29/08/2024
Postcard from Wendron Pancake Barn and Plant Nursery;
Summer Holidays, Young Staff and Gardening.
Hi all! And we hope you are having a great summer holiday period with the kids.
This year, as a semi stay at home dad (while Kim cooks the pancakes) I’ve been trying to get the kids out doing stuff most days, and today we are going to be raft building on a big pond.
They will be a stinking mess by the end of it all, but last time we did it they had a great time and I loved it too, despite dreading it due to taking Peggy with us who had just turned 2. I believe it to be a bit like childbirth - I am told – in that I forgot the bad bits and remembered the good, and so we are about to do it again!
Regular readers of these silly postcards know that I am not a fan of the modern world, with phones in particular and all they bring with them, and so we try to create a place at the Pancake Barn for people to go which takes people back a bit, with logs to climb and jump on, hammocks, trees, wooden playpark, no chemical use etc. animals to feed and the house dog Flossy on the loose.
We grow lots of tropical plants to try and make it feel like you are on holiday. That is the idea anyway, and I know that so many of you share our view on things and love our place as a result.
Because we are a little different as a business, we are a bit of a human filter which ends up with a group of reasonably like minded individuals. I suppose all businesses do that, but I would like to think that most of our customers are the type who watch their kids play and talk to their friends, not just stare at their phones.
Anyway, the reason I am raft building and not running around the Pancake Barn while the kids are neglected is because we have put so much work into finishing off the place recently, that the place is now running pretty much like clockwork even when we are super busy.
In huge part this is because the young people we have right now are like super human versions of young people in general, who, as a group, I never believed could reach the standard they have. That is no slight on our young people of the past, who have been genuinely brilliant, but this year, oh my!
They are like the treble winners at Man U or city. Come and see for yourself, it is weird how professional and friendly they are at all times, whilst looking absolutely brilliant and shiny in the new uniforms, as only young people can do - just as we did once! – sigh!!!
I walked in the other day and our front of house lead – the awesome Jenna – said to me it’s not been that busy, just steady, and then I found out we had served an amount of customers which I know we would have been buckling under in past years.
I checked out the kitchen and pot wash and heard the max wait time had been 30 minutes from my utterly and absurdly brilliant wife Kim, and the pot wash was clear of plates too – weird, and yet brilliant.
Ayla, Jenna, Jos, Abi, Liv and also the returning old Liv! Josh, Millie and then another 10 or so who are more occasional - a massive well done to you all, you do yourselves and your parents proud, and we are super proud of you too. The main 7/8 of you in particular will receive stella references when the time comes.
It’s took an incredible amount of work, patience, persistence and mental fortitude to arrive where we are now with the Pancake Barn, and this year includes the news from the planning department that they are going to give us planning permission on a permanent basis. They are just working on some addendums in terms of use of buildings etc. so this is another reason to relax.
This isn’t the official announcement I will do when we properly have it rubber stamped, and that will include an evening celebration with free food for all those who have gone out of their way to help and support us on our journey.
We are truly thankful to all those people, and also our customers who just like coming. For now, we wait a while longer, but this time with certainty it is all going to be fine.
Moving the subject a little to plants and gardening, my favourite hobby, and the thing that is always constant - no matter ones physical health, anyone can do it at least to some extent.
I know many of you enjoy how the place is currently looking. You tell me and I love that, but it is hard to see something properly when you are always there, so the feedback is very important to me. I now see that the trees are forming ever larger canopies, and I’m starting to understand it won’t be too many more years before much of the place will have tree cover as the canopies meet.
This will change things dramatically into more of a forest setting, and I’ve never gardened in those conditions before, and can only hope I can still grow many of the unusual plants and palms which currently flourish.
I will certainly ensure canopies are clipped where necessary to bring in light, but once they are 30ft up, it gets pretty tough I think! We will see how it develops, and of course that is the exciting thing about gardening isn’t it, you never know for sure.
And if any of you are wondering why there are not a load of different types of plants for sale anymore, it is because the supermarkets all now sell them all year round for cheaper than I can, and so people stopped buying them. As a result I have been growing palms from seed, thousands of them, most for wholesale, but in years to come also retail. This will remove the need for many local garden centres to import from the continent (the kind I grow anyhow), which can only be good for the environment, and so meets our general commitments to this whole area of concern.
It is sad to see this area of the business go/change, but you cannot swim against the tide forever, and it is just another of thousands of examples of how Britain is changing.
One day, there will only be 100 companies who own everything. So big will they be that the monopolies and mergers commission will have long been in their pockets and under their influence, and they will be uncontrolled and effectively hold power over governments and countries. Everything will be brilliantly automated, and you, the people, will have every convenience, but no need to work hard or strive for excellence anymore, or even walk or drive to anywhere other than your laptop or single supermarket, because everything is already done and owned by them and given to you on a plate.
Currently two thirds of us are overweight, and that will become even more. You will probably end up being given a minimum salary for free as AI removes millions more jobs. But only enough to afford poor quality everything and be further controlled by the processed sugary products that they control you with, and the medical services they then provide you with because of all the processed sugary products.
Your phones are controlled by them, and they nudge you a hundred times a day how to act, look and what to buy, to eat, to say, to hear. You find yourself not even talking to your friends anymore, and you ignore your kids more and more.
They can’t play the piano like other generations did, they can’t jump very far anymore either, but most people think they are fine because everyone is similar to them, so together, the majority sink from excellence to collective mediocrity.
Everyone is anxious, further lacking the confidence to challenge what life has become, and at that point, these huge companies have check mate. Tell me that what I have just described is not already becoming reality, that we are not already a long way down that road........ You can’t, can you?
But pretty much everyone can do themselves and humanity a favour - Remove social media from your phones, remove the expenditure on nonsense that you know deep down to be baseless or harmful to your family and yourself. Then put that money to buy a 2nd hand piano for your house and your kids, to learn music, to read together everyday and get them playing outside and get them into team sports or hobbies.
You do not need to post photos and tell everyone about these things, just do them and love doing them, and revel in becoming excellent at stuff again. People who matter to you, who actually see you and your family will see the incredible things you do. You and your family will naturally then become better than others at stuff and that job you want will be yours, or your childs in later years, and so many other doors will open, and life will be altered.
I don’t know how many people read this postcard, it is only an occasional thing I publish, and this last few type of paragraphs often comes into them! I’m a middle aged guy who remembers what things used to be like that’s all, and it hurts to see what society and individuals are becoming. I definitely don’t want to sound lecturing though, but surely people who remember must say something right?
Anyway, hopefully you will indulge me these occasional thoughts, and just to be clear, I do not have a phone, I threw my last one away about 15 years ago, so I know that what I suggest here can be done, and that it does indeed make you and your family happier and healthier and more able. It doesn’t make you perfect. It doesn’t remove all issues either, life is both brilliant and awful at times, with many mistakes made whether you have a phone or not, but not having one at all, or at least no bloody social media on it, will improve your life.
Houseplants! I’ve been learning through experience to grow better and more houseplants in the main restaurant. I’ve had many failures and had to learn the same lesson once again, that with houseplants, if you don’t do it close to 100% right, then they fail, so the arms race had to begin by ordering a moisture probe, and I still failed so then a ph probe, more dead plants.
Then I realised the moisture probe reads wet when it is actually close to dry, and very wet really means OK! Things improved but still weren’t great.
I had some fungal issues in stagnant air areas, so now I spray them with a natural anti fungal. More improvement, but then I switched to seaweed liquid concentrate fertilizer and that seemed to be the final piece of the jigsaw. They immediately improved, so this spurred me on. I got some mister sprays and now I occasionally take them all outside and shower them etc. too.
The damn things have become like a collective child! What I thought would take an hour once a week has become many times that. I spent an entire day messing around with houseplants the other day!
Recently we had the hygiene inspector round and he informed us we couldn’t have plants anywhere near the food and drink prep areas – fair enough I suppose, but it is always disappointing when my creative vision meets cold reality. That cost me another couple of days to move them all around!
I won’t give up though, I can’t, my nature is such that I might be awful at something for a very long time, and I should probably just give up, but I simply can’t. I will create an attractive jungle like internal restaurant, I will!
Should anyone be interested in using locally derived liquid seaweed concentrate for any of their plants, I recommend:
LITTLE GREEN SEAWEED
The Annexe, Goonreith, Rosudgeon, TR20 9PG
07354 925 612
[email protected]
I recommend you buy a large tub of it (20lts) as it works out much cheaper, and then just glug a bit of it into each large watering can. It will last you ages and it has a huge amount of benefits to both the environment and your plants versus standard chemical derived fertilizers. If you can, use that or animal waste, these are the gold standard for all plants, outside or in.
Finally, I want to cover some admin points here now by reminding you, our super customers, of the following;
• If you walk or cycle, tell us at the till point, and 10% off!
• If you are blue light services or armed forces, you get 10% off, and thank you for protecting us and putting yourselves on the line more than the rest of us ever do
• Childminders also get 10% off
• You can picnic at our place for free no problem, we encourage it, just make sure you take your litter with you. Similarly, you can bring food with you and eat it as part of your order etc. so if you bring a pasty from down the road, we care not
• Dogs on leads please – this does not apply to Flossy the house German Shep, because it is her home, and I know where she does her number 2’s (it is not the playpark!)
• We have plenty of pre-paid pay it forwards £10 pancake vouchers hanging up above the till. They are there for anyone with kids under 12 to use. Please don’t be embarrassed, just ask to use them. Most of us have been proper skint before, you are not alone. And, if you have plenty of cash, please consider buying a voucher for someone else to use - you will definitely go to heaven for this.
Thank you all for your patronage, and we hope to see you soon my lovelies - Ben 😊
