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WELCOME TO OUR AUTUMN 2010 CATALOGUE
Welcome back to Orchard Nurseries autumn catalogue 2010. Regular customers may know that we grow our bulbs naturally and without the use of chemicals or controlled growing conditions. As such we are now in our second year of conversion to Soil Association organic standards
QUALITY
All our bulbs are from cultivated/nursery grown stocks and are not removed from the wild. Bulbs are grown/naturalized in and around our 12 acre orchard. We use no chemicals or fertilizers in the process to ensure that all stocks are grown as naturally as possible. We promise that any bulbs that may be susceptible to drying out such as snowdrops, cyclamen etc, will be dispatched as fresh as possible. These bulbs are best ordered early in the season and planted upon receipt.
DISPATCH
All bulbs listed will be dispatched from early September to November. Whenever possible we try to send via the Royal Mail so that your order arrives with your regular postman. Heavier items may be sent via courier, which will need a signature. However, we do ask that you advise us of a safe place where your parcel can be left if you have popped out (see space on order form). We will also need a daytime phone number in case we need to get in touch. Please note that bulbs are dispatched when they are ready so we may not be able to dispatch for specific dates. Please contact us if you need your bulbs on a particular day.
COLLECTION
As usual, any order is available for collection; however this is by prior arrangement only. We are a working nursery and not a garden centre and do not have set opening and closing times, so please call us and let us know you would like to collect.
POST & PACKAGING
A contribution of £3.95 towards our post & packaging costs is required; this should be added to the total cost of your order. PLEASE NOTE that this applies to most UK mainland areas, however, some areas are not within our usual courier range. Should you require delivery to Scottish Highlands, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man etc, please contact us for delivery costs.
Some larger items and bulk orders are no longer able to be sent via the Royal Mail. These will be sent via courier. Please contact us for costs before placing order. All such item are marked with a ‘*’.
ORDERING
Orders can be placed by post, telephone or online at our secure website. All orders must be accompanied by full payment and a contact telephone number. You can pay by cheque/postal order and we accept most major credit/debit cards. We are open for telephone orders from 9am to 6pm Monday to Saturday, at other times our number is a private line.
Only online orders will be acknowledged unless accompanied by an S.A.E. Orders will be dispatched to arrive during optimum planting time.
SO WHY ORGANIC?
Many of you will be aware of Organic Standards and how they apply to food. The idea that your meat or veg are produced responsibly without the use of any nasty chemicals or genetically modified shenanigans is something that most people now appreciate, but why should people who grow bulbs want to get involved? Well, it is all quite simple. When you buy from us you can rest assured that your plants or bulbs have not been fed, irrigated, chemically enhanced or otherwise messed about with. Most of the plants that we grow have been growing wild in this country for many years and have done so without any help from us, so we reasoned that if it wasn’t broke, then we were not going to try and fix it.
The practice of ‘forcing’ bulbs has been around for as long as people have been growing them commercially. The idea is that they are grown in temperature-controlled glass houses where they get just the right amount of water each day and get fed just the right amount of food at just the right time and that is all very well and good. The only problem is that once you purchase one of theses bulbs and trot happily down your garden to plant your purchase, the bulb has to cope with the legendary English weather. Once planted in the garden, the bulb is not protected from the elements and does not receive its regulation watering or is ideally timed feed. Not wishing to anthropomorphosise the bulb, but it is more than likely that it will get the right hump about it.
In order to avoid this situation, we grow all our bulbs as nature intended. They are outside and open to the elements. The rain waters them, the soil feeds them and we think that they are better for it.
We decided to undergo conversion to full Organic status with the Soil Association so that we could put an official stamp on the way that we grow and so that our customers know that everything we grow is done so without the use of chemicals or controlled growing conditions.
Low Environmental Impact Gardening.
In addition to becoming certified by the Soil Association, we at Orchard Nurseries have adopted a policy of Low Environmental Impact Growing.
There has been a lot in the news of late concerning the impact that our lifestyles can have on the world around us. One of the most popular media buzzwords is Carbon Footprint. This is basically a way of attempting to measure how much filth is pumped into the atmosphere in order for us to have whatever it is that we want.
Most people, whether they care about such things or not, have got used to the idea that motor vehicles cause pollutants and wasting energy is generally a bad thing, and we are told to buy responsibly from people that tell us they are not harming the environment in producing whatever it is that they have made. We all know that an item of clothing that has been made just down the road from us and taken to the local market by horse drawn cart is going to have had far less impact on the world than the one made by children in India, flown to the UK and driven to its destination on the supermarket shelves. The only problem is that the one in the supermarket costs a fraction of the one from the market and there is a recession on don’t you know.
Gardening is often thought of as something that is very friendly to the environment. It must be mustn’t it? I mean we are planting plants and growing things and making the world just a little bit greener.
Having asked around a little, it became apparent that hardly anyone that we talked to had thought about where the plants come from that they have put in their gardens. A shrub, for example, may have been grown in Surrey, in a heated and irrigated greenhouse, transported to the Garden Centre by lorry, where it is kept in a heated and artificially lit building until it is sold. Once sold, it is placed in the back of the car and driven home. As you can see, a fair amount of energy has been used to get this ‘green’ item to you home.
All that is most certainly true but we grow on a commercial scale and thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the way that we do things and the way that other growers do them and see if there is a better way.
The first thing we looked at was energy usage. We have never used a great deal of electricity as we work mainly during the hours of daylight and are not using any for heat, but we did feel that the amount of fuel used to keep the grass at bay over the summer was something we needed to address. To this end we have now stopped using any machinery to cut the grass and instead we use approximately eighty sheep over the summer months to keep the grass in check.
We now collect enough rainwater to enable us to get our mains water usage down to zero.
Finally, we use all the unused hay bales from the area too. These are ones that have been left out in the rain or are too old to use for horses. The hay works very well as a weed suppressant and once used can be rotted down and mixed in with the soil
In short, we try to make as little negative impact on the environment as we possibly can.
FINALLY
We are expecting twins that are due to arrive sometime over the autumn period, so there may be a couple of days when there is nobody available to answer the phones. Please leave a message or send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions, and may we take this opportunity to thank you for you continuing support.
Bulbs will be supplied with basic cultural instructions. Packs will be labelled with the variety, planting depth and favoured position. A good rule of thumb is that bulbs need to be planted 2.5 times the size of the bulb.
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