Lay of the Land

Nearly half past eight, and as usual just getting back home.  What a relief – people are actually coming down to the Garden Centre to see us!  Thank you all so very, very much!!  Thank you also to the lady who called our home number today (assume you thought it was the work one?) to ask what our opening hours are, as we hadn’t put them on the web site.  Good spot, and sorry, but yes we were open.  I’ve now updated the web site and the opening hours are there for all to see.  In truth it feels like we’ve moved in to King’s Mill Lane, as we only really leave to go home and sleep, but officially we are open 9am to 6pm every day except Sunday, when we operate from 10am to 4pm.  Everyone who’s seen our makeshift signs saying we are open -ish seems to have been amused, and I have to tell you our opening times are also “ish”.  As a small business below a certain size I understand we are free to set our own hours without restrictions, and though the official hours are those published above we’d never turn you away if we are there, and you need or want something we’ve got.

Thank you for your support so far;  we promise to try hard to get better and better.

Lay of the Land – Settle’s “pocket” garden centre is up and running and open for business – ish!

After a huge amount of effort from all the family we finally said ok, we better stop saying “not yet” a couple of weeks ago, and even put some signs out saying “Open – ish” in time for Easter weekend.

We’re not finished.  There is still a lot to do to make it all exactly the way we want it, but we’ve been delighted with the feedback from the people who’ve been down to see us so far.  Here are some photographs of how the site was starting to develop in the last couple of weeks before we opened, and soon I’ll upload some photos of what it looks like now.

We are trying hard to assemble a collection of plants to satisfy as wide a taste range as possible, but which will still stand up to our fairly extreme climate at times.  We are using reputable British growers, and have sourced some interesting plants from Scotland, through Lancashire and Yorkshire, to the Midlands and even Norfolk.  I’m being told our  prices are very competitive, if not downright cheap, especially considering the maturity and quality of most of the plants.  In addition we have genuine frost proof pots from Yorkshire Pots (guaranteed 50 years!), as well as an interesting range of stylishly frost resistant pots from Cadix and Yorkshire Pots.  We have cutting tools from Darlac, a little known but wonderfully good value company, as well as great traditional top of the range favourites, like Haws watering cans and Joseph Bentley spades and forks.  We have sprays and fertilizers, a range of composts (3 bags of Murphy’s for a tenner), and various other gifts and sundries.

And we have King’s seeds.  Not a high street brand, but a well respected grower’s favourite, well known to most allotment holders.  According to my friend Denis, the courgette seeds were half the price of those he got from a supermarket, and the packet contained more than twice the number of seeds.  Nuff said?!

We’re gradually making progress with the Garden Centre now, albeit a lot of hard graft still to be done.  A massive thanks to eldest son Peter, without whom we’d be really struggling.  Not only is he chief designer and planning consultant, but also head joiner!!  He makes the trip across from Leeds every Saturday without fail, often then putting in a minimum 12 hour day working with us.  Thanks also then to Rhiannon for putting up with it!

Thanks to Dave Carles, my long time friend and electrical consultant.  He’s been superb again this weekend, making the trip over from Preston two days running just to help me get my lighting and power circuits just the way Peter has specified.  Don’t know quite how to thank you either really Dave.

Finally thanks to all the people who have passed by and given us their good wishes over the past couple of weeks.  Now we’ve ‘gone public’ with our plans I was really hoping for some feedback, and we’ve got it, thank heaven.  The response seems to be overwhelmingly positive so far I’m pleased to say, so I only hope I live up to the expectation I’ve created. Several people commented they’ve looked at the blogsite.  FANTASTIC – there really is nothing quite like the feeling that someone is reading after all!  In fact, I know from Peter’s analysis of the stats that we had over 100 hits on the site last week, more than double the previous best week.  Nice to know some of you care!!

So, I hope you’ve noticed there is a comment facility?  It would be really helpful to hear from anyone with suggestions for things you’d like to see us stock, in particular anything you struggle to get locally right now.  Can’t promise we’ll stock everything you suggest, but can promise we’ll seriously consider it.

PS.  Thanks also to Richard at RD valeting just a few doors along.  When Peter had a bit of an issue with changing his brake discs on Friday night Richard was just brilliant.  He doesn’t half clean cars superbly as well.  I saw a real life ‘before and after’ case on Friday – couldn’t quite believe the miracle he worked, definitely worth every penny the customer paid.

Gosh!  Another week passed, and it was all a blur.  The first full week of Rob and I working together, side by side, and all in all things went pretty well.  I’ve enjoyed his company, his wicked sense of humour and his willingness to learn.  We’ll gloss over how I feel when he’s first awake (or not) and just say that when he warms up, and has eaten something, he’s a much more agreeable companion.  I’ve also appreciated his muscle at times!

A good varied week in which we’ve started to re-model a garden in Barrowford.  We put some fence posts in, cleared and graded the beds and laid landscape fabric prior to replanting and gravelling what will be a nice, neat low maintenance garden.  We also worked on one of my regular gardens in Long Preston, where the job is to tidy up a nice garden which has become rather neglected and overgrown, and bit by bit we are restoring it.  In another of my regular gardens in Stackhouse we tackled an overgrown shrubbery and have started to carve out a new access path through to the compost bins.  We rounded off the week collecting 50 5 foot high hedging plants for a garden in Cowling (another regular).  I was amazed we could get 50 plants in my Transit Connect, but we did, and got them to Cowling without any damage.

In between times we’ve been laying concrete footings and starting a block retaining wall in the yard at our soon to be Garden Centre premises.  It’s all hard graft, and we have it all to do ourselves, but there’s an enormous amount of satisfaction to be gained by doing so.  I also really enjoy chatting to the local people walking past who seem to be starting to get really quite curious about what exactly is going on!