‘I live in a small cottage. My desk is basically the table in the living room’
Jason Linton is the founder of The Cottage Garden, a fruit and veg box scheme based in Kinsale. The dad-of-one works from a small cottage where space is at a premium.
‘We were running The Cottage Garden fruit and veg box scheme for about a year when the pandemic struck. Almost overnight our sales went up by four or five times. It just exploded!
I live in a small old-fashioned cottage with just one bedroom. My son stays at the weekend and there’s a fold-out bed for him in the living room.
My desk is basically the table in the living room. It’s a sizable table with a PC, speakers and stacks of paperwork. Everything builds up during the week and then, at the weekend, I think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t take this anymore!’ I tidy things up but then the cycle starts all over again the next week. It’s a constant state of flux, really.
I’m doing inhuman hours at the moment. I’d like to have more time to grow vegetables but setting up a small business involves a huge amount of admin, especially with what we’re doing.
We offer a bespoke veg box, which gives people maximum flexibility but unfortunately that means a lot of stock control. I built this big Excel sheet with a tab for every customer and as our customer base exploded to 250 boxes a week, every one of those tabs has to be filled in.
I just got a Trading Online Voucher so I’ve somebody working on a stock control app for me. In the meantime, I’m constantly on the computer and getting to bed at 1am or 2am.
I used to run a business called Iswari Superfoods and I suffered from hip problems from sitting down all day. So I invested in a sitstand desk. It takes a bit of discipline to say, ‘Right, I’m going to stand up now’ and you also have to move everything that’s on the desk before you raise it. But once you get over that hurdle, it’s really good.
Unfortunately it didn’t last as long as I would have liked. The spring mechanism packed in about a year ago. It was expensive enough — about €400 or €500 — so I would have expected it to last a big longer.
I’ve been meaning to get it fixed but everything has been so hectic lately that I haven’t got around to it. It means I’m missing out on that facility to stand up which would be really useful, especially when I’m working crazy hours.”