Boningale has passed the Plant Healthy Audit, confirming that we have the systems and processes in place to minimise the risk of importing plants with pests and diseases.
DEFRA’s 2014 UK Plant Biosecurity Strategy for Great Britain recognised that our plants are under greater threat than ever from increased global trade, and set out goals to develop a risk based approach through industry collaboration. In light of increased focus on climate change and the biodiversity crisis the responsible management of plant health risks is ever more important.
We are committed to helping the industry as a whole move towards more responsible plant supply. Boningale has been involved in the development of the Plant Health Management System for many years alongside industry partners, including the Horticultural Trades Association and Nicola Spence from DEFRA, and helped to conduct an initial ‘test run’ of the auditing system in 2017.
Our plant health policy gives details of how we make sure that plant health concerns are tackled throughout our business. This is important for our own resilience as well – an outbreak of a serious disease like Xylella fastidiosa would be catastrophic, with an ensuing restriction on all plant movements within 10km for five years following eradication.
Our staff across all relevant departments have been trained to spot dangerous pests and diseases, and our chairman Tim Edwards is a registered ‘Plant Health Professional’ – we will be encouraging others to go through this valuable training as well. Our upcoming stock control systems upgrade will further improve our security, using scanner technology to make our plant audit trail even more robust.
We know that we cannot tackle this issue alone and continue to build strong, trusting relationships with our excellent European nursery suppliers, while also expanding our network of UK suppliers as the business grows. We endeavour to ensure that our customers are aware of potential risks and mitigation measures.
We are also increasing our own production capacity dramatically with recent expansion to our facilities and nursery sites. With over 2.2 million plants per year already propagated in-house, we have increased control over our own stock production and our propagation unit will soon be expanding and moving to its own facility near to our main nursery site.
Boningale’s experience in implementing the Environmental Management Systems and achieving the ISO 14001 standard since 2007 has been hugely beneficial when implementing the Plant Health Management System.
Many of the measures involved in plant health mitigation also tie in well with our efforts in wider sustainability issues, like transport efficiency and the transition to peat-free production. This helps us to understand the idea of ‘responsible plant supply’ covering many different angles as an integral part of our everyday business.
A rain garden is a planted area designed to reduce the amount of water running off into drainage systems. It works by slowing down the flow of water giving the soil and plants time to absorb as much as possible, by slowing the water down it minimises the impact of high rain fall giving the wider water distribution system time to cope and reducing the risk of flash flooding.
The construction of a rain garden varies hugely in its complexity, with the absolute basic being the redirecting of a water down pipe into an adjacent border, to a sophisticated SuDS scheme with carefully calibrated water flow rates and control valves.
Within the domestic landscape, rain gardens can be used to manage the surface water which is created by rain falling onto roofs, patios and paths thus reducing the need to install often costly, underground drainage systems. This has the effect of also reducing the amount of water entering the sewerage network which often becomes overwhelmed during storm events and directly contributes towards the pollution of rivers and streams.
If the garden is expected to receive a high volume of water and is not expected to be able to soak away the full volume then a drainage system will still be required to remove the excess water.
Currently, plastic plant pots containing carbon black pigment are not widely accepted in kerbside collections, meaning many pots are sent to general waste, with landfill as a final destination. With an estimated 500 million plastic pots in circulation every year, the issue is far-reaching, and has contributed to a stigma around industry attitudes towards waste management and recycling.
Potback aims to minimise these issues by reducing the number of pots sent to landfill.
Potback facilitates the return of used Polypropylene (PP) plant pots to the Boningale Ltd site, where they are compacted and sent for recycling, guaranteed to avoid landfill. This streamlines waste management processes, encourages closed loop recycling and can be used as a marketing tool by clients.
To find out more, email us.
Boningale’s contract growing service enables clients to order specific plants to be grown for a nominated time to their specification. This is a tailored production order and is a cost-effective way to guarantee stock for when they are required.
This removes the need for substitutions and allows for even the most demanding specifications to be achieved, including that of more unusual items.