GreenKoos is go!

Welcome to the official re-launch of the re-launched GreenKoos blog. Third time lucky! This time however this endeavour is actually backed up by a real entity - GREENKOOS LTD, which is a real company you can actually go and check on in the companies house website. So far it's made £0 and 0 pence but that's ok. It's early days. Soon we'll be making real money off  real good plants like the one's shown above. The big one with the white flowers is Brugmansia 'Madame Foster' with a yellow 'Charles Grimaldi' behind it and some other neat stuff scattered around.

Anyone in my line of business will have had this said to them by at least once or many times:

"It's always the same with plants, I get them home and then I just kill 'em!"

To which I sometimes reply:

"It's the same with me and pets. I get them home. Then I just kill them."

Very rarely gets a laugh, that one. However behind this rather tasteless gag is a fundamental truth: Your plants, your pets and even your children are all organisms you have to tend to some degree or else they perish. Or wander off or get taken away by the authorities. Of course the latter 2 eventualities are not likely to happen to your plants- not until I get into power anyway. Now I would say that of the 3 types of organism listed, the needs of plants are the least complex and therefore they should be the easiest to tend but apparently this is not so. I would expect that what in facts makes4 people kill their plants is the shortage of time in our lives. Unlike the pets and children, the plants have less tools in their arsenal for obtaining the precious share of your attention. Then of course there's the devices that you're likely to be reading this on. Throw it down the toilet and tend to your poor plants you monsters! If you haven't actually got any got any plants left then here's the good news - you can buy some top notch ones from GREENKOOS LTD. Visit our obsolete website at  http://www.greenkoos.co.uk/ . There is a new one in construction but oh don't ask!

Meanwhile....

Well I had continued the project started in the last post not long after it was published and I really felt I had some momentum going. Gven the scale of the task at hand I employed an MP3 player dictophone thing, rather than walk around with a notepad and effectively writing all those things twice. It was on completion of indoor-greenouse-polytunnel section of this task that I discovered that I had made some error and that I had spent half an hour walking around loudly and clearly stating the latin names of many plants for no reason whatsoever.

It is to my shame that I have not resumed this exercise in the intervening period particularly given that it is a legal requirement to commence an annual stock-take. I think....I need legal advice really for all of these things I do. When you have a job all of that's kind of done for you but I'm self-employed and all that I'm aware of is that I have to be insured in case I hurt somebody and that I have to pay the government some of what I earned. However how much should I pay on all of these plants I've made before they've been sold? Should I actually claim back tax for their upkeep until that unhappy day of separation? I really don't know. Also half of them belong to Dee-dee, half of every plant that is. He employs himself same as I do but we share the nursery. It should really be a legal entity in itself I suppose but it isn't so there you go. It's a time-resources thing.

Now this time of year, of course, time is in much greater supply that usual. The ground is either too frozen or too wet to seriously do anything with and all the sensible plants have, at the very least stopped growing. This also creates a bit of a funding crisis as you'd expect. The idea is that when the sun is shining and one can work, a resource surplus is accumulated to carry one through the winter months. At the most basic level this consists of a freezer full of beans, cabbage, berries sort of thing but more significantly a big old pile of money, after all the rent, loan payments, water rates, council tax, none of that stops. Well, the council tax does stop for 2 months doesn't it? Phew. So anyway this year, even accounting for the expense Kris-mas (the crazy laughing 'record-breakers', sprinter winterval celebration) I'd just about got enough spare moochie for about 3 weeks of absolutely no work. Then December 2010 happened. Wow! It were right nippy and for absolutely ages. Then the van insurance renewel was 3 times last years. Ouch! Here's a money-saving tip for you  a'la Martin Lewis of Jeremy Vine show fame - Don't get caught by armed policeman going down the wrong down a road iun an airport. It was signposted badly you bastards! Anyway that was years ago. Just took the insurers a while to find out.  How was I supposed to know that was a 'conviction'. In my mind the only 'conviction' I had was of my utter innocence.

It wasn't for some sympathetic clients ( they know I'm The Best) and the housing association job, I would have gone under by now for sure. What a disaster. I'm living like Ed Reardon. Actually I've meant to talk some here about the housing association job, as it's some of the most interesting work I do and has given me the chance to some gloves-off garden creation in an inner-city area but sadly I don't know if I'll still be doing it in March as the contract is due for renewel and they might want a firm better resourced and organised. I mean I've not been certain of this job continuing indefinately since the end of the 1st year and I'm now into the 3rd. If it looks like I'll still be doing it in the 2011 season I'll start talking about it more and post some pics.

Anyway I'll see if I can get the stock-take done over the next few days and post thoses fascinating lists on here. Until then, just to whet the appetite of all you inferior turkey-necks of the horticultural world I'll leave you with the exciting news that that the Helicodiceros muscivorus are romping away and might even peak too early for this season's shows. We'll see.
Much love!
K
   

Brrrrrr!

As all Greenkoos operations are brought to a standstill by the huge quantities of frozen fluffy white crap from the skies it's an idea moment to resume where we left off in September. The list of plants in this one upstairs room has grown a bit since last time as it now has to sustain a bunch exotic refugees from the cruelties of the world beyond these walls:

Dracaena marginata
Kalanchoe tomentosa
Gasteria liliputana
Haworthia 'Black Prince'
Hoya carnosa
Cereus 'Monstera'
Lophophora williamsii
Brugmansia 'Madame Foster'
                  'Creamsickle'
                  'Jamie'
                   'Sunset'
Datura inoxia
Calamagrostis acutifolia
Aloysia triphylla
Pelagoniums
Sauromatum venosum
Amorphophallus nepalensis
Plumeria sp
              'Black Giant'
Stapelia grandiflora
Zingiber officinale
Eucomis pallidiflora
              comosa
              'Swazi Pride'
Astelia chathamica
Helicodiceros muscivorus
Trichocereus
Azorina vidallii
A..........

Wish I could remember what that last one is called. It'll come back. So will I...

Greetings

It's a wet day at the end of September 2010, a poor day for actually commiting any horticulture, so therefore a perfect day to start writing a blog about it. There may also be a podcast at some point, maybe an online catalogue and all sorts of amazing things flowing out of the Greenkoos website as soon as it gets re-launched . At the moment, however there is just this, so I'd better make it good.

Greenkoos currently consist of 2 independent sole-trading gardeners who pool their knowledge, resources and plants and offer them up to the public for pennies. We do the occassional garden make-over together but we're mostly interested in propagating plants and selling them as GREENKOOS at plant fairs in Northern England and formerly on t 'net as GREENKOOSBIOMASS. This however, for reasons I'll probably get to later, has yet to provide us with a living wage so we generally depend on scratching around in the mud like our peasant ancestors.

I suppose I'd better introduce the 'we' of which I speak:

I am Koosie, currently a human male in his late 30s. I originate in the south-east of England and been involved with plants one way or other since I grew up and naturally a little bit before. The other one of us is Greenie (or GreenDD) who is a human male in his late 20s. His origins are in East Yorkshire where we met in the early years of this century. Obviously these are not our real names but were our MSN Messenger names when we originally planned this thing. Originally we were called Green-Koos Biomass as I thought Biomass was a good word for plants  with a nice 21st century eco-technology ring to it. As it turned out Biomass is a bit of a dirty word in ecological circles these days as it's become associated with vast monoculture plantations growing food for motor-cars on what used to be rainforests. Crap! At the moment we're just 'Greenkoos' or 'Greenkoos Brugmansia and Tropical Plants' as Greenie would have it. More about that later, no doubt.

Our short-term aim is to have our own small commercial nursery and my own long-term aim is to have a great big commercial nursery attached to big park with a mini-railway running round it, a nature reserve, an arboretum, an oriental garden and some dinosaurs. Oh yeh and an eden project like thing but loads better.

For now, I'll just concentrate on the little nursery bit. Given that we're currently operating out of a not-huge private garden in east-Manchester, we already have an enormous variety of different plants. We don't really discriminate too much. Basically we'll grow anything we can get our paws on but there are certain things we will go out of our way to obtain. Greenie, for example, is very keen on Brugmansias which are the shrubby form of the Angel's Trumpet Plants often collectively known as Datura. I don't have any specific favourite genera but I do have a penchant for large leafy tropical-looking things though I often state that the apex of the horticultural arts is bonsai.

It did occur to me to list here all the different plants Greenkoos hold specimens of, highlighting those currently available for sale. This however would take several hours and I thought I'd never get this started if I commited myself to that so late in the afternoon. Just for starters though I'll begin with the diversity of houseplants visible from my current position. Let's see there's...

Aspidistra elatior
Ficus retusa
Ficus benjamina
Crassula ovata
Tradescantia fluminensis 'Variegata'
Cyanotis sp
Maranta sp
Salvia sp
Sansieveria trifasciata
Kleina articulartus

Nothing that amazing there but that's just 1 window-sill . Sp, by the way, in this use refers to nothing more than me not knowing the species name or simply having forgotten it. That's 10 already. Impressed? Not yet eh? Well there's lots more to come....

The picture accompanying this worthless introductory  prose is of a hardy perennial called Morina longifolia or the Whorlflower. We have these available as plant or seed.

Greenkoos Biomass

Greenkoos is an innovative plant nursery/ Gardener's collective based in Manchester in Northern England.