...But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
Actually it's not that easy running a haulage business a day like this - the A21 is closed between Lamberhurst and Tonbridge, the M20 is at a standstill from the M25 to Ashford, the A249 is closed; our Westerham quarry is closed - and still the snow is coming here in Newenden. There is - unusually - hardly any traffic past the office right now (9am).
The forecast is for more of the white stuff this morning, and then quite a lot on Thursday. Might not be a terribly productive week!
This is a recent addition to the Bourne Sport fleet of machinery - a Dakota 310 Turf Tender. It is a compact machine for spreading various material - here you can see it used for top-dressing a park lawn in Camden. It can also be used, for example, for spreading rubber granules on artificial football pitches - an important part of keeping the synthetic grass in top shape.
This is a relatively new development - earlier machines of this kind are much bigger and have to be tractor-towed. This, pedestrian-guided machine is ideal for getting into areas with narrow access gates. It has an 11 hp Honda engine and the spreading width can be adjusted up to 6 metres.
There is a video of a Dakota 310 in motion here.
This is a sneak preview of an e-mail flyer that will be going out all over SE England on Friday, aimed at groundskeepers at football and rugby clubs, parks and local councils.
Now is the time to prepare pitches for the summer season - they will typically need top-dressing, scarifying and re-seeding. If they look like the picture in the flyer, then some verti-draining and perhaps bigger drainage works would be required, too. Sports pitches wear unevenly and special attention will be needed at the goal-mouths, for example.
Note that it's not just natural pitches that need winter maintenance - 3G and hybrid pitches also need looking after, if they are going to survive through their full potential life-span, which could be ten years or more.
We got there! The new bourneamenity.co.uk website has been launched and is now fully operational. Still a few minor bits and pieces to add and adjust but it's all looking quite smart, we think.
We are already getting about 1000 visits per day but some of these are from the search engines, updating their records. Another interesting, but odd statistic is that the most visited page is Products/Grass - I wonder what kind of grass the visitors are looking for...
With the new Bourne Sport site well established and new sites for Gardenscape and John Bourne & Co coming online in the next couple of weeks, we'll soon have the full set of Group websites in commission.
Many thanks to Alex and Liam at Lunar Works for their lovely design and clever coding!
