This weekend we visited our friend Adrian who grows a vast range of British flowers exclusively for us. April is an exciting time for me because there is so much happening on British flower farms. But that also means a lot of hard work and despite the longer days there are still not enough hours!
We started in Adrian’s Seed house where all of his crops germinate on the special heated benches. There are numerous trays of different crops here all springing into life before they are pricked out into single pots where they grow on producing healthy roots so they are fit to be planted out, that was our second stop, the potting house where again there are a vast variety of young plants getting ready to make their way out onto the Nursery.
From there we went out around the houses starting with one of the Anemone houses which is producing some beautiful quality flowers at the moment. After that I was eager to see the Dahlia houses, one of my oldest memories as a child is the smell of Dahlias on my Granddads nursery, unfortunately all of the houses are still fleeced down at the moment while the plants produce their first shoots of the season so there was nothing to see there so moving on we looked at some of the recently planted houses.
In the first we found some new Cornflowers, they love the soil on Adrian’s nursery so much so that he’s had to go from planting 4 beds down to 2 so that there is enough room for him to get into the house to pick! We then saw houses of freshly planted Nigella, Achillea & Godetia before we found our way to the first of the houses of Pinks, this first year crop were planted back in September but are already producing healthy buds, next door is a second year crop, just in need of a bit of sunshine to get it going.
By now we’d taken up over an hour of Adrian’s time which is very precious at the moment with so much to do so It was time to leave him to his work but I couldn’t leave without a glimpse into one of his Strawberry houses, I promise you you’ve never seen anything like it! its an amazing sight to behold especially when they’re in full flow with beautiful gigantic fruits begging to be picked and eaten there and then, taste a proper Cornish Strawberry and you’d never buy another imported one again!!
