Already over a week ticked off from February and the longer days are emerging at last!
Whilst it now seems an age ago, the lead up to Christmas was a busy time at the tree nursery. The most time intensive task for the team was the potting of the plants grown in root trainer cells. These had to be transferred into larger pots to eventually be offered for sale from our retail area later this year as containerised trees, or to give them their more common term trees in pots! The benefit of these of course is that they can be planted into the ground at any time of the year unlike bare rooted trees that really can only be transplanted between November to February. Nevertheless, whether buying containerised or bare-rooted, a certain degree of after care is necessary to ensure success.
During late December we made the decision to revamp our retail area adjacent to our putting green at the Ledene Golf Centre, unfortunately due to a multitude of reasons we have not yet finished, but we are full of determination to carry on and finish the basic ground works as the weather improves. I haven’t quite worked out how to set up the actual presentation of our trees for sale, but I am planning on recycling any redundant wooden pallets and bins I can find discarded around the farm; I believe the technical term is upcycling! All creative ideas are most welcome.
Bare rooted hedging and tree sales have been very encouraging, particularly our horse friendly hedging containing mixed bundles of 50 plants. Individual tree sales have also been busy but we are still waiting for someone who wants to plant a traditional English wood to come along! We do still have a good quantity of woodland tree bare rooted species available. If anyone knows of a charity or school who still wants to plant this season please do ask them to get in touch.
So the next job for the nursery is to get our nursery bed areas ready for our March sowing , but probably the biggest job will be to line out (plant out) any unsold whips to grow on for another season. We have modified an old veg planter from the farm to take the backache out of this operation which I was very pleased about, but due to the unprecedented success of growing our plants during last summer they have ended up too long to go through the mechanism of the planter!
