Cramden Nursery’s response to Covid 19

The March 23^rd lock down announcement put us all into shock and uncertainty.

Our season starts on the first of March so we had only been open for 23 days.  We had plants waiting to be potted, young plants ready for the sales benches and a great deal of new ideas and plants to share with our customers.

Our first question was simple how do we get our beautiful plants out to our customers?

Thankfully we had updated our website only the year before so it was still shiny and new but only selling young pelargonium plug plants.  We had  a mad scramble of uploading pictures, descriptions and introduce a delivery system to the website so that we could move straight into our  “Local home delivery service”. Our shop floor had now moved online

Now orders came in from grateful local customers, pleased to be able to get hold of young plants.  We also still had our regular web orders flowing in from customers all over the country that needed to be packed and either taken up to the post office or to the courier depot.  Evenings were spent printing out orders and confirming dispatch dates to customers, our days were spent picking orders and Nic was now transformed into our local delivery driver and was out delivering plants from 9am till 7pm.  It was a blur of young plants, boxes, delivery notes, watering and coffee!  Somehow it worked, I never believed it would be possible on that Monday evening after the lock down had been announced, but we sold all the rooted cuttings, even those cuttings that we had taken to pot up, we sold the lot, with the three of us (myself, Nic and Elaine) running the nursery after the rest of our staff had been put on furlough, it was an amazing feat.

Pleased to have sold all the rooted cuttings  we then had to turn our minds to our 2litre pots of Pelargoniums, and all of our hardy stock.  They had been growing steadily while we ran around after our young plants and they were now  ready for sale.

As the lock down began to be eased we set up a click and collect service through the website.  This meant that Nic could stay on the nursery with us and pick orders and at last some plant work could be done too.  Now we were filling trolleys with beautiful flowering Pelargoniums, Salvias, Hardy Geranums, Lavenders, Penstemons, Geums, Heucheras, Agapanthus and more.   The sun shone and the gardens of Northampton were filled with beautiful plants. Our evenings were spent watering and printing out orders, weekends were spent moving plants down from the stock houses to the sales area which was now converted to a picking and packing house.  With no customers  entering the green houses Hector, our dog, had a wonderful time enjoying all the freedom he normally only gets during the winter months when we are closed.   By August we had sold out, we had managed to sell all of our plants without any of our customer stepping inside a greenhouse! It was rather emotional actually. We felt elated & so relieved that we been able to empty the nursery with just the three of us, our nursery normally runs with 8 staff and Nic and myself admittedly we had not been able to do our spring and summer potting sessions so we had produced significantly less plants but still it felt amazing to have sold out.  We feel so deeply grateful to have so many understanding and appreciative customers, their constant support and positive feedback kept us going through the crazy times.  There were times when we thought we just simply didn’t have any more energy to give, until you receive an email thanking you for the plants & telling you how your plants have made some ones day, how their garden is their sanity and life line, and then you know why you’re doing it, being part of something bigger than just our nursery, to be part of our community, keeping us all together, keeping us going through these unprecedented  times.

Now with the nursery closed we are busy getting ready for next March.  We have our stock house full of Pelargoniums, the first cuttings will be taken in January.  All our hardy stock has been potted up, Nic is busy changing bench lay outs in our sales area so there is more space for our customers and staff to be sociably distanced. We are full of positivity for next season, we are older and wiser and know we can adapt to whatever 2021 throws our way.