Stewarts Office Plants

We supply many businesses across the South, from Sussex and Surrey, through Hampshire and Dorset to Wiltshire and Somerset. For more information about the services we offer visit our home page, or contact us here. In this blog you'll find news, interesting snippets, stories and pictures of our staff's adventures out on the road.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Re-use and Re-cycle


We do love to re-cycle at Stewarts. To this end, we offer some excellent deals on our re-cycled containers - see just a few in the photograph! They are just sitting waiting to be re-sprayed in some of our latest colour options (matt finishes, like expresso, bronze and silver make the containers look especially contemporary), filled with a lovely, fresh new plant and placed in a corner of your office for all to benefit from and enjoy.

Why not call or email me and I'll be happy to let you have an idea of cost. The containers in the photograph are not the only style available, by the way.


Thursday, August 14, 2008

Rubbish!

As with all manual industries, Stewarts Office Plants creates a lot of waste. However, we're very proud of the fact we recycle almost everything, thanks to our purpose-built recycling facilities at our Broomhill base. Our green waste is separated into soil, woody waste and green waste, all of which is chipped/shredded & mixed up, then allowed to rot down, before being re-used as compost & mulch by our landscaping department. Among my less managerial duties is emptying the trailers of muck, but at least it means I can fulfil every boy's childhood dream of driving a tractor!

We also receive a lot of packaging with our plant consignments: the cellophane and cardboard is compacted and baled for recycling, and all the used plant pots are put in the 'pot exchange' in the garden centre car park. We even re-use the cardboard that our new pots come in on the next delivery!
Anecdotally, I don't believe any of our competitors can touch our level of recycling, so if this element of our business is important to you, then we're the company for you.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Houseplants?

Just come back from a new house being built in Bournemouth, where Stewarts have installed a 3.5m Dracaena Song of India, and two groups of three Kentia Palms up to 3.5m in height in the open-plan living area. Here's a picture of my installation team posing by their handiwork (well done, guys). Filling these 1.8m diameter tree pits used over 100 of our 75 litre compost bags.

Makes my skinny 5ft plant & two bowls on the windowsill in my living room look a bit pathetic!

Monday, August 04, 2008

A challenging install goes like a dream

Remember how windy it was on Friday morning? We were up the end of Bournemouth pier at 07:30 installing nine Chamaerops Humilis palms in the al fresco seating area of the restaurant there, where it was windy enough to blow the palms off our trolleys, despite the fact we could barely lift them ourselves! That wasn't our only difficulty though:

1. The displays needed to be secured in position, but also removed for winter each year. Normally we bolt exterior pots through their bases, but this would have meant digging the plant out to undo the bolt - hardly ideal. So I came up with the idea of having some metal plates made (very quickly, by JP Design in Ferndown) that were bolted to the bottom of the pot in advance, and protruded out of the sides, enabling bolts to be fitted/removed without disturbing the plant. Complete success!

2. These required all sorts of drill bits, bolts, washers etc. to be used, on a windy day, on a surface that you could see the sea through the gaps in. I became careful to the point of paranoia about not dropping anything. On the other hand, sweeping up any spilled soil was a doddle - just sweep it through a gap!

3. Obviously there's no vehicle access to the end of the pier, so everything had to be trolleyed up (see comment above about the wind blowing things over), and the vehicle access to the end of the pier is only available until 10:00am. In the end, we left at 10:01, while a council employee stood patiently waiting to close the gate.


Despite all that, it went rather well, and the plants look great. Incidentally the pots are in two-tone gold on black, which we've never used before, but I suspect we will again as it looks rather nice. Good choice, Ruth.

You can see 'my' fixing plates sticking out of the sides if you look closely, but they're pretty discreet. The only issue now is whether we'll be able to lift the displays up when we collect them, as we planted them up in situ so we don't know how much the finished product actually weighs.