Call me old fashioned…or heritage if you prefer? but I’ve never taken to the social media craze…I’ve never had a facebook page, or twittered or anything cool like that. My daughter, Alice, who runs our Weiti Stables business these days, harassed me for years to put Weiti Stables on facebook, and eventually I crumbled a few years ago and let her go for it. She has a very successful “page” I think, with thousands of followers who she amuses most days with fun posts about the horses and animals in the yard. She sells a heap of horses through it, without having to spend any money on advertising. I can keep up with what’s happening over at the stables without having to mount my trusty quad. So all in all you could say I’m a convert to facebook as a business tool.
So, Alice is now joining me in the plant business and we have set up the perennial section in a small way to start. As of today she has started a facebook page called Grassroots Roses and Perennials which hopefully will bring in some customers to this new side of our small family business. We are planning to have some open days in the Spring, when you can come along and look at our respective gardens (a couple of smallish paddocks separate them) and peruse the roses and perennials on offer at bargain prices. Alice is heavily into succulents and cacti as well, which have never been my speciality and she is also very artistic (which she certainly didn’t inherit from me) so her garden is a lot more interesting than mine!
If you’re into this sort of thing please check out our new page (and “like” it of course)
In other news…
I guess you’ve noticed that Spring has sprung a bit ahead of schedule this year…although they’re advertising a bit of a barometer drop again this weekend, on the whole August has been unexpectedly wonderful so far, with balmy temperatures and lots of sunny days to make up for the windy wet ones.
I feel even more behind than last year with my winter jobs like spraying, trimming and fertilising. not to mention weeding…the bloody things have never really slowed down this winter. Spring could be quite scary…anyways, what will be will be. We’ve stayed very busy on the rose selling front and are really low on decent sized plants available, but that’s what’s supposed to happen I guess and there’s plenty of babies coming on in the nursery now.
My major gripe for the month is rabbits. I used to think possums were worse, silly me. Possums are easy to shoot at night if you have a son and a gun. And they even put their heads willingly in those silly plastic traps. Rabbits on the other hand are the root of all evil. Very hard to shoot and they don’t seem very scared of me and my team of hunting dogs. My daughter, who has a much bigger team of equally useless dogs, has a very new garden and is also being driven mad by the rodent depredation. She’s rather more pro active than me and checked it out on social media ! Her answer seems to be helping…
It scares the rabbits and some of the horses, but not this one! She moves it around every night and he has definitely reduced carnage. Not a particularly attractive garden ornament though! and I’d need many as my garden is a lot less compact than hers…
That’ll do for tonight, I promise next time I’ll say something interesting about roses…