Snapdragon's chat

Why do businesses blog?

In yesterday's Independent newspaper Rhodri Marsden wrote a very funny article "I wanna be a rock star" about his attempt to launch his musical career via the internet.  He recorded the song , acquired his website, called in favours from friends and acquaintances to sort out the graphics and video and launched his single Those Rules You Made via You Tube.

Along the way he had a lot of luck - YouTube features the video on its front page - and the viewing figures and commenting go ballistic, making the single the most viewed music video in the UK with 64,000 people watching it - by the end of the week this had risen to a quarter of a million people.

I was interested in this as over the past couple of weeks I have been contacted by other people with small business blogs saying basically that they are going to stop blogging because it hasn't generated sales for them.

Rhodri Marsden had 250,000 people listen to his video on YouTube - it was in the top 3 "listened to" tracks globally, it was successful beyond his dreams.  He sold 58 downloads - netting him £27.00.

I don't blog to sell things - I blog to provide a back story and because it makes me disciplined in recording what is going on. I blog to be part of a community of like minded people - and because people send me cards to say "sorry about the pig" (I cried).

If I did blog just for sales I would have given up a long time ago as typically there will just be 1 or 2 direct sales from the blog a week.  I enjoy reading business blogs - and I know that some people do sell well from their blogs as they have a talent for making people part of their world.  I do get asked by people whether they should start a blog as part of their business - what are the benefits for the outlay in time?  It would be interested to know whether other business bloggers see it as a part of sales, a more soft marketing, or in fact something else altogether.

My blog may not bring in massive sales but it has got me onto tv, has let old friends track me down and lets people know a lot more about what we are trying to do that a brochure ever could.

Best buy British?

On Friday Gardeners' World devoted an hour to a special on the British cut flower industry - we were away so I didn't get a chance to watch it until yesterday.
The program was hosted by Sarah Raven, who used to be a contract florist and who now runs workshops in her cutting garden at Perch Hill in East Sussex.
It spanned a wide range of different kind of growers - from the farm shop cutting patch in Fife to slightly sinister polytunnels full of chrysanthemums with deadheaders pedaling round mid air like robots. 
The overall tone was gloomy - and indeed the statistics were very shocking - in the last 20 years the majority of British cut flower growers have closed down and there are now just pockets of growers in Cornwall, Lincolnshire and Scotland (daffs, not me - I'm not that much of a meglomaniac!).
But what struck me was that there was an assumption that buying British was better "just because" and that is something that I think cannot always be taken for granted.  Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed this were it not for the "We don't speak Dutch" label on flowers in Moyes Stephens flower shop.

  From a distance traveled/freshness/eco- point of view there can't be that much difference between Cornwall and London and Holland and London.  From a growing conditions point of view I understand that in the Netherlands there has been a lot of well funded work on how to heat tunnels with renewable energy and treat pests with organic methods.  This is in response to customer demand and there are grants there which are not available here.   From a conditions point of view I don't think there is much difference between the pay and conditions of the pickers (who seemed strangely absent).

I think that people should buy locally - I would love a countrywide network of farms for veg and flowers.  I think that they should buy seasonally (what kind of warped customer thinks that the season for sweet peas is February-June as quoted in the program?) and I think that we should consider alternatives such as potted bulbs for the winter when it is not possible to grow blooms here in an environmentally sustainable way.  None of this would help the growers in Cornwall - I think they should club together, get a proper distribution system set up and sell direct to florists.

A lot of florists are trying to buy British flowers - one woman opening a shop and desperately trying to source flowers visited me here to try and prise some out of me.  I simply didn't have enough but I was very interested in a tale she told me of her recent stint at a wedding show where she was advertising her interest in British grown flowers.  A fellow florist had stood at her stall and started screaming that she was depriving people in developing countries of their livelihood.

I needed roses for corsages for some of Helen's relatives at the weekend - unfortunately the request was made too late to order from The Real Flower Company  and we are out of rose season here - so I called round florists here looking for organic fair trade roses.  A complete blank on either.  I ended up in Sainsbury's - no organic but plenty Fair Trade roses.  I can't remember where they were from but they certainly weren't British.

I wore the single worm eaten I could find in my parents garden.  There are compromises too far.

I found it to be a very interesting program - it made me think.

The photo is of cosmos "purity" - a flower that doesn't travel well and which you need to grow yourself or buy locally.

 

Keeping it in the family

In a comment to a post on Snapdragon's Chat, Gigibird joked that she was glad to see child labour alive and well in Scotland.

It got me thinking about family businesses and how growing up in a house where work goes on around you  is quite different from growing up where work is something people go out to.

My Mother had her own business from when I was 10 or 11, she began by opening the house up for Bed & Breakfast and my brother and I waited table and dragged bed sheets downstairs to the wash.  Then she moved onto dealing in antiques, first with market stalls and then in a shop and again we were there, at auctions packing everything up in newspaper, loading up cars and writing out price labels.  It was largely good fun and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

I have read that if your parents have their own business you are much more likely to start your own and certainly it has worked that way for my family - my brother, who was hanging around auction houses while still in short trousers, has developed a fantastic eye for antiques and now has his own shop in North Berwick.

Tonight was one of those beautiful balmy evenings that we have been so short of this year - so the girls helped me to harvest some of the honesty seedheads which have been drying on the plants.  Then we sat on the deck and peeled the mother-of-pearl discs out of the husk, they will be used to make decorations later in the month.

It was strangely meditative work - a bit like shelling peas - and just lovely chatting away with my girls about their day at school (yep they are back - that is why the sun is out) while watching the sunset.  It was a chance to have something slow, sharing, and positive about the work that careers around their home.  A chance for them to join in without me screeching - "no don't touch that!".

This post is not about child labour - another post for another day perhaps - it is about family businesses, which many women's businesses are.  It is a subject that I am very interested in - how do people sort out a separation when work is at home?  Do people involve their children (it isn't always time efficient after all)? How do customers envisage a "family business"?

J
x

Who else is growing cut flowers?

For the past 5 Fridays people have been turning up at the van on spec, interested in getting advice on growing cut flowers commercially - so far they have come from Aberdeen, Yorkshire, Hampshire, Edinburgh and Northumberland, shoehorning a trip to our garden into a holiday itinerary.

I believe that there must be lots of small businesses like me, growing flowers for a local customer base, too small to make a national impact, many too small for a website.

I would like to add a list of other growers to my website - I often get asked if I do mail order flowers but in fact a much better solution would be if I could point people in the direction of a grower local to wherever they want the flowers sent.

Do these growers exist or are they figments of my imagination?  Are there people selling flowers at farmers markets, doing subscription deliveries or providing flowers for weddings.

If you know of anyone could you let me know - or if there is a complete dearth of local flower growing it would be interesting to know that too,

The comments button seems to be odd on some machines - if you hover over where it is meant to be it magically appears .  I thought that it might be something I had done in the settings, but it is only on some monitors - please, please continue to comment.

Thanks
Jane

Vintage vibe

One of my tasks this week is to write copy for Christmas stock (I know, I know the C word - sorry).  It is throwing up the age old problem of weaselly words - honesty in describing things is important to me and I spent yesterday with a conversation going on in my head about the word "vintage".

I grew up in the antique trade - my mother bought furniture for our house at auction sales and then graduated onto taking stalls at antique fairs to sell the bits she didn't want finally buying an antique shop which she still runs in Gullane in East Lothian.  My father and brother have an art gallery and antique shop in North Berwick.  The house was, and still is, full of a conveyor belt of antiques being processed, cleaned, mended, and often coveted and kept.

From the age of 12 I collected costume and, though much of the collection was sold to buy our H-van, it is still a passion.  I first trained to work in museums because I wanted to be a textile curator.  I have acquired over the years heaps of bits and pieces, not valuable enough to sell to fund something like the van, too good to declutter. I use them when I make things.

I also use modern materials - often selvage seconds - high quality materials from the likes of Osbourne and Little which have marks in the selvages and cannot be sold in their shops.  I mix them up together, I would argue that I use what is best for whatever I am making, sometimes the velvet is from the C19th, sometimes it is from the 1970s.

And there is the problem - the C19th velvet would qualify as an antique, the 1970s one is not even properly vintage in my book.

There are many makers in the same boat as me, and many consumers wanting some of the "soul" that vintage somehow brings to an object - how do people solve the problem ?  What do customers expect from a description. If I could waffle on like this it would be fine but I need to distill copy into 10-15 words.

J
x

Rain and repurcussions

At the end of last week I either heard on Radio 4, or read in a paper, an interview with an organic farmer where he explained how the wet season this year will have repercussions for organic farmers well into next year.  it won't just be a case of their spring brassicas having been drowned as seedlings last month, it will be a much more serious prospect of the fertility having gone from their soil.

The soil, its structure and its complicated microbial communities, are at the centre of organic growing.  A healthy soil means healthy plants and getting the soil right is the first job of any organic farmer. 
What has happened this year is that the waterlogging will have killed off some of the microbes that turn organic matter like compost and manure into nutrients that plant roots can take up.  Even here, where we have not been flooded, the cold wet weather will have stopped these microbes from working effectively as they need heat to really get to work.
In addition the constant rain will have caused leeching of nutrients, the draining water dragging the nutrients down into the lower levels of the soil, away from the top layer where plant roots live.
The farmer in the interview was worried as obviously he cannot just chuck a load of synthetic nitrogen onto his field to compensate for lack of food and he felt that this drop in fertility, coupled with the loss of the Spring crops, might send many organic farmers to the wall.
It was obviously a "doom and gloom" interview - a traditional way of farmers getting their point across in the media - but it had a valid point and has jolted me into thinking about what I need to do to ensure that our plants do not go hungry next year.
I haven't yet decided what I will do - there seem to be several options.
I could grow cover crops over the tulip bulbs which are usually left in bare soil from October till February - or perhaps I could cover them with straw or bracken.  Both of these methods might increase slugs.

I could also get another delivery of basalt dust from the quarry at Milton and top dress the beds  -  this is a method suggested by the inspirational Moira and Cameron Thomson at the Seer centre near Blairgowrie, the dust gradually breaking down and acting as a nutrient for the plants.  All of the beds have had the dust incorporated when they were first made, perhaps it is time for a second helping.

Both of these options need the rain to stop at some point so that the soil can dry out and I can get onto the beds. Any other suggestions would be gratefully received.