Groundsfest

Despite the total lack of Bitter in the Kenilworth area* I had a good time at Groundsfest this week, where we had a little stand.

We love a trade show. It's a good time to reconnect with suppliers and competitors alike, as well as picking up some business. We've got a couple of fab ideas for new products too. I did a panel as well, so good for morale (less so the photos of it, featuring some fat old bloke in a flowery shirt). I can get a bit stuck behind a computer or marching around meadows so it's always good to be social, and sometimes, like all of us, I forget I do actually know a bit about interesting stuff.

It was my first show for while, and gave me pause for reflection.

We've come a long way from the zeitgeist of 2008 when we started the business. Back in the day our core messaging was considered at best eccentric. How things have changed! We're now very much mainstream, which was reflected in the other stands around us. Lots of meadow seed, peat free, green roofs, biodegradable tree guards, local grown plants, etc etc. A special shout out to fellow Somerset business Woodland Horticulture, who were opposite us and discovered the pasty van, and to next door neighbours British Wildflower Plants, long suffering growers for us since 2008. 

The punters were much better informed too. Fair play, they were professionals, but I didn't hear much odd over the two days. They all wanted - and were being asked - to do the right thing, and asked good questions about how to. Ponds and meadows were the top two topics.

Groundsfest is mostly about machinery, which is where the money is, of course.  There were machines of all shapes and sizes, for cutting, rolling, mowing, whacking, mangling, lugging, sawing, chipping, fencing, posting, titivating, scarifying, destumping, blowing, sucking... They had names like "terminator" and were much admired by crowds of huge blokes with beards, big boots, and even cooler padded trousers that tell people you use a chainsaw with a metre long cutting bar. 

I was surprised by the number of robots which are routinely used in ground management now, to do a range of things from mowing to painting lines on football pitches. Even more surprising was the number of electric options now available. I've got a great little Stihl electric hedge cutter and I knew they did chainsaws too, but there were other really big powerful electric bits of kit I wasn't expecting (see below). Why aren't we all using electric mowers now? It was so good to see, particularly in a business which attracts its fair share of petrolheads. 

 

The show itself was much less green. I do wish these venues would sort themselves out. Trade shows are horrendously wasteful, and we should work harder to make them less so. There were no recycling bins for example, just general waste. Carpets for stands are optional and cut to order, so presumably all tossed after two days. All the banners and event signage were one use. It was pretty typical that at such a major venue - NAEC Stoneleigh - there were only 3 EV chargers, two of which weren't working. And in such a big area with such enormous roof spaces, surely there's space for some proper solar panel arrays?

Anyway, we're off to Futurescape in London in October to compare and contrast.  It's going to be even more knackering, but hopefully with proper beer. 

*I'm surely not alone in disliking IPA?