Full details for booking a place on the tour can be found at the end of this article. Plants are grown both outside and in several large greenhouses on the nursery. The tour begins with the outside area where hardy shrubs are grown. Your guide is Michael Esposito who has been working at Old barn Nursery for nearly ten years, well before Wyevale Garden Centres bought it.

Mike briefly explains that originally the garden centre was owned by the Spears family being sold to the Wyevale Group (now Wyevale Garden Centres) in 2007. The nursery side of the business continued and Old Barn Nursery grow many of their own plants and also supply other garden centres in the group.

Having explained how the outdoor plants section is operated we were taken into three  of the indoor growing areas. The technology is explained by Mike from the automated planting machine to the various solutions they have use for watering. So much information is given that we wont reproduce it here but a couple of items did attract our attention in particular. For example one of the greenhouses has exceptionally strong and thick glass, so thick in fact that it costs less to heat in winter than an average house!

The roof on the greenhouse is computer controlled and it opens and closed large areas of glass depending on the outside weather conditions. One of the key methods for feeding the plants is by slow release fertilise pellets. Without going into the intricate details, little pellets in the special formula compost release fertiliser only when the plants need it.

Mike is a mine of information on growing plants and he encourages questions throughout the tour. He is so enthusiastic about his job that it's almost infectious, it certainly is one of the key factors which make the tour so enjoyable.

We thoroughly recommend this tour and were even more pleased when at the end we were all offered a free large Philadelphus grown on the nursery to take home, see the picture above.

As far as we are aware The Old Barn Nursery is the only one in Wyevale Garden Centres which conducts tours of this type.