Spanner management

I always spend the last part of November trying to suppress the feeling of Christmas panic. Will the flower crop be at the right stage to meet the Christmas orders? Will a winter bug lay half our team low at the crucial time? Is our box order on track? Will an Atlantic gale stop the freight boat running? Have we remembered the small but oh so important things like tea bags and loo rolls?

These worries fall into two piles; controllable and uncontrollable. I am by nature a control freak, an acceptance of the uncontrollable does not come easily. This year in an attempt to quell my pre – Christmas tummy turbulence I tried to be more accepting of the inevitability of, ‘spanners in the works’. There would be unforeseen spanners of varying size and I regained a degree of control by acknowledging that after 16 years of running Churchtown Farm I believe we have most of the spanner management skills needed. As a result, I hit December in a more positive frame of mind.

The inevitable Christmas spanners arrived but thankfully this year they were relatively small and soft. With the help of our great team on Scilly, the Isles of Scilly Steamship Co and the Royal Mail thousands of gift boxes of Christmas scented narcissi successful reached doorsteps all over the country.