Plant Sale

There has been little in the way of posts here for the past couple of weeks. The reason being is that a lot of hard work was done getting ready for the Plant Sale.

Well that happened this last weekend. Why no posts over the weekend? Because I was too damn exhausted once I got home to actually sit in front of the computer and write something up.

The Plant Sale is one of our yearly events. We order in a lot of bedding plants and vegetables, mostly in plug format. These we then pot on and keep in the various greenhouses around the site. Space in the greenhouses are donated by many plot holders. My own greenhouse was absolutely choked. No spare space at all. As a consequence I had to postpone the potting on of some of my own seedlings. This has had an adverse effect. For example my Pak Choi has gone straight to seed in it's seedling tray. This is not good and basically ruins them.

Slugs attacked my Sprouts that I put out a while back. Of the 26 plants outside, only 1 survives. The Red Onions and Beetroot however seem to be going great guns. The runner beans are showing leaves the potatoes got hit by a late frost a while back, but seem to have bounced back. Well, except for one which seems to have been slugified as there is no actual foliage left, just stalks. But we shall see. The Carrot are doing extremely well. Their fronds waving in the breeze above the tops of their bags.

But back to the Plant Sale. Things started out bright and early Saturday morning. We had already got some of the benches and tables set out the previous week. The Vegetable trays had been stored in the marquee since Monday and many trays of the bedding plants had already been moved in to join them. So it was just a matter of rolling up the sides of the marquee, last minute layouts and sticking pricing labels in.

Setting up.

Sure enough, come 10am the buying hordes started streaming in.

The weather over the weekend was brilliant. Thank goodness for the shade of the marquee as without that a lot of the plants would have been wilting in the heat. But liberal doses of water for them (and the workers) saw us through until 2pm when we closed for the day.

We also had a couple of off-shoot stands. Firstly was a charity stand run by our Bee Keeper in residence, Alison, raising funds for Bees for Development. Helping her was Phil who was also selling bee friendly plants, but grown from MAGA plants and the funds from that went to MAGA of course. I think there was some confusion in how everything was discussed before hand, because there were some rumours going around that all of the funds on the Bee stand were going to charity. Yet everything was clearly defined on the day to show which plants were being sold to support which cause.

Support the bees!

Sunday started out with a smaller amount of plants as most had already been sold. But we cut prices all over the place, and dropped the prices even more towards closing time. In the end we gave people a tray and told them to fill the tray for £2. We didn't want anything left.

Sales in full flow

But even so at the very end, there were still plants left. So we simply left one side off the marquee and put an Honesty Jar for donations inside and let people take whatever they wished. I suspect over the next few days we'll offload a lot of the plants. But anything that doesn't go by the end of the week will probably end up on the compost heap.

All in all, we raised over £100 for Bees for Development and over £1,000 for MAGA. Not a bad weekends work.

Next weekend we'll start the Plot Inspections before the sunny weather pushes the weeds into overdrive. Which reminds me. I have to borrow the strimmer to attack the grasses and stuff that suddenly wants to take over my plot.