Blog

It has been over 8 weeks now since the country has been in lock-down in response to this horrific virus.

Nothing is normal ,many are laid off work, others concerned for their jobs, many are risking their own health daily and some like us have been so overwhelmed with a demand for orders, mainly vegetable seed.

Mr Middleton is a small family company and has been severely challenged to respond to the sudden 1000 x increase in demand.

At first we were totally taken aback by the surge in orders, this was compounded by a Covid case among our small team.

We responded by putting the safety of our staff and customers first , closing our office and allowing the warehouse to continue dispatching orders . It was difficult working without the office admin team whilst worrying about everybody’s health.

We had to close our phone lines and simply could not answer the high volume of emails we were receiving.

The vast majority of enquiries have been measured and friendly: some of the warmest messages of support have been greatly appreciated and at times moved us to tears. Whilst there has been a small number of less understanding messages, they have been much in the minority.

To try to cope with the demand, we’ve roped in family members, extending our working time. We worked 7 days a week , 10 hours a day for the last 8 weeks.

The website capacity has been challenged by the demand,as the number one seed supplier in the country we felt it was our duty keep the webshop open in order to supply our loyal customers who would normally purchase their seed in person in our shop .

At first the website was open as normal but when the queue reached many thousands of orders, we simply had to close for a number of days in order to clear the backlog. We are now open as normal and expect all outstanding orders to be shipped within the next few days and return to normal shipping times next week. Our phone lines are now open as usual and we will respond to all emails, however it may take some time to answer the thousands received over the past weeks.

At some point, things will go back to normal. For us at the moment, it feels like some way off. We hope,subject to government guidelines , to reopen our shop in Mary Street on June 8^th . Our open days and garden masterclass events have all been cancelled for the next year . It was a difficult decision to cancel the event in April when so many had booked and were looking forward to hearing four great speakers . As soon as the decision was taken we refunded all attendees in full .

Thank you so much for showing such patience and understanding during this strange period. We appreciate your support in this difficult time in our history. As mentioned, the warm comments have been extremely well received. It is such a pleasure to witness the very best in the vast majority of people at this time.

We are doing our utmost to reduce the dispatch time and reply to your enquiries in good time, and hopefully to get back to normality. If you have shopped online with us for the first time we hope you will pay us a return visit . We greatly appreciate all the support we have received and look forward to supplying you with great gardening supplies in the future .

Mr Middleton