Going into horticulture - heating and irrigation
I finished the farm in 1957 when I then went into horticulture. Mind you I was born not just next to the farm, I was born on a working nursery. My father had 4 wooden greenhouses, hundred foot long and three of them were built round about 1926 and 1927. They were low and they had very small glass in, nowhere near as much light as nowadays. The glass in one of them was only 16 inches wide and the height of the glass was 20 inches, so you had an awful lot of glass there to make up any area. They were heated by coke fired hot water through 4 inch cast iron pipes. They were quite low, they were all manual ventilation, which meant you had to open the lights and the watering and the heating was all manual. On the bigger nurseries they had a fireman where he would look after several boilers, and that was his job day and night, because, as my wife will tell you, I would go last thing at night . . . . we'll start in the morning - I'd go at perhaps half past six, seven in the morning to clear the clinker out of the boilers. We had two boilers. Clear the clinker and put fresh coke on, draw the damper to get the fire going again, and depending on the amount of heat you'd want during the day you would open or close the damper, and stoke accordingly. And then after tea, half past six, seven o'clock, I'd go over, clear the fire, all the clinker and muck, and build the fire up right, the damper on, to get the heat in the pipes. Eleven o'clock at night I'd go and bank the fire up completely and shut it down. The pipes would be hot. You'd clear the fire again, fill it up with coke and shut the damper. And you'd do that to both boilers in the winter, early spring, and then you'd get half way home and think "Did I shut that damned damper up?" And the time I did that is unbelievable! You doubt yourself, you see.
I can remember one night in particular. I got over there and I'd drawn the clinker .. . . and the clinker is the molten mass which comes out of the coke ... and I'd drawn the clinker, and got overcome with the smell of sulphur, because burning coke releases sulphur fumes, and the sulphur got on my chest and I had a policeman come to see me that night, and he sat here and (to his wife), you asked him to come, J.M. didn't you, asked him to come over and get me, , or see where I was? And he walked over there, and came to see what I was up to. And I just couldn't breathe. We then went on to some anthracite, which lasted longer, you didn't have to bank up so much, but it was quite expensive, and we used to have that come direct from Ebbw Vale, a lorry load at a time. I then went on to automatic coal, which is a boiler which you filled up with, I should think, about 10 barrow loads of this small Mansfield Singles, which are little nuts about three quarters of an inch wide of a high quality coal, and at the time it was costing £5 a ton delivered. The local blacksmith used to come and buy some off me, because that was better coal then he could buy. And I took a contract out for five years with the firm I was dealing with, and it was the first two and a half years it was guaranteed no increase in price of coal or transport, the second two and a half years the coal would be the same but the transport would go up if it went up. And that went up from £5, I think, to £15 a ton. We then decided that was too costly and we went ... I bought another boiler, a new boiler, which was a high efficiency oil-fired boiler, and we put that in, and a diesel tank and we had a fully automated system, with heating.
Roughly when would that have been?
(Contributor discusses date with his wife) I would have had that 1970, and so that was fully automated.
So you stopped your evening journeys, did you?
Yes, I didn't have to bother. Then we came to the winter of discontent, and, ‘ course, by that time everything ran on electricity. My father in his time, and even when I first started . . .the wife and I, we did 10,000 boxes of bedding plants and we used to go over the old nursery with Tilley lamps, didn't we? Even before we got married. That's how we used to earn a little money. And we used to prick out these bedding plants by Tilley lamps. I then put in electric, but ‘course during the winter of discontent you sort of had four hours on and four hours off, and I managed to buy two second hand diesel generators. We had one over the old nursery and one at this nursery.
So you had two nurseries going at the same time?
I had two nurseries going at the same time. Not to start with. I started with my father's nursery and then we started building here. The first one went up in 1965 and we built one or two a year for several years. We started building new wooden ones, and ended up .. . . .
This is glasshouses?
This is glasshouses . . . and then we ended up with, for the time, fully automated aluminium glasshouses. Of course the difference in all the growing techniques . . . I made some notes here .. . to start with wooden glasshouses, small glass, heating coal-fired, hot water through 4 inch cast iron pipes, low houses, manual ventilation, watering and heating. The modern glass, wide span glass, all aluminium, high speed hot water through small bore piping, automatic ventilation and irrigation.
What were you doing about irrigation to start with?
That was all hand watered, and on the old nursery we used to have a pump, a deep well bore. When Father first had it in 1926 he put the bore in and it was 80 feet deep, but by the end of War time he couldn't get enough water and they put down another 40 feet. 120 feet, and we used to pump that up into a tank and that was just ... the height of the tank was a railway sleeper high, so the flow of water weren't very great. We had all 1 inch piping and our hoses were all pure rubber, 3 ply antimonial hose. That's what they were, and at the time I bought my first ones they were £10 each, and a farm worker, when I finished on the farm in 1957, a farm worker's wage was £7 and a shilling a week, so they were quite a costly item.
And you must have had loads of those?
I think on the old nursery we had four, but when I came up here we tried to do it .... we started with the big hoses but then when we started getting the aluminium houses - we put up a quarter acre block of aluminium followed by another one a bit smaller a third of an acre, and then we had 8 wooden houses - the automatic irrigation was an entirely different thing.
Growing tomatoes and diversifying
How we used to grow tomatoes when I first started: You make the hole, put the plant I, which'd be a foot high. You then tie a string round the base, but you had to tie it in such a way you didn't strangle the plant or you didn't get a slip knot. They had to be reef knots and you then twisted round this little plant and tied it up to a high wire. But I read an article where they were experimenting with string. Now to start with we always used to use 3 ply fillis twine, and then a chap came round with some polypropylene string. My father said to me, "Don't you buy that! You don't know whether that's going to last. You don't know whether that'll hold the plant. It'll cut the plant. That's rough! Don't have it!" (laughs) being me I decided to buy it! We used that and that'd got an 80 lb breaking strain whereas our ordinary string only had a 30 lb breaking strain.
Then I experimented with the tying. I think I must have been about the first one about here to ever do it. Make the hole - we had what we called a plantool which made the hole for the tomato plant to go in, we dropped the end of the string into the hole and planted the plant on top. Never moved! Then we went into a more modern way: Instead of tying the string up to a high wire ... the high wires were still there, but we used to ... it was first done by hand . .. you had to wind a piece of string, your polypropylene, round a former 30 times and that would give you 30 foot of string. It had a hook on and you hooked the hook on the high wire, undid 6 or 7 feet of the string and tied it to a low wire 20 inches above the ground, and the plant then came up onto the short wire, you kept twisting all the way round, when it got to the top you took three or four rounds off the bobbin and the plant then laid down at an angle. You then twisted it and trimmed it all the way and then as it got up towards the top again you took another three or four winds off. So eventually it laid down on the low wire and, as you laid it you made sure that one truss of tomatoes went one side of the wire and one went the other. This bottom wire was held up with short posts every ten feet. When you got to the end of the row you took the hook off the wire you were on, hooked it on to the wire next to it eighteen inches away and went round the corner. So you ended up with your tomato plant . .. my father used to have them ... he would perhaps get 7 feet of tomato. We ended up with 30 odd feet.
So how many trusses?
Ooh ... pushing up towards 30. Probably 27 odd.
‘Course the varieties of tomatoes have altered so much. We had open pollinated varieties such as Moneymaker, Ailsa Craig, JR6, which were ordinary open pollinated ones. Then we went on to hybrids, the F1 hybrids, which gave us a much greater crop. You were then getting built in resistance to a lot of diseases they were picking up.
So were the old tomatoes very liable to disease?
Oh yes! One in particular TMB, Tobacco Mosaic Virus, which you notice if you went into your crop they would slow down, an area would slow down. You'd see the other ones growing away. The top of the tomato plant would be more like a nettle. It would throw a truss and then abort the fruit and you might get three. And then they would wilt. The old word was "sleeping sickness". And to stop it wilting you would shut the vents and spray water, and we had what they call whirlybirds, sprinklers which whizzed round and sprinkled the water to bring up the humidity, and the humidity would rise and the temperature would rise and that would make them turgid and then you would gradually open the vents.
So you could counteract it?
You could, but you might lose three trusses. Going back to the 1920s the first truss paid for the labour, the second truss paid for all the other input besides the labour, the rest was profit. Some of them only used to grow five trusses. Another nursery down here at Aylsham - they were bigger than us - they only used to grow five trusses. Finish!
Then they could get over some of the diseases, the root diseases. One they couldn't get over was one called corky root and you couldn't get over that one.
So if you got that you lost the crop did you?
Well, they wilted and you got the same sort of problem you got with the TMV, but there's not much you could do with that. They would dwindle off. The centre of the root, if you think of a needle, and then think of it as a sausage and you push a skin over it - corky root turns that skin into a hard substance and it breaks off like pieces of cork, just leaving the centre which can't take up any food, moisture. So we got over that one on our nursery here and over father's by grafting the tomatoes. Now you graft them onto a root stock which originally had been a wild tomato from Brazil or somewhere and that didn't get corky root. And you grow the seed of the root stock and the fruiting stock side by side. When they get the thickness of a match stalk each in the fruiting variety you make a slice with a razor blade, into the side of the skin and upwards, and the opposite, into the side of the skin and downwards in the rooting variety. You then slide one into the other and then a lady with a deft pair of hands will get a piece of inch sellotape and pull it round it and stick the two sticky bits together, because as they grow and expand it will undo the sellotape. If you put it right round it'll kill the plant because it can't go anywhere. So we got over it like that.
But the new varieties were resistant to those things?
Not all resistant to it, but you see nowadays, since just before I finished, they started going in for various substrates to grow the tomatoes in, instead of growing them in the soil. The first one, I think, was the grow bag, the second one was the nutrient film technique. Now I saw that at Burlingham horticultural station, and plants were grown in a plastic trough not in any soil, nothing. They were just plants poked through a hole in something, and their roots went through into the liquid which was passing by, which was the nutrients. So they never saw soil, nothing. Nowadays they all grow in rock wool, which is an expanded form of volcanic ash or something. It's more like oasis, and you grow the plants in a small pot of rock wool, and then, when they get bigger and want to be re-potted, you put them into another pot which has got the hole in there already the size of your first pot. You just drop it into there, and then you drop them into the block when they're ready and they are then fed with this nutrient solution. More modern ones now . .. we had high speed hot water pipes going between each double row of tomatoes. Tomatoes 18 inches apart in the row -
45 cms I should say, shouldn't I? - and we had double row of inch and a quarter high speed water. High speed pipes are now used as rails and they have little trucks go on the rails and some of them have got electric motors in, so when you're trimming your tomatoes you don't have to keep walking along. You stand on the little truck and you go along like that.
When I first started I followed in my father's footsteps. We grew early cucumbers, tomatoes and chrysanthemums. My first year or two I just grew late chrysanthemums for the Christmas trade. Now these ones were all planted outside in April in little pots. Used to call them tins. Little metal pots with no bottom and they were lifted in, put in barrows in October, brought into the greenhouses and you'd dig a hole and put it in and cover it up. They were then fed and watered, sprayed and you cropped them for Christmas. I then decided to go into mid-season, so I grew a house of ones which started coming into bloom in October, a variety called Loveliness. The winter ones were all white & gold Favourite. Nowhere can you find white & gold Favourite now. We've been trying to get them because they were very low in the needs of heat and today mostly chrysanths need quite a bit of heat in the winter time to keep off the diseases.
Then I started to diversify. We grew tomatoes, lettuces, cucumbers, peppers, 10,000 trays of bedding plants, chrysanthemums, stocks, gyphsophila, misty blue, Dianthus Barbados, spray carnations, pinks, cyclamen and various pot plants. We grew various things under glass and outside, which, perhaps we only tried for a year or two and then gave up.
So that's diversifying quite considerably.
Yes. Well, we increased the amount of glass we had.
Is this when you opened the new nursery?
Yes. This we opened in 1965 with two 15 foot wide greenhouses here. On the old nursery we had four of various widths but over a hundred feet long. Then we started with two, then another single, another single, a double, Dutch lights, and then we put up the two blocks of aluminium.
So it was a steady expansion?
Yes, each year we did a quite big expansion . . well, big in my terms anyway.
Wife: Tunnels.
Contributor: Oh yes, we had lots of tunnels, because we didn't borrow money, did we? Early on.
You made sure that you could always finance .... ?
We could always finance, because the first two, that financed heating, which we put in big enough - which was a hot air heater - which was big enough for 4 greenhouses, and we put that in after we built the first two and that built the third . And then, as I say, we built the fourth and the another double, followed by a double Dutch lights, followed by the big aluminium ones.
So you're taking on staff all the time?
Er, yes. Except towards the end, because towards the end of the time a lot of people didn't want the hot, dirty jobs in the glass houses. We've had women start here in the morning and by lunchtime they'd had enough. Too hot. Too dirty. We had one young girl start here and we said "Come in your old clothes." She turned up in high heels and a white dress! Well, I don't think she lasted the morning, and she went home. But one funny side, which I always thought funny: When we had the bedding plants, the 10,000 trays we used to have women come in, and they used to prick them out, piece work. When I first started you used to put 60 plants in each seed tray, pricked out in each seed tray, and they would get 6d per tray for pricking out, of which we would pay them 4d followed by the other 2d if they had to come back and gap up, because some of them wanted to do it quick, but not very well. And if you, instead of getting hold of the leaves to put the plants in, you got hold of the stalk you'd cause trouble on the stalk, you would crush and then they would die off, so you had only part trays. Now you can't sell part trays, so we said "You'll get the other 2d when you've gapped up". So that made sure they did the job right. But one young lady came and I think she was with us about a fortnight. She suddenly started fainting. Well, I hadn't got a clue what was wrong with her. The other girls said "We know what's wrong with her. She's pregnant. But she hasn't a clue how she got pregnant!" And she thought that was the heat. Perhaps that was God planted a seed! (laughter) I do get some of them come up with some funny things.
We used to grow 2 tons of peppers a year. Now you know peppers don't weigh very much. Takes an awful lot to get a ton of peppers (laughs).
Was this green or red?
They were mostly green. If she missed some they turned red. We never had any of the coloured ones. .. in those days it was just green or red. But she could really, really pick them, and I said to her "You mustn't smoke when you're in the greenhouses, because that can transfer a virus from the tobacco into the tomato plants, called Tobacco Mosaic Virus. "All right, I'll give up, J." Well, she used to wear a tabard, and in the tabard they had a big, wide pocket Well, when she left us eventually I got this tabard and I thought "what on earth? Has she left something in there?" It was full of stubs, cigarettes! (laughs)
So how many staff were you employing?
We had a foreman D, who's just died, and then I had two more, younger lads with him and also a woman. They were sort of full time. At pricking out time we would probably have another 6 (to his wife) would we?
Wife: Between 4 and 6.
Contributor: Yes, depending on what had to be done at any one particular time. But I'll just tell you one story: The bulk of the pricking out as I learnt it and as most of the other women did it was they had benches in front of them, the soil would be tipped on the bench or we would bring them the boxes already filled. Mostly if they were potting up they would have the soil, if they were pricking out they would have the trays full of soil all levelled out, and they would prick into there. But I was offered a woman - I was selling plants to another nursery in Norwich and I said "It's hard to get good women". And he said "Well I've got one you can have for so many days a week". And he said "I've just about finished. You have her." I used to have to collect her from up near the cemetery in Norwich, bring her home. S he used to take her child to school, I'd collect her at quarter to nine, I'd have her here about ten past nine. She wanted all her trays put on the ground in rows with just one pathway between ‘em, both sides of the house. She had a flat board with a stool screwed to it and she had a cigarette in her mouth - well, it didn't matter for bedding plants - and she'd start one end and she'd work backwards, and she could do TWICE as much! I had to get her home to pick up the child at half past three. She would do twice as many with not a mistake. She didn't need a ... we had a former which you just press onto the trays to just make little holes to put the plants in. She didn't need one of them. You could say "I want 48 plants in these ones, that variety. We want 54s or for John Sadler at Norwich, he wants 60s" and she could do it and they'd be exact.
I bet you wished you'd got more like her!
Cor, she was wonderful, wasn't she?!
But staff were hard to come by, you say? There's always talk now about Eastern European workers coming in because British people don't want to do the jobs, isn't there?
Well, yeah. It is hot and dirty. At one time, perhaps when wages weren't very good, benefits weren't very good and someone was struggling with two or three little kids. I mean, one woman who we had here, she had two children another one had two children. Sometimes they used to bring them with them.
Wife: They needed the money, didn't they?
Contributor: They needed the money. They couldn't go and say to the Social "Well, I want this, that and the other", like they seem to now. That's just one of the things . .. it's as it was at the time. It weren't easy work. It could be hot, and tomatoes are filthy things to work with. You get the stain into your hands, and we used to mostly wear old pyjama jackets. And that gets into your hands, into your skin.
And another thing that's so different nowadays to my first operations in both farming and horticulture were sprays. My dad used to use a mercury spray. He had a thing like a gun. You put the mercury spray into the handle and in the back you had one of these sparklet bulbs and you screwed the sparklet bulb up until you got the gas in the handle and then you pressed the trigger. It used to run down his arms! Well, I mean he lived till just on 80, but it make you wonder how on earth he lived.
And that was being sprayed on food crops, was it?
Yes, that was for tomatoes for cladosporium and botrytis, which are two mould growths on there, and that would kill that. And what you used to do, as you went into the house you would put a sparklet bulb down .. you knew the length of the house and you divided it up, so many cubic feet, so as you got to it there was one. And you'd start at the furthest end, you'd load your machine, press the trigger, work backwards till you got to the next sparklet bulb, and then you filled up again and you went along like that. And I mean there was all sorts of chemicals that we were using. On the farm my boss was one of the first ones about here to use metasystox. Well, metasystox is a systemic insecticide for aphids, and if I did a day's spraying of metasystox he'd give me a half day off ‘cos it used to make me sick, ‘cos you didn't have masks! It's the same as the combines, the Massey 726, the Massey 780 and the other Class, I can't remember the number of that one - you were OUTSIDE in the air breathing all that dust and as you see now a combine goes across the field the dust rising, you'd get that all in your lungs!
It's got a sealed compartment nowadays, hasn't it?
Nowadays, yeah! In an air-conditioned, sealed cab.
Marketing near and far
Is there anything else you can tell us?
Well, when I took over from my dad, his tomatoes during the War had to go to what they called a pool, because tomatoes weren't actually on ration but a grower had to account for what he grew. He was only allowed to sell to the general public 5 hundredweight a year and that was broken up in months. And I shouldn't say this, but he sold more than he was allowed to and that's how we managed to get the butter and the various things . . . little bit of black market! Well then he used to sell to Pordage, Sexton, who were wholesalers in Norwich, and then another independent one, George Smith in Norwich. The first year or two I started I was selling to George Smith but I then built up local shops and we were delivering tomatoes to Cromer, Sheringham, Holt, Aldborough, some into Norwich.
So "local" was quite wide!
Local was quite wide! And then when we grew chrysanths Father sent all his to one man,
J C Lucas in Sheffield. They were the market, and he always got a reasonable return, he was always happy with it. I then thought well perhaps I ought to try somewhere else, and it was very fortunate, one of the women that worked for me part time also made wreaths, and she was talking to one of the stalls on Norwich market. That particular stall isn't there now, but they were the biggest. Cary is the biggest now. And this woman said "Where you getting your chrysanths from?" She said "I get them from where I work - S at Aylsham" so she said "Do you think he'd sell some to me?" She said "I don't know. I'll give you his phone number" Well, she phoned me up and said "Can I come over?" I said "Yes, you can come over." My father said "Cor," he say, "you want to be careful of these Norwich traders", he say "they'll have you if they can". Well, she came over and saw the flowers that we'd got and she liked them. "Can I buy some?" "Yes". She said "that's cash". I said "Yes, I'll give you a receipt for it." And I always think first day Father said to me "You want to watch out". Well ... to his wife Am I allowed to tell this lady what happened? (laughter) Well we decided on a price which was a very, very good price, because it was the year when we had a drought and there were very few chrysanths about. And I hit lucky because I'd got an irrigation sprinkler and I'd got mine but there weren't any about and ‘course they literally had doubled in price. And so I said to her "well, if you want them, they're a shilling each" "All right, boy" and she turned round, she put her hand up her skirt and she'd got these great long bloomers down to just above her knee, and she brought this wad of notes out (laughs), she put her thumb in her mouth and then she peeled 'em off. And then she said "Can I have some more tomorrow?" I said "Yes". I never sold another one anywhere else for, I should think, six or seven years. She took the lot. Then I had another nursery couple come up here, and they'd been buying flowers off me for wreath work, and they said to me "Will you sell us some cuttings?" "How many cuttings do you want? Just enough for your wreaths?" "No, no. We want to sell some." I said "Yeah. On one condition: You don't sell them to E.M." - that was the one I was dealing with. "Right, we won't sell ‘em to E.M." Of course I went up to E with my first chrysanths. Now there nursery is in a hole, probably a lot warmer than mine. I'm up on a hill here. And she said "How much are yours, S?" Oh I believe they were 10 pence or something like that. "I can buy them cheaper than that". I said "Not like mine you can't. ‘Cos there's no-one else got ‘em" "Oh yes there is" "Well" I said" the only person that I've sold my plants to .... " And some of them, one particular variety was what they called a Sport which threw a different colour entirely, and I knew I was the only one that'd got that, because I'd bulked it up. And she'd got them on her stall. And I said "I know where they come from" and she said "Well I bought them for 8 pence". I said "You either pay me 10 pence or you don't have them." "Well," she said "I'll buy ‘em off them". I knew they'd only got the earlier ones, the October variety. Come Christmas she phoned me up "Are you going to let me have some chrysanths?" I said "Yeah if the price is right." "You name it." She couldn't get them, could she? So I named my price and we dealt with her until something went wrong. I can't remember.
Wife: No that wasn't her.
Contributor : Oh no, that was the chap that worked there, weren't it? That's right. And I wouldn't supply her any more, but during that time I had got 13 shops I was selling flowers to.
When we got even bigger . . . see, all this old stuff that we used to grow, we used to grow them outside and bring them in. But then, when we got more and more glass we were going for the more modern type, which they call all the year round chrysanths, like you buy in the sleeves now. And ‘course we grew more than what the locals could take, so we then started sending them, some to Covent, some went to Stratford and we used to get jolly good returns.
Did they go down by rail?
When I first started sending them to Sheffield they all went by rail. When they went to Covent Garden the rail had gone up in price. We could send it cheaper by road transport, and so we sent them all by road. We had a chap who'd got a stall on Stratford market, lived only a few miles down the road, and he used to come and collect and do a round and collect and take lorry loads.
Wife: Lettuces. Where did they go?
Contributor : Well a lot of lettuces went to Fyffes.
Wife: And that one who went bankrupt?
Contributor : H...
Wife: What market was that?
Contributor : That was Stratford market, wasn't it? Man by the name of H there went bankrupt. Took us for a load, didn't he?
And we sent peppers, a lot of spray carnations. Our biggest buyer of flowers was the man on the market in Norwich, C..., and I could take a van load up there . .. and ‘course he used to start at half past six. They don't now. They used to start at half past six. And I would be up early, load my van up. That used to hold 63 buckets of carnations or chrysanths or whatever I was doing. And I was always the first there. Always made sure of that! (laughter) And I'd opened my van doors, the double doors at the back .. and the smell, when you used to have stocks! And I would open the door "How many you got, S?" I said "63". "Same price?" "Yep." "Right, I'll have that lot." I used to have to unload, stand ‘em all out .. . his son'd help me ... and then the other one, R.P., he used to run down. "Where're mine?" I'd say "I'll be back in an hour" (laughs) And so I used to have to come back, load up again, and in the meantime you had to get them cut and packed and sleeved and .... I mean we used to put some long hours in, didn't we?
We grew a crop which was new to us, we grew a crop of gyphsophila and my son was working with me at the time. And we grew this crop, and that seemed they all come fit at once, virtually. And I didn't know, you don't have that many days to get rid of them before they go over. And they were in this pair of Dutch lights, we had two Dutch lights full. And the sweet smell of it, the bees were all in there! And I said to my son "Take a van load to Norwich and see what you can do with them." And he come back and he said "I made a good price, dad". Only sold five! I said "WHAT?" He said "Yeah". And then we had a phone call from Baileys, which are a big nursery and flower sales people. They used to go all round the County "Have you got any gyphsophila?" "I said "Yeah". "Can we have some?" I said "Yeah". "Bring us a sample". Took a sample up. Meanwhile this first batch what M brought home, we then sent them to Covent Garden. Phone call the next morning "Mr S?" "Yes" "You sent us some gyphsophilia" "I said "Some what?" (laughs) "Gyphsophilia". I said "Yes". He said "They're a good price", he said. They were £5-60 a bundle, weren't they? A sleeve. I forget how many sleeves. He said "Can we have a load more?" I said "Yeah. Why the increase in price?" "Well", he said "They found an insect called lyramisa which is a leaf mining creature in this gyphsophila which was coming from Israel. They'd stopped the whole lot, that had been sent back and they mustn't send any for x amount of days because of health clearance. So he said "There's no gyphsophila on the market". So we loaded up all we could get up there. And then Baileys come along and they took thousand of bunches, didn't they?
So when did you finally retire?
January '97. I think we sent the last flowers in October '96 and then we sold the aluminium greenhouses to the man, K.D., that owned Taverham Garden Centre, and the wooden ones we sold a lot of the glass to various nurseries. We put some down the sale here at Aylsham.
So you closed it all down?
Wife: He had to really because he had a bad heart.
Contributor: Yes, this rapid angina took hold extremely quickly.
Wife: And they came after us because they were then building over here, see.
So they wanted the land?
They wanted the land, although we didn't sell it to them when they first wanted it. Anyhow I'd had open heart surgery and we cut down a lot of the labour intensive crops and for the last couple of years I worked it with one lad. I think we made more money in them last two years than we'd done previous.
Wife: That was a Godsend in a sense because we wouldn't have been able to carry on. We had the shop then as well.
Contributor: Yes, we had an opening, you see. (To interviewer.) Do you know Aylsham at all?
Not really.
Right bang slap in the middle of the market there's Break charity. That was ours.
Wife: There wasn't enough money for two families.
Contributor: You see, my son he didn't really want it. But he then took over the shop, didn't he?
So you were selling your own produce through the shop?
Yes, as well.
I was going to ask you earlier on whether you did any direct selling.
Well my father started during the War really, I suppose, selling from an old cottage he had on Saturdays selling cucumbers and tomatoes. He never sold flowers. When I started if anyone had got any money and wanted to part with it I'd be pleased to take it any time. Many a time we had people come here lunchtime, teatime, haven't we? "Can we have a couple of pound of tomatoes?"
Wife: Well then that got to Fridays and Saturdays, that was like a farm shop in a sense, before we had the shop.
Contributor: Well, yes, because we had such a diversity of crops.
Wife: So then we had the shop. M ran that. When was that - the 80s?
Contributor: '82. We bought that and gutted it. We were the first shop in Aylsham to have self-service. We bought the self-service units, didn't we? From somewhere up north and brand new.
My goodness you were busy!
If you saw my diaries, I wonder how on earth we did it! I mean, some of the houses and the tunnels - they would have a crop in the morning, it would be cut, packed, gone, rotavated, dug, levelled, marked out and replanted. In a day!
Dealing with diseases
Another big thing in horticulture was sterilisation. My dad's time he only had formaldehyde and sterisol, which were fungicides, which you mixed with water in the big tank at the old nursery and then you ran it through the hoses into the houses, and that took the funguses out of the ground. But that didn't kill a lot of the other diseases. And they then brought out .. . Shell brought one out - DD, which you used an injector gun and injected it into the soil, which was very good unless you were allergic to onions, and that had an effect on you. Then, when we started on the nursery up here you had a choice of steam but the price was prohibitive. There were two varieties of steam: there was trench steaming and flash steaming. Trench steaming, you dug a trench 18 inches deep and that was hard work because it was done in extreme heat. You dug the trench 18 inches deep and buried a pipe with a cranked end in which you fed steam or you coupled to a header of about 5 pipes. They were all connected to that, one beside the other about a foot apart, and then you covered it with tarpaulin. You then did the next five and these pipes would be about 8 feet long. Did the next five, got them all ready, put them on a header, and then you'd turn the steam on. You had a big steam engine outside what you'd hire. The steam was pumped in through the pipes into the soil and when the tarpaulin started to lift a bit they'd put a thermometer in and once it got up to a hundred degrees they would then uncouple the steam, and while that was being done you would then be digging the third lot of pipes in. they would couple it onto the second lot of pipes, turn on the steam and then, when you'd finished the third lot, and put the third lot of pipes in, you'd be uncoupling the first lot, you'd have to take them out of this steamed soil , draw them back and start again. And it was extremely hot work. You were probably working in a temperature in excess of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Then when we got up here they started to bring in a new sterilant. It's called methyl bromide. Now you can't use it yourselves. You have to have a contractor come in, and we used to have a contractor come in from Suffolk, and he used to go round different nurseries. To prepare your soil it all had to be rotavated, you had to have a trench all the way round outside and under each gutter. They would come in with these great big sheets of plastic, and you'd have what they called a 2 inch wide lay flat perforated hose, which they'd put down the centre . In a 20 foot house you'd probably have 4 of these lay-flat hoses, fixed to a header, sheeted right down so that was air tight. And then when you'd done the whole house like that they would turn on this methyl bromide gas, which would go through a heat exchanger to expand it because that's liquid gas, to expand it, and they'd pump it into the greenhouses and you'd see all this plastic lift about a foot from the ground. The cylinder which held the gas was put on a pair of stilliards, and they knew that you had to pump x amount of pounds. It was 4lbs per hundred square feet, and they would let that go in till you got the right amount for that house, turn it off, a man would go in with a gas mask and then put it on the next one and so on till the house is finished. You only want one lungful of gas and you're dead and while they were working here they were telling me about another man in a Lincolnshire nursery where he had been sterilising chicken houses with formaldehyde. Now that would take an awful long while to get through a gas mask, formaldehyde, it'd make you cry, but he kept in the filter When they're using methyl bromide every twenty minutes that filter has to be taken off and a new one fitted, and they go away to be... whatever done to them. It's one of these chemicals what depletes the ozone in the atmosphere, but suddenly that stopped in Holland because they are on a high water table and the gas doesn't go through water. It stops at water. And the methyl bromide was turning into bromine. Now when the male workers were eating their tomatoes and their lettuces you know the results (laughter) Now eventually . . . this was another reason why we were glad to get rid of the nursery, because my wife was worried that people might come over, a kid kick a ball in through the glass, go in after it . ..
Wife: We had notices on the doors. We had great big water tanks, and I said "It's not worth it. We'll have to take what money we can get." And we could have built four houses down there ourselves when the two acres went and they would all come past the door. And we've been here then 44 years, and I thought we aren't going to live another 44, so in the end we stopped partly because of his health and partly because of the worry.
