Neonach

Today I made my first ever sale of honey. An historic first not just because it is our first sale, nor because it is almost certainly the first honey to be sold from this garden in its long 350+ year history, but it is quite possibly the first jar of honey ever produced and sold in this group of islands. Although at this stage I'm growing bees rather than producing honey, I had reason to remove a ’super’ I’d put on to allow the bees to keep their own winter supplies. I’ve no proper extracting equipment yet, so I used rather messy and time-consuming manual methods to extract and filter the honey, and then I put into jars just as we do for jams and chutneys. This was meant to be just for our own use, but it looked so good I thought: why not try it on our customers (for preserves, fruit and veg, meat etc - from the garden and the croft?) I designed some labels, printed them and had them ready to put on the jars when a customer comes to the door for eggs and says “By the way, I see you have bees …” (there are, for reasons that will now be obvious, hives positioned right outside a window of the garden shop, “… do you by any chance have honey for sale?”. I heard Neonachina reply, quick as a flash, “Himself’s in the kitchen right now, labelling our first ever batch: would you like some?” Yes, they would, and after a hurried but hushed discussion in the kitchen N-ina returned to the door with a jar - with the product label on but lacking the finishing touches - “… and that’ll be £4.75 for the honey”. Meanwhile another customer had come to the door and was waiting behind the first, and piped up - oh I’ll take one of those as well; and then the same for another and then again another customer (we don't normally get customers that thick and fast - but they are a bit like buses). Four jars of honey sold in less than 10 minutes. At £4.75 for a 250g (1/2lb jar). But before you think what a rip-off!, or immediately turn to the internet to plan your own Honey Klondike campaign, you’re best knowing that we’ve spent thousands of pounds, hundreds of hours, and a lot of worry to get to this point; we have a lot more to invest before we can extract honey cost-effectively, and yet at this point we can’t expect any more than 100 jars a year (sales value less than £500) at very best. Quite simply, it doesn’t pay unless you’re determined to build up to a pretty large operation, and can sell direct to the public with minimum overheads. Fortunately - exceptionally fortunately - that’s exactly the position we are in.