anyway.