 Is it ladies' fair? Ladies' fairs! Okay, I'm Lisa Ralsop and I run the gardening side of Camelan Garden Centre and Farm Shop. I'm Ian Ralsop, I'm her husband and I run the farm shop side of things here at Camelan. Camelan is a location here just up the road and it was a name that we liked because it's Welsh but it's easy for English people to say which we felt was important but also there is a thought that it translates to Camelot and there is a strong sense of the Arthurian legends in this area. The garden centre opened in 2016 and it came out of idle chats in a pub on a winters night, knowing about the lack of garden centres. Oh, there's a bit of land up in the village that's not doing anything, why don't you see if you can rent it? A year and a half after that conversation we opened and that was four years ago. Looking back at photographs there are very few plant displays, a few pallets of compost and a lot of goodwill from people who came to our garden centre which was very, very much in its infancy. Two years of developing that we felt that we needed to add a farm shop into the mix and also give it in the opportunity to give up his day job of being a gardener and indulge in his love of cheese. Cheese, yes, I've been a lover of cheese since I was a wee boy. I've been a gardener all my life and recently after 35 years it started to take its toll on my body, especially living here and so I decided to semi-retire and follow that passion of cheeses by selling it to the local population and beyond. I think that we are really passionate about plants grown in Britain and Welsh produce as well and it felt really important to us not to have things that had lots of air miles attached to them or that were grown abroad in poly tunnels. We wanted plants that were hardy that would cope with the Welsh weather and then we were really passionate about Welsh produce as a whole. One thing that I have really developed a love for or a passion for are alpine plants and we sell a lot of alpine plants because they cope with poor soil, rubbish weather and being up at high altitudes but also the shrubs that we sell by from a nursery up in North Wales, they're really, really hardy stock, they're good quality, they're really good prices. I think the starting point for me is not to sell plants that are poor quality and I just think that we've fine-tuned it and found really good growers that sell their plants at good prices which means that they're affordable to most people. I specialise in good Welsh produce, it doesn't have to be low for Welsh produce as long as it's good it can come from the north, from the south, from the east. There are criteria that have to be filled, I won't have palm oil for sale and it has to be decent, it has to be decent, I'm not getting any alter in that palm shop, it's too small. If it's got a present from Wales and then on the back made in Cornwall it doesn't get in and over the last two years I've been very surprised at the amount of produce that I've been able to find and we have had people come to us saying I do this, I make a product, I see it's not in our shelves, would you like to sell it for me? And for some products I'm the only outlet and they won't go anywhere else because we sell it for them. We had another scheduled visit from Waterculture Wales, there was a meeting cancelled nearby and they stopped on the off-charts, it was a very cold February day and we ended up standing and chatting for probably two hours out and it was really cold and it's very open and exposed here and I did know about them, I followed on Instagram at that point but hadn't really used them as a resource, using their Instagram account and it has been really interesting seeing what other growers and nurseries there are and garden centres are in Wales and kind of seeing that the challenges that they face and sort of I suppose in a distant kind of way giving ourselves all a bit of support and supporting each other with our endeavours and it just gave me an idea of what's going on around us and just an opportunity to kind of connect with other growers really, another Waterculture project. The local honey flies off the shelves, I can't get enough of it, as soon as it's there pretty much within a couple of days it's all gone on on the phone again. We've got some cracking pudge that we've just started selling, that's a right winner with tourists and local meat but a first year I wasn't able to get any lamb, proper Welsh lamb, it was all roaming around on the fields over there, I couldn't get any of it whatsoever. A local farmer approached me last winter and said we're diversifying into selling from our farms and so now we're regularly supplied with his lamb and it is gorgeous, absolutely melting them out stuff. We are very dependent on tourist trade, very dependent on it. We get local support but the bulk of it is from tourism. And I think that if it's right to go on to that is where it leads into the Covid lockdown is that we had all sorts of big plans, we've got a little cafe just behind us that we opened for two days and then lockdown was announced which we knew was going to happen. We wanted to have a couple of days of running the cafe to see whether it would work or not. So we had all these ideas about what we would be doing to bring in extra customers, attract new people to the site and then lockdown happened and Ian suggested that we did food deliveries and offer it free local food deliveries. We didn't have a system set up, that was a mistake. We launched ourselves into it and we hit the ground running with that and within the third week we were delivering to 60 people. So while it hasn't been the year that we expected it to be, there's been a lot of new challenges but also I think we've risen to the challenges that were presented to us and we've won ourselves new customers but also through that what we've realised is actually a lot of our customers are local. We're not dependent on the holiday trade for a big part of the growing year, they are local customers, they're people who have been coming to the garden centre regularly and have supported us and that was a surprise. I mean a lot of people were scared to go to the supermarkets, we had an awful lot of isolating people. We didn't realise actually how many people had to go into isolation for various reasons and it was obvious that the supermarkets early on weren't coping with delivery, suddenly everybody wanted them to turn up on the doorstop with food and what have you and that just wasn't happening. So in a way we filled a gap for quite a while, while the supermarkets sort of got their heads around it. So yeah, we kind of got ourselves, our cog was put into place and it was part of a bigger picture really, what we did I think. I'm dreading the next accounts that I've got to go in. When I work out, because the profit margins on fruit and veg are very minimal, we were delivering, we didn't always know where people were, Ian would be driving around trying to find somewhere, towing a trailer full of compost, guzzling fuel, we just, you know, there was no profit in that element of what we were doing. Our turnover was OK if the profit margins were very, very low. When we were speaking to the environmental health officer that we deal with for here, we talked about the importance of gardening for people and she said that her own father was desperate to garden and she was going to drop them off some plants and she agreed that we could deliver plants and compost as long as we were out delivering food. So it wasn't an unnecessary journey and that she also agreed that people could come and collect plants and compost if they were collecting food. And that to us, that was a bit of a lifeline because it meant we could sell the produce that we've got. We had to invest in new equipment. We've had to pay for signage. We've had to pay for hand sanitizer, mask, gloves, which we bought in bulk because we have no idea how long this is going to last. The signage was changing frequently so that had to be always constantly changing. The signage on the gate and around the shop. But we also needed to pay people to come and help us because we couldn't manage the workload and the logistics of managing deliveries. So we adapted, we reviewed it on a daily basis and then we made changes as we needed to just to try and manage the demand for the deliveries but also to make sure that we met people's needs. Our board meeting was in bed one night just before lockdown occurred. What do we do? Do we stay open and do our best? Or do we just shut and hide and accept the consequences? And we thought now we will stay open for as long as we... as long as it's possible to stay open. And I think that's partly because that's who we are. We felt we wanted to offer our customers who have supported us a service while things were difficult for them. And right up until last week, we were still delivering to someone who was shielding and that was our last delivery to her last week. And it felt important to be able to do that even if it was one customer only that we were delivering to. We needed to do that while she needed us to supply her with the food. I was also very conscious that a lot of my suppliers are family businesses. They don't have too big profit margins and a lot of them would have just shut down and we would never have seen them again. So from my point of view, trying to keep them afloat by selling as much of their stuff as possible was important. I'm hoping that all of them have come out of this. We might have lost a couple. I don't know. I haven't done the groundwork on that yet. But yeah, it was very important for me to keep as many people as possible afloat. One of the things I think that's been really affirming after this whole experience with Covid and lockdown is the generosity of people who we know as friends, but who have stepped up to help us. And we've had volunteer helpers for the Garden Centre who's basically rearranged the whole layout, has been responsible for ordering plants, managing deliveries, another neighbour that helps us with the food deliveries and then a fantastic couple that gave us a huge trailer who said, this is for you to do your plant deliveries and your compost deliveries. And we wouldn't have managed to do them without it. And so I think it's been interesting how people have responded to us and what they've been able to offer us as well to help us keep going. I think friendships have been forged out of this quite seriously. And we won't forget that. Yeah.