Beekeeping, Honey, and the Fascinating World of Bees with Helen Rogers

If you're someone who has a passion for cut flowers, our environment and wants to make the world more beautiful, you're in the right place. Whether you're growing flowers for pleasure or profit, I'm on a mission to empower flower enthusiasts and professionals to help change the world around them. Whether you're just starting out or needing help in hand, or looking to scale us to substantial flower business, I'm your Cut Flower Woman. Welcome to the Cut Flower Podcast. So today I'd like to welcome Helen Rodgers. I'd like to introduce Helen to you, a high-gate honey, and I came across this lovely company online on Instagram and the one for Instagram, and was fascinated that you could have bees on the top of the house in North London. That got me thinking. So Helen, do introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about you and your journey and how you got to have bees on the top of the house. Well, it's been quite a ride, I have to say, and I just say that Instagram is fantastic for making new friends, isn't it? I've made loads and it's so good for that sort of thing. And anyway, so my story begins. I grew up in rural Oxfordshire, I mean, it was really rural, a tiny, tiny little village in the middle of nowhere. And I guess it's one of those childhoods that people imagine that their children should have. You know, we were very free, we cycled everywhere, we walked everywhere, we climbed trees, we lay in hay fields and jumped off straw bales and made tree houses and all of that sort of thing, which is so it's very in touch with nature and really in tune with the seasons as well, which was fantastic. So we were outside a lot. My mother is a horticultureist and so she was all about growing her whole world, it's about growing things. So we had this wonderful garden and she planted an orchard and vegetable gardens and beautiful herbaceous borders and you know, we were all enlisted to help with this operation. I had three brothers, so you know, there's quite a lot of mouths to feed and my father would be busy working and he'd come home and do the lawns and things like that. But yeah, we'd get enlisted to Apple Pick and Fruit Pick. Oh my goodness, as I spent sitting and picking, bed currents, white currents and strawberries and raspberries, but it was great, you know, and you can't beat that kind of hands-on experience. So in a way, all of that is part of who I am and, you know, I went through school and I was definitely on the sciences side of things. So I ended up studying engineering at university and my father's an engineer, so that's in the blood too. You can't escape it. So I ended up after I graduated coming to London because I studied as a structure engineer and I wanted to work with the most exciting architects and all the exciting things were happening in London and it was the late 1990s and there were lots of, you know, big projects running up towards the millennium and London was the place to be. So I moved to London and had this great career as a structural engineer for many years and I'm still doing a bit of engineering these days and I was all over London visiting various building sites. I particularly enjoyed working on old buildings, you know, rediscovering their history and all of that sort of thing. But while I was travelling around, I noticed that here, there and everywhere, there would be hives tucked into corners of parks and on the tops of roofs and all sorts of things like that and it just blew my mind because coming from the countryside, you know, people had bees there and it seemed like a very rural, natural thing to do in the countryside but I could not wrap my head around having bees in the city because it just seemed bonkers. And then I started sort of putting my ear to the ground and I found out that there were actually loads of beekeepers in London and London honey was just fantastic because of the variety of flowers that are available in the city which aren't really available in the countryside. So I got more and more interested while all this was going on, my career was developing, I had met my husband, we got married, we bought a little house in Camden which was tiny and then we had children and we ended up moving to Highgate and we had a bigger house with a garden which was very exciting for the first time I had my own proper garden and my husband surprised me by buying me a bee hive for my birthday because he knew I was interested in the bees and he said, come on, we've got space now, my children were tiny so I was at home a lot, why don't you go for it, get some bees, learn anything, everything about it and off we went. So he gave me this hive and we sort of, I did loads of research, I'm one of these people if I want to know about something, I'll dive really deep into the whole subject and so I deep dove into bees and I had a very limited time because he'd given me the hive, I didn't have the bees yet and he said oh by the way the bees are arriving in about six weeks time. So suddenly I had to really gain a lot of knowledge very, very quickly and I decided that the best place to have the hives would be on the roof of our house because then they fly high over people's heads so they're not coming in low over many gardens and bothering people. So the hive was put up on our roof, we've got a flat roof just out the window here and I can see the bees flying and yeah six weeks later there was a knock at the door and a delivery man holding this box full of bees and he just said here are your bees and he ran off. He was obviously terrified for man. So I've got a bee suit and installed the bees into the hive and that was the beginning of our journey with bees. So now I've run about between 30 and 40 hives all around North London and I keep them in very small groups of five or six maximum hives and some of them are my bees and they're on sort of in parkland or on nature reserves and things like that and some of the bees are owned by other people so I manage the colonies for them. So for example there's some on a golf course, there's some on a rooftop of an office building but we're not in central central London where the forage is quite difficult we're further out so there is they seem to thrive. Wow so yeah that's where we are now. We've always had this dream of having bees and we have the land have bees so that's not the problem but it's like you say getting someone to manage the colony is a job and it's kind of like there's work to be done and so I've always fancied it but never taken that next step. So if there's anyone in Milton Keynes who wants to have bees and wants to colony that's absolutely fine. So you've talked about Ybees but where are some flowers I've bred that some flowers are better for bees than others? Yes that's absolutely right. So one of my big things is to try and encourage people to plant the bees and not just honey bees because you've got to remember that in the UK we've got about 270 different types of bees and they're all really important and actually this whole kind of save the bees campaign is a bit ridiculous when it's pushed at honey bees because honey bees are very well looked after by beekeepers and you know maintain it in healthy colonies as long as the beekeeper knows what they're doing but there's a lot of other bees which are struggling and the reason that they're struggling is that they don't have enough forage and they don't have the environment to benefit them. So I spend a lot of time persuading people not to have bees so I have a lot of companies approach me and say oh we'd love to have bees on the roof of our building or whatever and so I instead of saying yeah yeah I'll come and dump some hives on your roof and I'll charge you thousands of pounds every year to look after them. Instead I talk to them about creating a garden on their roof instead that will benefit all different types of bees and this has been really successful and in some cases you know they've created outdoor meeting rooms as well and they've made sort of sand banks so that some of the solitary bees can borrow in there and lay their eggs and all these different things we've provided water sources and I'll help them choose appropriate plants as well. So yeah that's been really fun so I've kind of done myself out of work I suppose by looking after bees but for me it's more important that we have this holistic view of bees and not just honey bees so go back to your question about why different plants are suitable for bees and why some aren't well you have to remember that different types of bee have preferences about which types of plants they like so bumble bees for example have relatively long tongues for bees so they're able to forage on different types of flowers then say honey bees which have got shorter tongues so you'll see honey bee bumble bees foraging on things like lavender, fox gloves, stuff like that you know flowers with longer flowers and honey bees can't access those flowers I mean there's very specialist bees as well so there's one bee called the IVB which more or less only feeds on IV flowers so they emerge from the ground where the eggs were laid the previous year in late September time and the IVs just coming into flower they come out they feed on the IV they mate they lay their eggs in the ground and that's a complete life cycle for the year so it's really important that we consider all of these bees and try and produce a kind of buffet of forage for them and I mean there's lots of debate about the best type of flowers and really it's not worth getting too hung up about these things as long as you're doing something um my mum and I wrote a book together over lockdown because you know she was desperate to talk plants for somebody and I was desperate to talk bees so we had a call every week where we would kind of discuss what was happening in our gardens and we decided to write this little book um called it's called 80 flowers for bees so I have to remember what the title is 80 flowers for bees and I illustrated it but it's very basic um here are 80 good plants that benefit bees and she wrote notes on how to look after those plants you know what aspect they like what type of soil they like it you know whether they're annuals or perennials or whatever and then I would monitor them and just see which bees were visiting these flowers so I'd write a bit about that um so between us I mean there's plenty of books on the market about planting the bees but very few give the horticultural information as well um which is annoying because I mean you can spend a lot of money on on plants which aren't suitable for your location and it's it's disappointing so I'm all about you know getting people to have good results from planting things and being able to attract the rights sort of bees wow so you get that from Helen where can we get that book oh um it's on my website highgatehoney.com so we published it ourselves um and yeah so you can order it from there okay yeah so that I mean there's lots of things to say about yeah I mean with bees you've got to remember that their eyesight is very different from ours as well so their whole spectrum is shifted towards the ultraviolet and the things so they'll always be attracted to blues and violets over you know yellows and reds and oranges so it's given a choice they'll always go for the blues and violets so you know when you're selecting your plants you can help the bees by thinking about that um they'll always prefer trees trees brilliant because they produce so many flowers on them in a relatively small footprint um whereas you know annuals are great they're beautiful and all about but um they produce relatively few flowers yeah plant if that makes sense yeah so yes I'd recommend you know you've got to have long-term thinking and short-term thinking as well so plant the future put those trees in uh you'll have lovely foliage for your um yeah flower arrangements but also you're helping the pollinators yeah yeah yeah yeah thinking about that now you think about things like vibrant and that has sort of flowers all year round they love that for winter timers they look part of the dailyers but only the ones that completely open they don't want to show that's right open space yeah um so forget the pompoms go more sort of open the oh yes the single variety yeah lavender absolutely buddha yeah all of the kind of yeah it's quite interesting so as a flower farm of course it's quite diverse so you've got your foliage so we've got a lot of bees we actually did have an ivy bee too when we took ivy down completely because it was holding the wall up and we needed to hold the wall you found didn't really think very much about ivy bees and of course then within 24 hours the ivy bees had made another home somewhere completely different in my polytone which is probably the way from the ivy so I walked in and thought oh what are these who better bring a bee person who Julia arrived from Newport Park going to bee suit and said these are ivy bees it's funny every single year I get a call from someone with a polytunnel so I think they must really like the warmth when they lay their eggs in the autumn it's interesting yeah they go yeah they're not silly they're not silly they go straight so different honey I know in different areas can taste differently and my childhood name was Winnie the Pooh actually I'm called Ross the Pooh this is one of my favourite characters but I actually don't like honey which is very odd what's going to try I'm really going to try different honey's because I've been told that they're different depending on obviously the flowers they've actually had so tell us a little bit about different honey's that are so different well this is something that's really close to my heart so when I first set up my first hive and then very quickly got another hive I harvested the honey separately from each hive I mean they were situated next to each other they're about a meter apart but the honey produced from each hive was completely different one was very light and floral and the other was very dark and almost medicinal you know really rich and slightly better taste and that again blew my mind because I knew that you can get honey from different locations tasting very different but my bees were obviously finding completely different sources of forage and you know they hadn't talked to each other exactly so that blew my mind so I started doing you know in my typical way deep dive research and I realised that in Italy they take honey extremely seriously and you can actually train to become a honey sommelier in Italy so I decided to do this and so off I go to Italy and oh my goodness it was just the most amazing experience so now I am a honey sommelier and one of the things you have to learn to do is to recognise lots of single origin punnies so for example lime tree sunflower dandelion so you need to be able to recognise them from scent and also the flavour and obviously they look very different as well so you know dandelion honey looks like a dandelion yeah it's like bright bright yellow and it's got the most incredible flavour so when you say to me I don't like honey yeah I just say you just haven't tasted your honey yeah I need to find it then what would you suggest starting with because obviously you start with a honey from a shop from a supermarket and then I'll try a honey from a farm shop maybe locally and it's what comes after that so it's like well why don't I like it and what could I try that I would like I would really like it well you'll have to come on one of my honey tasting workshops well you're not far from me are you so I have so far up till now done them over zoom but this year I'll be doing some in-person over the winter months yeah so I mean that's a good way of trying lots of different ones very quickly so usually I focus on using honey from the UK because I don't think most people realise the range of honey that is available in this country so you know we've got very light tunnies like orange which is a very clear and light and it has a very light flavour as well right through to honeydew which is a very dark mysterious honey and it almost tastes like licorice you know it's that very interesting flavour and sometimes we even get a bit of chestnuts the heather honey is a really interesting as well what's interesting to me is when I'm doing these honey tastings it's interesting which honey people prefer and it really always is honey that's from the area where they grew up always so recently I was doing one and there was a lady there from Yorkshire and they have a lot of heather honey in Yorkshire and heather honey is quite in a quiet taste I love it but a lot of people it's too much for and you know everyone must go oh I'm not sure about this and she was like now this is how I think honey should be and it turns out you know that was the honey she was given as a child and it has a very deep seated memory for her so I find that really interesting so yes I don't know where you are from originally but maybe I can find it we're exciting a new town how much did so North London I suppose yeah yeah so no we're exciting so but it would be so it was a new town but it probably be interesting to see yeah what it would be I just remember having lots of roses in our garden as a child and very little else so because it was a new town they put all reds around the front of everyone's houses so it was as a child so I don't know is the honest answer we'll find this is interesting but I mean you can have a lot of fun with honey because you can do pairings with wine and cheese as well so you know a very robust blue cheese can be it really be accentuated in a way with quite a bit of honey and they work really well together so yeah you can have lots and lots fun with that sort of thing and you know we quite often do a cheese board with different types of honey for each type of cheese now you're talking you see I knew that was a way and I don't know what is wrong cheese no problem with that and yeah I love all the chutneys I love everything else because it goes with it something must have happened in childhood but you know what I so I think you you might enjoy the sweet chestnuts maybe even in our boots as honey you know the strawberry tree I think perhaps you might go for one of those I put me on a course and I'll be so I know you an avid reader as well and that's um obviously your deep you know you people are either deep go deep into research when they come across a new subject and they research it I'm actually the opposite of that as a person I would tend to be the person who ordered the bean hive and the bees they would arrive and then I think oh now what I'm gonna get a book off Amazon and dummy's guide to beekeeping because I don't know better do that now oh gosh that they're already at the door oh nevermind I'll work it out whereas your obviously for research and I would love to be there but I'm kind of like oh we'll work out a way so an avid reader so you've obviously what do you what what if you went on a desert island or what would you take with you what three books would you take with them you know this is like killing me to choose three books I mean I have a quite an extensive library of books that I can't live without so just choosing three would be tricky tricky I'm actually reading a really interesting book at the moment called natural intelligence and it's looking at the world as a whole and it's talking about climate change and all of that and not being depressing about it they're talking about the different ecosystems that exist and how different sort of keystone animals affect their whole ecosystems and how we need to kind of work to restore those things quite gently rather than let's invent this amazing carbon capture scheme with lots of engines and and you know mad inventions let's just make sure the well populations really well looked after so the plankton can thrive so that the weeds in the seagrow and actually store loads and loads of carbon on the seabed you know things like that which I'm finding really fascinating so it would be quite nice to have that book with me on my desert island as I sort of lays around on the beach I think I quite like that idea there's a lovely novel about beekeeping I mean I've gone for bee themed books here I think and it's called the keeper of the bees and it sets between the wars first of war and the second world war and it's about a veteran who is very very unwell I can't remember what was wrong with him because it's some years that I read it but I just remember it's about the garden that the bees are kept in and it's quite a gentle book but it's it's him healing and growing this garden and the bees guiding him and so on and I think that would be a really nice book to revisit as well because I'm not really one for deserts desert islands I think I'd have to start growing stuff immediately and maybe I'd have to have a book to help me identify things that I could eat quite quickly yeah because we'd be thrown into a whole different tropical one and we wouldn't know what we could eat with the whole fish maybe or but who would know so we want to yeah we definitely would have to have an identification book otherwise we might start so that's exactly exactly I think I need a how to grow lots of tropical fruits I love fruit and stuff so I'd have my whole orchard set out quite quickly I think so tell us what's been your biggest mistake or learning along the way there's always learnings along the way aren't there oh yeah I mean it's quite funny because there's a beekeeper there's a saying but if you ask three beekeepers the same question you'll get six different answers and that's how it is in the beekeeping world so I made a lot of mistakes along the way nothing catastrophic luckily but you know everything that I could have done wrong pretty much I've done wrong so I always said because I give a lot of my time to our local beekeeping club teaching beginners and so on and I always say to them come and learn from me because I've made all these mistakes don't do this don't do that ask me how I know because I've done it so I think that my biggest learning is have patience with everything and I'm sure it's the same for you in a way with growing all the mistakes oh 100% yeah I say the same thing come and learn don't do any of that just do that exactly I have definitely made some huge mistakes in flower farming I think I've grown that I've never grown again ever the things I've grown that I don't actually like the things I've grown that would never sell and doesn't have a commercial outlet so what's the point of that and so yeah all of that and if you could get the feeding right and the marketing right then you've got success but otherwise woo that's the same I mean patience patience patience with bees you've got to be so patient and I'm not naturally a patient person so I find that quite difficult and at the moment I'm very impatient because for us July has been a complete disaster as far as honey production has been concerned because it was a complete wash out the bees collected a lot of honey early in the season and then they've just sat in their hives all of July and mulched their way through most of the crop so I'm patiently waiting for the Indian summer that we take a couple of weeks keep waiting I'm you know on my phone continuously looking at all the different apps for forecasting you know this one says that this one says that they never agree completely do they no I'll have a rain alert online and I was actually on holiday a few weeks ago in France it was lovely because obviously here all it did was rain and all I was worried about was lack of rain it's a lot that kept jumping up and then but then even now if I look on that now I always I live by the weather of course when am I going to pick when am I going to feed what am I going to do when am I going to water and exactly yeah I who knows I don't trust any of it anymore now I've come to the conclusion that let's just see what comes out the sky and plants and it's like I think that's definitely the best way forward no so yes lots of patience and when you're making splits of colonies and so on you have to wait for the new queen to be mated and it always takes excruciatingly long and you're come on come on surely surely now surely now and of course if the weather's poor the queen hasn't been able to fly out and be mated so it takes even longer so I'm in that situation at the moment I keep looking at this week Thursday she may go on Thursday well it's a nice day today actually so you know and but you mustn't be too windy because they might get lost and you don't want too many birds around you know there's so many things that can go wrong oh yeah I'm sure it's very similar for you but you know there's all these things that are competing to make your life more difficult it feels like sometimes so who is inspired you in your career I think I might guess at this one oh um well I've been very lucky actually because I've had some very generous people give me some very good advice about beekeeping but also about the business of beekeeping so yeah they're usually much older men with big beards as you can imagine I've also been very inspired by Dave Gausson you can be a podcast if you haven't listened to me you need to listen to I'm sure I've got a girl crush on Dave Gausson and I have to be too but I have definitely got Dave Gausson crush and I have all his books and I was this weekend I went to the Newton summer set I was lucky enough to go there for the day and his books were all sitting on the shelves and I thought oh my goodness this is like yeah I definitely have a girl yeah no I think there's a lot of people do and he's done so much to raise awareness of this sort of you know providing proper environments for bees and planting for them and so on and his books are great because he is a scientist he's a proper serious scientist with strings of letters after his name but the way he writes is very relatable even to people who've got no kind of botany or biological science background at all so yeah I highly recommend his books and if you can ever see him speak he's a great speaker as well he's very relatable so yes him um yeah I you know that I get influenced from so many different things and for my engineering world as well there's people who've taught me things that are transferable to the bee world as well so yeah there's a lot of people I don't have one great idol I have to say that yeah it's a combination of lots of people any plans what's next let's know what the plans are oh well you know there's always plans aren't there I'm one of these people that has about 50 million at any one time um so the next big thing is in-person honey tasting workshops and I think I've just sourced a really lovely place to do them I hope to go and see it next week um some hoping that we can run those over the winter the problem is over the summer I'm just flat out bees yeah with the bees and you know I've got youngest children and you know the whole point was that I'd be around for them yeah you know how it goes um so yes honey tasting workshops we've got lots lots of lovely new products coming to our website shop but in the autumn which I'm very excited to share with people um just getting those worked out at the moment and sorting out how to package them and all of that so it's not just about looking after the bees there's all the other stuff that goes with it yes it's 100% so yeah what's your favourite honey then my favourite honey I don't have one I have to say but I think I mean the best honey I've ever tasted and I think every beekeeper would tell you this was the first harvest from my own hive it was just the most amazing thing and it's mind-blowing and you can't ever beat that but if I had to choose another honey maybe dandelion is quite an unusual one um it's it's it's it's unique you know I can't really describe it but you just have to try it I know what it is this is the sounds are really mad now because when I'm a bee if I'm a bee I'm going to go off and have a bit of everything on time I'm not I'm going to have it I'm going to have the buffet you are to a certain extent but honey bees are a little bit different to other bees so they're it's the reason why they do so well is that they're extremely good communicators so what happens in the morning they send out scout bees to scan the local area and they'll find you know maybe three or four different types of porridge that are available that day they'll come back with samples of the pollen and the nectar they'll share it with their friends and then they'll make a decision about what they're going to forage on and then they will go and this is why it's so important not to have too many colonies in one place because say for example there's a lime tree blossoming and they love lime if you've got five colonies of bee honey bees all congregating on the lime tree other types of bee aren't really going to have a look in um because honey bees don't go from one to a flower and sort of stumble across and see what there is out there like humble bees and solitary bees they're extremely efficient so you know it's um quite contentious keeping a lot of bees in the city particularly all in one place so that's you know I've set up this Facebook group called flowers that bees love and it's all about trying to encourage people to create this buffet in their garden or even on their doorstep if they don't have a garden you know if they've got a little flap or whatever they can do a window box or if you can do something it's better than nothing um so I'm always trying to encourage people to do that sort of thing I can imagine these bees in the morning going oh I've got that thing out and I've had a really good look around and I decided today we're going to have dandelion because it's a mate well actually if they came to my house they'd be they'd be more than enough dandelion or I've decided I'm gonna I don't know I'm gonna have lime or nettles not nettles not flour enough but uh and I'm gonna come on then we're going this way and then they'll follow it's kind of sound elegant oh I mean the more I learn about bees the more they blow my mind and that's one of the things that I love about it so much is it's a continual learning process and it never stops because there's always more information to learn there's always scientists working on things and bees are so so intelligent and you know their brain is the size of a sesame seed or something but there's ability to communicate with each other and know what to do at different times in their life and I just find extraordinary I think that's why I'm really interested you've got me really hooked actually I hooked on a coming to test what honey I'd like but I can actually see bees on my land at some point I have always wanted to do it but I've been put off but if I could find honey that I like that would be the answer wouldn't it I will I hopefully I will do a bit of research and hopefully I won't just they won't just arrive one day and I'll think oh my I mean the same thing we've got two goats which takes me back to when we sat in Lisbon Airport and our flight was delayed and we didn't really know what to do we're a bit bored and we had our computers and my my youngest daughter at that stage said oh mummy when do we lovely tab goats and we were really lovely to have goats so no tuner did we find that having goats would be a really good idea that we ordered to and then when we got back oh now we've got to drive over a hundred miles to pick these goats up what you're going to do so we had no idea even on this piece of it but we did buy an Amazon book on the way on how to talk to goats we had some idea and we had built each other house so often these two goats who were still here today and we didn't realise they're bored goats and bored goats are really weird for meat and then you get really deep into it and say okay well we'll have milk goats and they have meat goats and what's the difference and now you've got these meat goats that you and actually if you had milk goats you'd have to milk them all the time so you'd have to be here all the time for like asking that's not going to work but these could equally have been milk goats which would have been a problem so I promise that if I'm going to do bees I will not do that I won't go into this oh dear nevermind they've arrived I will do a bit more research than that that's really reassuring to me because the best thing you can do is join your local bee club and most of them run a beginner's course and so at least you get some hands on experience because the other thing that happens is that people love the idea of getting bees and they'll order everything and it's not cheap you know it's several thousands of pounds to set up initially just with a couple of hives and we need a bee suit and all that stuff and then they have their bees and they swarm or they open the hive for the first time and they realise that actually it's a really terrifying experience for them and it's it's really not for them at all and you wouldn't know that unless you stood next to a hive when it's being opened so I always encourage people you know calm spend time with the bees work with the club bees our local club we have an eight purie which is just for people to come and learn and I run it so every Sunday we have people coming and we do whatever needs to be done and I teach them all the time you know now this time of the year we need to be thinking about that and have they got enough stores there to last them if it's very wet over the next couple of weeks and all of that sort of stuff which you you just wouldn't think about it's planning ahead all the time that you need that a bit of experience I guess to really understand it properly yeah but it is great and I absolutely love it you don't have a good dog just for Christmas do you actually have it the rest so you've got to really think about this alien investment and be if it's right for you yeah I mean I think that there's a statistic that more than 85% of people who buy the gear have given up after two years because it's a lot more than they ever anticipated yeah I think you've got to go into it with your eyes open that's for sure wow exactly to be fair to do it that way round so yeah they need to connect with you Helen and we have got in our show notes everywhere that people can get you both on social media on Instagram and not and obviously on your website and your product and your courses of which you must nudge me in the winter that would be lovely thing to do and I would love to do a funny tasting that really sounds right out my street so Helen I'd love to thank you for coming I've learned so much today and I am out of provision in my head which I am now not going to be able to get rid of or for these people to go and come on which way we're going guys this way or that way I find that just fascinating and yeah and that we've both got a joint love of Dave Gilson so that's fine too and if you haven't caught up on Dave Gilson's podcast please do so thank you very much for joining me Helen I really appreciate it it's a pleasure Ross lovely to chat and I'll see you soon I look forward to next week's episode please don't forget to subscribe and rate and review on your podcast app we do have some wonderful free resources on our website at the cutflowcollective.co.uk we also have two free Facebook communities which we'd love you to join for farmers all those who want to be for our farmers we have cutflower farming growth and profit in your business and our other free Facebook group is learn with the cutflower collective for those starting out on their flower journey all of the links are below I look forward to getting to know you all