Autumn Musing

The season is unfolding. The trees are turning a burnished shade, shedding leaves and their wonderful produce; conkers, acorns or apples. It feels like a good time to have a clear out ahead of Christmas, to ready your house and store cupboard with jams and chutneys and gather warm bedding, throws and blankets to ensure warmth over winter.

Our hedges have been cut by lovely farmer Walter and their crisp edges look great against the returned verdent green of our fields. The alpaca and sheep spend their days eating this good Autumn grass to stock up, pre the cold season returning.

We’ve taken delivery of lots of new stock for the website and for the Autumn and Christmas sales we are attending. New 100% baby alpaca fleece scarves are already selling out, as are our alpaca knit mittens. Cute new fleece creatures, like mini sculptures - each unique, are proving popular as Christmas gifts and our alpaca pillows, duvets and mattress toppers are being bought n d shipped throughout the UK and around the world. Our last overseas order went to Angola and the US before that! So funny how a tiny smallholding, perched on the Shropshire Hills, can be in touch with the world thanks to technology.

Several of our breeding females are pregnant, so we look forward to new babies next year from 3 new studs. Watch this space in April.

We will be back at Chelsea Flower Show and many of the other RHS shows again in 2019, our 4th year selling our Lou’s Poo, Alpaca Fertiliser range. Try it for your plants, a little goes a long way and our commercial growers and flower farmers love it.

Oh well, time to work in the fields today before gathering up our stock to go to yet another Autumn sale on Friday, this time in Newbury in Berkshire. Onward and upward.

Lou.

Post Chelsea Flower Show 2017 - Part 1

For the second year running, The Archers At The Larches Ltd have sold our branded Lou's Poo, Dried Alpaca Fertiliser at RHS Chelsea Flower Show. We wouldn't be there without the fantastic support of Mark Macdonald, owner of Todd's Botanics, Plants Delivered and Vaso Toscano. Mark is a champion grower and a firm believer in our fertiliser. He uses it to feed the nursery and loves specific products, like our Shredded Lou's Poo, for feeding his tree ferns or our Beans, for feeding his olive trees.

In conjunction with Mark, we created our Lou's Poo, Compost Tea Mix with added comfrey, especially formulated to feed flowering plants in their flowering season. At Chelsea, this was particularly well received by those growing agapanthus, chilli and tomato growers but it suits all indoor and outdoor flowering plants too.

This year I was lucky enough to attend the Chelsea Flower Show Press Day and Gala Dinner hosted by the RHS on the Monday before the public opening. I was stationed on my Plants Delivered stand eager and waiting to see who I might see. First to pop by was Julian Cleary and his mum. Juilian is astoundingly beautiful. I remember him from his early days on TV and imagined him short and skinny. He is tall and elegant. I passed him my card as no celebs seemed to be buying much. 'Ah,' he said in a considered drawl, 'Thankyou. One never knows when one might need some alpaca poo.' 'Quite.' said I. 

Next I was lovey-kissed by Ainsley Harriott, most excellent. He's even taller than Juilan! He walked away chortling when I passed my card over. Lovely man, I have his BBQ book somewhere.

I saw Judy Dench and the beautiful Duchess and countless other celebs, like all the Radio 2 BBC crowd; Chris Evans, Jeremy Vine, Jo Wiley, Anneka Rice. It's exciting but I'm not altogether sure if all these personalities were there for the flowers.....the real stars for me, of course, are the growers inside the Grand Pavilion and the garden designers outside. The growers, in particular, work their fingers to the bone 24/7, seeking RHS medals and caring customers to purchase their stunning plants. My top picks were:
Todd's Botanics, for drought tolerant plants, tree ferns, olives, the unusual, agapanthus and iris, garden design and wholesale planting solutions. T3 Wall End Nursery for unusual plants, salvia and abutilons. Avon Bulbs for stunning bulbs and seeds. HooksgreenHerbs culinary, medicinal and scented pot-grown herbs and seeds. Mamoth Onion  W. Robinson & Son, Seeds and Plants Ltd for fantastic vegetable plants and seeds. Check out their websites.

In my next blog post I'll share a little more of my pictures and comment on the gardens I liked/didn't, but for now I d like to say a massive thanks to my Poo Crew for the week; Kathy, AM, Ori, Cathy, Erin and Bryony plus French Antionne! You all rock.

Alpaca babies...

So, it's hot. The alpaca were sheared last Wednesday and just as well, as Bracken produced a stonking baby boy just three days later. Phew! (JIT: Expert planning obviously...... cough, cough)

http://www.thearchersatthelarches.com/products/lou-s-poo

Larches Enzo

Larches Enzo http://www.thearchersatthelarches.com/products/lou-s-poo

Larches Enzo http://www.thearchersatthelarches.com/products/lou-s-poo

He weighed in at 8.9kg and two days later was 9.4kg. Mum is happy and healthy and feeding him beautifully. All we need now is another few trainee Lou's Poo Producers playmates to be born.... keep your fingers crossed please.

http://www.thearchersatthelarches.com/products/lou-s-poo

Shushhhh.... soft launch, new online store

Shushhhh, I will say this only once... [yeah right!] ... My website has launched. You can reach it by clicking on the store sign on this website or by putting TheArchersAtTheLarches.com into Google. All feedback gratefully accepted, orders more so.....

If there's a gaping silence I'll worry, so feedback is what I require peeps!

Love
Lou
xx

Tea Leaves....

Hmmmmm... Lou at Larches is a teensy-weensy bit cross...

The Larches barns are filled with accumulated clutter. Some items are required and some items really need a new home or depositing at the dump.... Oh, ‘scuse me, it's not called the dump anymore is it? It's the recycling centre or, worse still, the sustainability centre!!?? .....Anyhoo back to the point of this ramble...

I was rooting about in the barns, climbing over the sproglets’ bikes, the builders' stash and the leftover rabbit entrails kindly discarded by the cats, when I came upon a particularly nice example of twentieth century design; an MFI cabinet in that delicious wood effect veneer with sliding glass doors, c. 1970. Lov-erly.

Knowing full well what the local auction house would think of my latest piece of period furniture... [...our Ikea phase has recently been disposed of in this manner and I’m fairly sure that the auctioneer did a 'smell' face when he saw it. Subsequently it took several sales before a gullible discerning bidder was found.] I decided against this route this time.

Eureka! Thought I, bearing in mind that I am now top totty authority (numero 24 y’know) on Gardening matters, according to ebuzzing The Global Platform for Social Media Advertising. Oh yeah...

I thought, I know, I shall have a retail outlet for The Larches.....

It’s an honesty cabinet and so far Wyevale Nurseries or indeed any other garden centre need not fear for their livelihood... Situated at the bottom of the bridlepath, I started out by stocking it with some rather delightful strawberry plants, then I added some pots of herbs and then some rather delectable perennials.

In the beginning the children were thrilled to note that a pot of perennials had been removed only to be replaced by a shiny 50p and having made at least £2.50 in three weeks.... wit-ta-woo, I decided to expand production into jam.... [and yes, I have had an Environmental Health visit to pass my kitchen actually... and he was mightily impressed. Smug.]

Within a week, five jars of jam had been stolen! Out-bloody-rageous!

Last week someone took two huge pots filled with flowering strawberry plants. In return they left me some Spanish coins dating from before the Euro!

Yesterday two good sized lupins, raised from seed by me, were also nicked. Sheesh...

It’s a flipping honesty table, not a free for all!

Fortunately I know some lovely army chaps and their wives have very kindly volunteered them to lie in the ditch for the foreseeable future with their gorgeous foliage hats. They will then muller the tea leaves who feel my MFI cabinet is like Tesco but without the paying bit! Marvelous what your taxes will pay for.......