 Okay, I'm Charles Warner. This business is called Quinkie Young Plants. We supply garden centres throughout Wales with herbs and alpines. There's been a business on this site for now for 32 years but selling what we call finished plants to garden centres and we've been doing that for the last 10 years. The alpines that we grow are plants that are suitable for that. They tend to be hardy, low growing, very bright flowering plants especially in the spring often mound forming good for the front of any kind of border but particularly for rock gardens and any kind of situation like that. Also very good for container gardening and that kind of thing. The herbs that we grow we have quite a small range really, a very popular culinary herb. So the things that you use in your kitchen every day. So lots of basil, lots of parsley, lots of rosemary, lots of sage. So we don't do the more unusual things because we find that they don't sell but we do lots and lots of the popular ones. Parsley is by far the biggest seller probably. We sell probably twice as much curly parsley as any other single herb. So they tend to be the very popular ones that we do the most off. One of the main things here is that we grow everything ourselves. It's quite an unusual way to do things as a wholesaler that's applying retailers. So we start the plants off from a cutting or a seedling and we grow it right from the beginning of its life here on the nursery. Most wholesalers now buy in their plugs as a as a root cutting or as a seedling from another grower. But we don't do that because basically my skill is as a propagator and because on a small scale that we operate on it's very expensive to buy in the young plant. We don't have the buying power to bring the price down of the plant. So we produce them ourselves which means we can produce them a lot cheaper. It makes our range unique. We're able to grow a lot of the things that would be very expensive to buy in. So tend to be avoided by a lot of the other wholesalers. So our range is very different to what other people offer. The disruption that COVID has caused is obviously going to have a ripple effect throughout every business in the UK. And some will find positives in that and I think we will find positives in that. We don't know what the business landscape is going to be when we come into our sales period in the next spring. And so we're going to have to learn a degree of flexibility just to survive I suspect. In the next 12 to 18 months there will be things that it will be a learning curve, a huge learning curve. This time of year which is mid-August. We're focusing on the sales that we're going to have next spring. So we're producing the plants from the cuttings, putting them in a small pot ready to go into a larger pot in some cases or ready to produce a really good plant with lots of flower to go and garden some of the benches early in the spring. So last August we were in the middle of doing that. So the whole place gets tidied up at this time of year and all the growing areas are swept and cleaned and prepared for the new plants to go down that are going to overwinter and give us our spring crops. So we did that this time last year. So when we entered the period of February to March we're just on the cusp then of our sales period starting off. We have about four months of very very intense sales to the garden centres and they really start depending on the weather in the first half of March which is exactly when we closed down. So we had a lot of things that were ready to hit the garden centre benches just at the point when everyone was closed. What I meant was that for the shorter term crops really there was no way out for those so they all had to be gathered together and thrown away. For the longer term ones the staff went home and I just stayed here and kept them as best I could in the hope that once we reopened we'd have something to sell or that we could use later as a stock plant to get another cutting from or something something or those that sort of thing but I didn't really see that we were going to get any sales because we very quickly went past the time when those sort of plants are saleable. It really is horrible we've had this kind of horticulture does create waste and the reason for that is that you have to be you have to have product for your suppliers and the only way to make sure that you have product is to slightly overproduce all the time. We've got really good at not wasting very much and one of the reasons is that partly because we grow our own we have lots of stages that we can sell at so once we've reached the end of that stage they can go on to the next stage and quite often everything gets sold in the end and we've got really good at minimising that wastage and then suddenly we had to suddenly stop when the focus for six months has been to have product on benches on the 1st of March there suddenly weren't any benches to fill and the product was there and so quite a lot of that had to be discarded and yeah it was horrible it really was horrible it was also a lot of work and a lot of it is still here because the tips were closed and we actually take it it goes into the green waste which gets turned back into compost but when I saw what other people were doing I saw acres and acres of bed implants that had days literally days before they had to be thrown away and they're in perfect condition and my heart went out to them because some of them were big employers and some of them had huge amounts invested in those crops and that was very very tough and I saw it daily on social media there were daily little short films and pictures of crops that were ready to go to gun centres and instead they were going to tips that's a that's a big hit well I found is talking to other businesses but they all have similar but slightly different issues so I'm very interested in the food industry and so the people in the food industry have had issues we've had people throwing farmers throwing away milk we've had the cafes not being being able to open and now they can open but on a much smaller scale than they were before because they don't have the space to fit people in we don't know how long this is going to last and we will have to adapt to whatever we're left with I think on a small scale like this selling as we do a product that is produced in our little nation I think we have certain advantages that we're going to have to play on my only hope is that the retailers understand that they see what we do and they take an advantage from what we do and so they come to us rather than coming from uh than coming to uh the suppliers overseas and maybe that way we'll either expand to satisfy the demand that we already have or another way might be to do what I intended in the first place which was to supply more of a local area rather than having to spread out further and further at the moment it looks like we need to spread out further and further but I'd be quite happy to stay closer to home if we could pick up more trade here I was really excited that there was something called cultural wells that existed I've been I've been here and since 1989 I actually started clearing the site to make a a young plant business to supply large growers with a propagation material and in all that time I was alone there were there was nobody nobody that I knew of that was in not sort of my sector um and then one day I came across a little video on youtube that's that was made by somebody called water cultural wells and I thought how on earth did this get made without me knowing I have been here for so long and I contacted them I became part of that which was really it was focused on growers well our bit of it was focused on growers like myself but even more so on the sort of cottage industry side where lots of people were producing plants and cut flowers and other horde cultural produce and selling out local markets and plant fairs and things like that and it was all about us communicating together and it was fantastic we ended up quite competitively going to each other's holdings and being quite competitive about the food in the end and it was really good fun and we and it was really enjoyable and I think everybody came out of it and learned a lot there were positives to take from it definitely there were positives there I like a big shake-up we got noticed because as soon as the garden centers did begin to open and they were one of the first retailers to be allowed to open there was a huge scramble for stock and nobody had any because they were all in a position just like I was here where imports weren't coming in growers weren't supplying everyone was in turmoil and yet because I was here just on my own working seven days a week I was able to have some product and get it out there it was very stressful it was not very economic the loads that we were delivering often there was no profit but we were keeping some plants for all our customers that required them so we were operating a very different way normally we send an availability list out every week and we get every plant that is available that week out on a selling bed all prepared and ready to be delivered and then we send out a list of what we have available and the orders come from that we weren't ever able to do that we were just firefighting really we had the phone was ringing all the time the emails were coming in all the time people desperate for stock and we just piled up what we had onto the van and got it out there so people just they weren't putting in orders of search they were just saying please bring us stock and for really three months or so at least we that's all I did personally was just get the plants out get them into the van and get them out to as many customers as you could for a while