Why couldn’t customers collect orders at set times?

RUPERT WOODS, who runs Wellington Home and Gardens in Herefordshire, was banking on the next few months to generate most of his company’s income for the year. ‘If we miss this season it puts us in a particularly tricky situation,’ he said.

Rupert runs the company with his wife Pru, and they are now operating a delivery service to try to stay afloat while garden centres are ordered to remain shut.

But with just Rupert and his son acting as delivery drivers, and lots of heavy products to drive around winding country lanes, this is an impractical long-term solution. Rupert said: ‘We are in quite a remote area so people are keen on gardening. We just charge £5 for a £50 delivery and you could be driving seven miles down little lanes each way. So it’s not particularly economically viable but least it’s some income.

‘We are doing about 30 percent of the business we would normally do so it’s better than nothing, We’ve got a huge car park here so we could quite easily have people collecting without anyone coming close to each other and you could give people set times to come.’

At the beginning of the lockdown, they ran such a pick-up service, but they had to stop that when the Government effectively banned non-essential travel.

‘We’ve got a small food hall here as well,’ Rupert added, ‘but we’ve got no easy way to sell it to people. Unless someone’s been here and got an encyclopedic memory of what we’ve got there’s no easy way of showing people. It’s a lot of effort to set up a website from scratch.

‘Our indoor plants are also quite hard to sell at the moment because there’s such a range. Unless people know exactly what they are looking for, they wouldn’t know what to ask for.’