Diaries and notebooks
Claire, Plantpassion
What do you need to keep?
I've always had a diary for appointments. Not a "dear diary" type thing, but enough to give me a good idea of what I was doing each year.
Before I started growing flowers for a living, I'd been to see Arjun Heuse, a flower grower in Sussex at the time, and his advice was "always have a notebook with you, and write everything down".
So when I started, I got myself a diary that I could put in my pocket, and started well:
January 3rd 2013
Bought Wheelbarrow £49.99 Wickes, Soil testing at HTF pH 7.0-7.2 Soil crumbly texture chalk underlying. Deeper than I thought.. managed to dig down 30cm in several test holes.
January 4th
Organic compost delivered £420 for 15 cubic metre from John Gunner, Turf cutter from Dorking Hire, 6 beds cut, turf used to mulch nettles on bank as hard work to wheel to end. 1st strip of each bed most difficult as tyres slipping.
Sat Jan 5th
6 more beds cut, into a rhythm now, mark out, mow, turf strip and move turf. M&D came and helped for last 1/2 hour great to have extra couple of pairs of hands and William a big help too.
OMG, thinking back to the backbreaking work that we did that week, I've no idea why my husband and son are still supporting me. Thank goodness we now do No-dig. The next week, there are also 4 entries, and week after 3, and then....... There are a few to-do lists scattered through the rest of the year.
The last entry of the year is Saturday 7th September. I have a note:
More needed for this time next year - Later flowering red sunflowers, Green Nicotiana, lots of Zinnias, Dill, Ammi, Sedum and Purple basil.
I was through my first year of growing flowers for a living, I had a few customers, but realised that I hadn't got any idea of when I did all the work during that hectic first year. I was going into my second season and was going to have to work out timings all over again.
I had been "too busy" to write down information that would have saved me lots of time in coming years, so I was determined to keep up from then on.I needed to know what I'd done.... so that each year I could be more and more efficient, but I obviously wasn't good at sitting down to write things up, especially when I got busy in the summer.
My Mum and Dad often came over to help me. They didn't stay long, but they were usually there once a week, so I put Mum in charge of writing the diary. I got her to write who had been there, how long we'd worked for, and what we'd achieved on that day. At the time they were newly retired, so they kept going off for long spells on holiday! But at least we'd have an entry for most of the rest of the year, and I got better at the other forms of record keeping.
I've always been a big list maker (as I discussed in module 6) and I had lots of get it done lists for my first year, but they had no dates on them and I hadn't always crossed everything off - did those jobs get done? That day or any other?
So from my 2nd year I made sure that every list I wrote had the date at the top.
“Are you a diary fan? Will this be easy for you?”
Sales records
Knowing what you've grown is no good on it's own, unless you know how it relates to what you've sold. Obviously the fewer lines of flowers that you sell, the easier it is to keep records, and you need to weigh up the time taken to keep records against the worth of those figures.
I have tried at various points to record exactly what comes in the door when picked from the field, and what goes out the door, to customers (and whether everything goes out and how much wastage there is) but I've decided that I've got too many variables because I sell to retail and wholesale customers, so now I record:
Detailed variety listings of what goes to wholesale customers via delivery notes - these are usually high number of stems.
Number of stems in a colour scheme that go to my DIY brides.
Sales figures in numbers of bouquets and bunches of flowers that go to my local retail customers.
Carol uses her picking lists for each week to record her sales - here is an example
“What kind of notes or records have you been keeping?
Do you have the information you need to plan for your new season?”
Seed sowing information
Seed sowing dates that are successful for you and your conditions are vital pieces of information for any flower growing business.
Dates will change dependant on where you are in the country, so although being reminded through social media of what others are doing is a help, it is really important that you work out how that applies to your conditions, growing set up and micro climate.
Another thing that I've found vitally important to my stress levels, is to record how long each variety takes to germinate. Now I no longer panic when Larkspur takes 3 weeks, and Didiscus almost 4. I know that if the sunflowers haven't appeared in 10 days, and certainly in 14 even if it's been cold, the mice have nabbed them and I need to resow, and that cornflowers should be though in under a week.
These timings will also help you to know how much room you need in greenhouses.
I do this by an excel spreadsheet (I've added the headings I use in the resources below) . Using excel means that you can order it by alphabetical order when you want to add in the seeds that you've bought, and then you can order it by week number to give yourself a list of what you need to take to the greenhouse to sow.
I know that I manage to get through to about week 12 each year keeping excellent records, and then it gets too busy. So then I find that by doing a monthly stocktake of everything in the greenhouse and polytunnel, and recording (into my phone voice recorder) the dates that each of the trays were sown on, I then have that record to take back and fill in the excel spreadsheet at a quieter time, so that by the end of the season the information is complete.
Other records: are they needed?
What other information might you need to keep?
Well the more information the better BUT - that takes time, so it is your call what will be useful to you and worth collecting.
Here's what else we keep:
Claire - Hours that both staff and volunteers have worked each week, plus days that we were unable to work (it's been an average of 5 days a year since I started here in Surrey that we've been snowed or frosted. Min was 2 days, - max was 10 days) Greenhouse temperature, field plans.
Paula - Temperature and wind, when plants and seed ordering is completed, what's in flower, what I've achieved.
Carol - A planning diary/book with daily weather forecast, what we’re doing when, appointments etc, what we’re going to eat, who’s working. What we need to do this week. I then just tick them off or make notes alongside as a record. Also record what I’ve ordered and who from, emails, phone numbers etc in the same book. Separate time sheets, cash sheets, mileage etc.