Great Elm Physick Garden

A few days before this seemingly endless rain started pouring down I had a phonecall from Liv O'Hanlon from The Great Elm Physick Garden. Liv's company makes gorgeous organic skincare products (www.greatelmphysickgarden.com) and is based about 6 miles away from the farm.

Liv contacted me because we had both attended a Soil Association workshop about growing and supplying organic herbs to the health and beauty industry which is a burgeoning sector of the organic movement at present. Currently over 85% of the organic herbs used in health and beauty products are imported from overseas, some are gathered from the wild and some are farmed in countries with much lower labour costs than you can find here.

I had attended the workshop because I had a surfeit of Calendula (English Marigold). In fact I had loads of it and a bit bright on the eye it was too. Anyway, I thought there must be someone who has a use for organic Calendula and maybe for some of the other flowers that we grow. The day was very interesting but I realised that supplying herbs for other uses would probably involve drying them first and that I would have to find time (and space in my head) to put together a drying system. I also thought that maybe the winter would be a good time to do some more homework and contact some of the manufacturers to see which crops they might be interested in.

A week later Liv made contact to ask if we knew where she might be able to find a large quantity of fresh Marigold.......what a perfect circle. The next day she came to the farm with her two teenage sons and quickly and efficiently picked 4.5 kilos of fresh flowers. She then took them back and dried them to an end weight of 0.8 kilos dried flowers and preserved them in Almond oil
Liv is thrilled that she has found a source of English Organic Calendula so close to home and I am very happy that our flowers can have two roles to play in the outside world. We are both now very excited about working together on crops for next year.

Bath Life Magazine visits BOB

A couple of weeks ago a lovely journalist came to visit the farm and I spent most of the time trying to stand between her and the weeds.
Anyway she can't have been too shocked because she wrote a very nice column about us which is available to view online... if you go to http://www.bathlifemag.co.uk/ and navigate to page 14/15 you can read for yourself.

Market Marathon

Keynsham yesterday; Southville, Bristol (Tobacco Factory) today; we're filled with weekend market madness! We've been sales-happy flower-drenched retailers, hawking our wares (or bearing our hawks) like career carnies this weekend. Keynsham yesterday had the feel of the Roundabout Zoo about it (ref: BBC League of Gentleman)) but we covered our pitch and diesel. It looked gorgeous though; colourful, structural and exciting on the eye (there are only so many ways that pork chops can be shrink-wrapped and stacked in polystyrene, and I speak as one who respects his pork). Sunday morning and Jo was up at Hackmead cutting by 0530 hrs; I wobbled up at 0800 and off we went to bring the BOB experience to Bristol.

A slow start, a gentle middle which eased off to a stately and quiet end. Hmmm. It hit us both at about the same time; around about 11 a.m.; we'd had lots of interest and lots of well dressed window shoppers; but everyone seemed to be looking at us as purely 'sellers' and not 'growers'. At the farmers markets it's evident that Jo grows everything on our stand but today we just looked like a hungover florists (I speak for myself there, and in fact; just hung-over). It was only a couple of customers who had worked or trained in floristry that recognised what Jo's blooms represented; I reckon about 80% of our sales were purely 0n visual impact alone; which is great in itself, but begs the question that does the fact Jo coaxes these things out of our own ground in fact matter? Does it matter how, where and why the flowers have arrived? It does to us, obviously, but does it to whoever hands over the folding and chinking stuff?

U.S.P. Unique Selling Point. I think we have to work on it before next weekend's market; we know what it is, but we maybe have to spell it out more clearly for potential customers? Although I'm not that confident of my ability to spel corecttly.

USP:

or proposition - this is what makes the product offer competitively strong and without direct comparison; generally the most valuable unique advantage of a product or service, for the market or prospect in question; now superseded by UPB.
www.bizjobs.com/business_glossary.php

Abbreviation for selling point. A differentiating factor that makes a company and their product or service better than a competitor's.
www.tractionsearch.com/se-dictionary.co

A Unique Selling Proposition is a statement that identifies what makes a person, product or organisation different from competitors.
www.simply.com.au/glossary.php

Let's get spelling!
JPx

The long winding toad . . . .

Check him out! Bufo bufo in the sweet-pea tunnel! Started lifting the spent plants on Wednesday, clearing out the docks and preparing the three beds with the lovely muck John Wyatt gave us. This chap was tucked under the mypex against the tunnel rail, and had been raining righteous wrath on the dozens of slugs which I'd also been finding (I like to think, at least) It's another sign that a pond or two might be a good idea; I think we've got two obvious spots for them, we've got the clay for puddling (just a bit) and we know how it drains now after 9 months on site. He was a great find, and along with the myriad of bees, wasps and hover-flies that cloud the blooming beds (and which followed around our displays at the festivals this year) , shows how diversity can generate diversity. It will be interesting to see how the plot matures (in wildlife/biodiversity terms) over the coming years. It's small and its connectivity to the wider landscape is relatively tenuous, and as we've discovered; it's exposed! I'm looking forward to getting to know personally the various genera which adopt each one of Jo's plants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_toad

N.b. No toads were harmed in the making of this blog and associated images. All parties were consensual and were released back into appropriate habitat as per EU Habitat Regulations (Media Wildlife Clause 862) Annexe 3 2004.
Jp x

Grown in Britain, sold in Bristol

Hurrah for Bella and Fifi www.bellafififlowers.co.uk, for waving the flag of British flower growers. This new florist enterprise will ONLY be stocking seasonal flowers grown on these shores thereby giving the good people of Bristol the opportunity to fill their vases with beautiful, ethically sourced flowers which haven't traveled half way around the planet. Needless to say they will be stocking a wide selection our blooms, so look out for them in Clifton and Montpelier on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Eastnor 2008

As soon as I've got a spare second; I will write about the Big Chill and publish the hundreds of glorious photos we took of our flowers around the festival (err, three dodgy cameraphone shots, two of which are taken of Jo from the wrong side of a heras panel; she looks like she's in a detention centre)

And can whoever nicked my neon-blu-boy-racer valve caps off our landrover please post them back to the address on our website; come on you lot, you know who did it. It's not big or clever; but then I guess size and intelligence are relative, not absolute attributes, and it may well be a pinnacle of achievement for you, in which case, keep them; adorn your wagon with my blessing and pat yourselves on the back for a job well done.

More later. .