Dr Alan Rae is Chairman of a family horticultural business in East Sussex. It specialises in selling plants and gardeners sundries on line and grows organic vegetables for the local market in 2 acres of glasshouses near Lewes. In 2010 he was the SEEDA horticultural workforce champion and a long, long time ago in a far away galaxy he was a plant scientist…
Alan writes:
Well that was an interesting year - life at the glasshouses is never dull. This time last year we were faced with the second year on the trot of lots of broken glass due to the weight of snow. This year it couldn’t be more different. Looking back through previous blogs, I see I’ve never explained how we came to be growing veg after a 30 year career in IT and engineering. So here’s the ghastly truth.
Our growing space here consists of two acres of glass that used to be a Chrysanthemum nursery and which was designed for an era of cheap fuel. Originally we bought the place for our www.plants4presents.co.uk business which uses the pack station and the propagation benches to store and ship plants (we sell a lot of citrus, olive and fig trees plus vines, chilli plants, herbs and some ornamentals like orchids and bougainvilleas).
However, once the original trauma of moving was out of the way we started to think, as you do, about what we’d inherited. Two acres of glass filled with dead Chrysanths. What the devil are we going to do this lot?
There seemed no point in trying to heat them as it was obvious that’s what had done for the previous owners, so we thought about what we could grow in a cold house. Organic veg seemed to be the answer as at least we’d done that before (if not commercially) and if no-one wanted to buy it we could at least eat it ourselves.
Fortunately it was like pushing on an open door – no-one seemed bothered that we clearly didn’t know what we were doing in any professional sense – the produce looked ok and the price was competitive and that was all that mattered for most customers (the rest were appeased when we were officially “in conversion” with the Soil Association and we became fully accepted when we achieved full certification in 2008) . So we set about getting the whole lot back into production. It took us about four years – one house per year basically.
We’re fortunate that the vents are all computer controlled and that we have thermal screens in two of the houses and we’ve managed to keep them going – they’re first generation microprocessor boards – obsolete yet built like tanks. Reminded me of my first job which was in an engineering firm.
We’re now growing a wide range of produce for the local market including sweet potatoes, squash, aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes and peppers. However the backbone of the veg business is leaves – spinach and chard and salad bags.
These are all pretty thirsty crops - in fact it gets through somewhere over 5,000 cubic metres a year at a total cost of around £8k a year.
So this year, driven by Isobel, my intrepid partner, we built a reservoir. Because of the lie of the land we could only get just under 800 cu m. on the property which is arranged in two pools. We really benefited from the dry spring as we managed to get the digging done and get the Bentonite liner in without serious mishap.
However there was then no rain to fill it up. Our local MP dutifully turned up and opened the puddle on the 3rd of June and we had a visit from Ms Austin of the BBC who was doing a little piece on the effects of the drought. However once the official launch date was over and the clerk of the weather couldn’t embarrass us any more it duly started raining and because the catchment over two acres of glass is pretty efficient it filled up in no time.
In fact we’re pretty pleased with the results as despite being an exceptionally dry year we’ve only had a couple of fills of the main tank (around 50 cube) since the beginning of June.
I’ll gloss over all the alarms and excursions we had due to the apparent absence of the principles of basic physics in the understanding of some of the contractors, which has led us to redesign the overflows ourselves having spent a couple evenings floating about in wetsuits on windsurfers sawing the ends off pipes in the rain. However all seems to be well now. And we’re confident of saving on our water bill. Here’s a picture of the 2 pools full up as they now are.
I wonder what 2012 has in store for us?
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