Crowd Hunter
Well-Known Member
I live about 20 miles from McMinnville, TN, which like to say it is the nursery capital of the world. We usually buy directly from the nursery at a pretty big discount.
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Crowd Hunter
Well-Known Member
Love when the evening sun hits that freshly cleaned concrete!
:
Crowd Hunter
Well-Known Member
Thanks! The trees make it a lot of work.Very nice.
The car too.
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Crowd Hunter
Well-Known Member
Absolutely nothing today!
TundraOnKings
Well-Known Member
I mowed, but have about 6 more hours left 
Also pressure washed all of the hard surfaces, unfortunately I can’t take credit - paid someone to do it lol.
Also pressure washed all of the hard surfaces, unfortunately I can’t take credit - paid someone to do it lol.
FreePenguin
Well-Known Member
guess thats what heaven looks like. Beautiful. complete envy there. funny, I just did a little shop of my house from Zillow, and you can see my grabber blue mustang (gone now) in driveway. takes me about an hour to do my yard. but I enjoy yard cutting.
DFB5.0
Well-Known Member
While this is not at my residence, I basically live at work anyway and this is where people go to by trees for the residence.
Yesterday was the first day of winter in Australia, and that means it's time for all of the winter 'bare-root' stock is due to arrive at the nursery.
First task though is building sand beds to store the various deciduous trees, shrubs and fruit trees that are turning up today.
These beds are pretty simple and certainly not pretty. We use treated pine sleepers sitting on bricks to give some extra height, which are then secured with stakes and lots of tech screws before lining them with weed mat. The trees are then lined up one row at a time while sand is shoveled over the roots to keep them moist. A customer can then select the tree they want, pull it from the sand bed and take it home for immediate planting.
We also had a surprise delivery of bare root roses arrive today. Normally, we would receive our first delivery late June/early July. Our roses are always later than the likes of a hardware store nursery (we are a traditional retail nursery, a family run business that racks up 40 years this month), this stock is naturally defoliated rather than being sprayed with a defoliant to get them into dormancy early, the result is a healthier plant. The concept here is the same, except the roses are bundled into pots not a bed.
The above roses are about a 1/4 of what is expected to arrive this year.
Todays task -
We get trees from two suppliers, the main one delivered today and the secondary supplier's stock will arrive next week. This is mildly frustrating because it's easier to process them in one large lot.
Trees taken off the truck and sorted into their varieties. I would get in trouble if I told what the dollar amount is sitting there on the concrete..........suffice to say it's a VERY significant cost to the business. Not pictured here is the hessian we cover the trees with to keep the roots moist while we process them.
Trees are bundled and labeled with a simple tag at the grower, we then attach a pictorial label to each and every tree for retail sale.
This is me pretending to be a real man using machines to load sand into a trailer and lugging it into the nursery ready to shovel into the sand beds. We are lucky to have two of these machines, although both are wounded. The engines burn oil and the one with the bucket leaks it too. In fairness, both have done a power of work over a number of years.
I'm actually pretty proud of being able to use those machines, although I have only a fraction of the skill using them that my three boss's do.
Initial work began on burying the larger standard and weeping trees.......think weeping Cherries, weeping Maples and Catalpa's. It's actually good to get these ones out of the way first, bigger trees mean bigger roots to cover and more heavy sand to shovel.
We then moved onto the smaller growing and flowering trees.......think Japanese Maples, Crepe Myrtles and Crab Apples. Here you can see how we work row by row to ensure each tree is properly covered with sand.
The dinky little trailer empties pretty quick but is able to fit down the rows easily. The machine is actually really easy to maneuverer a trailer with. (I'm not a real man so I can't back a trailer.
)
Calling it a day, the trees that made it into stock today are watered and the ones that didn't covered and saturated to get them through until morning.
Shattered after a long day, and injuring my knee in the process wasn't helpful.
Yesterday was the first day of winter in Australia, and that means it's time for all of the winter 'bare-root' stock is due to arrive at the nursery.
First task though is building sand beds to store the various deciduous trees, shrubs and fruit trees that are turning up today.
These beds are pretty simple and certainly not pretty. We use treated pine sleepers sitting on bricks to give some extra height, which are then secured with stakes and lots of tech screws before lining them with weed mat. The trees are then lined up one row at a time while sand is shoveled over the roots to keep them moist. A customer can then select the tree they want, pull it from the sand bed and take it home for immediate planting.
We also had a surprise delivery of bare root roses arrive today. Normally, we would receive our first delivery late June/early July. Our roses are always later than the likes of a hardware store nursery (we are a traditional retail nursery, a family run business that racks up 40 years this month), this stock is naturally defoliated rather than being sprayed with a defoliant to get them into dormancy early, the result is a healthier plant. The concept here is the same, except the roses are bundled into pots not a bed.
The above roses are about a 1/4 of what is expected to arrive this year.
Todays task -
We get trees from two suppliers, the main one delivered today and the secondary supplier's stock will arrive next week. This is mildly frustrating because it's easier to process them in one large lot.
Trees taken off the truck and sorted into their varieties. I would get in trouble if I told what the dollar amount is sitting there on the concrete..........suffice to say it's a VERY significant cost to the business. Not pictured here is the hessian we cover the trees with to keep the roots moist while we process them.
Trees are bundled and labeled with a simple tag at the grower, we then attach a pictorial label to each and every tree for retail sale.
This is me pretending to be a real man using machines to load sand into a trailer and lugging it into the nursery ready to shovel into the sand beds. We are lucky to have two of these machines, although both are wounded. The engines burn oil and the one with the bucket leaks it too. In fairness, both have done a power of work over a number of years.
I'm actually pretty proud of being able to use those machines, although I have only a fraction of the skill using them that my three boss's do.
Initial work began on burying the larger standard and weeping trees.......think weeping Cherries, weeping Maples and Catalpa's. It's actually good to get these ones out of the way first, bigger trees mean bigger roots to cover and more heavy sand to shovel.
We then moved onto the smaller growing and flowering trees.......think Japanese Maples, Crepe Myrtles and Crab Apples. Here you can see how we work row by row to ensure each tree is properly covered with sand.
The dinky little trailer empties pretty quick but is able to fit down the rows easily. The machine is actually really easy to maneuverer a trailer with. (I'm not a real man so I can't back a trailer.
)
Calling it a day, the trees that made it into stock today are watered and the ones that didn't covered and saturated to get them through until morning.
Shattered after a long day, and injuring my knee in the process wasn't helpful.
HoosierDaddy
Well-Known Member
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Sometimes it seems I spend half my time at nurseries buying plants so it's very interesting to see what goes on. As for the dollar amount, I'm thinking around $80/individual stem retail based on last year's prices so somewhere just south of that.
And I thought they came from the nurseries with the tags already attached!
Any thoughts on bare rooted vs potted trees? I need a good sized eg 3m Golden Ash next, IIRC bare rooted are much cheaper but generally smaller. For some reason the rare couple I've lost, despite meticulous prep and introduction, were bare rooted and it was a pain as I lost a few weeks of growing time. Hoping to avoid that...
DFB5.0
Well-Known Member
It's up to the retailer to put the labels on.
Trees are grown closely in fields. Once they have dropped their leaves in mid-late autumn, the wholesale grower will dig up each variety, sort them for size and bundle them in lots of 5. Once bundled, they are stored in holding bays.
It's a huge and messy job, the staff dress in full wet gear to keep warm and dry.
They are then loaded into trucks and shipped all over the country.
It's then up to us to label each tree.
This is my 17th of doing the bare-root season. It's a massive job and one I tend to dread.
Some trees do better than others with bare-rooting. Crepe Myrtles and Oaks are more sensitive to the process. On the other hand, it's extremely rare to have a Maple or Birch not take after being bare-rooted. Roses are also generally pretty reliable from bare-root.
Golden Ash can be pretty fickle, so don't be hard on yourself. I don't know why they are tricky, we even have them fail after being potted up from bare-root in the nursery and in most cases, it takes them several months to die and just go backwards. For a Golden Ash, I feel it's better to buy them potted.
Crowd Hunter
Well-Known Member
I don't think we use that bare root process here in the states.
TundraOnKings
Well-Known Member
We do in the Pacific Northwest. I actually planted about 40 bare-root blueberry plants, and 150 Doug-Firs. Did less than 20 bare root fruit trees, but they are more common around here. They can be had for much cheaper than potted plants, but the downfall is they don’t have a nice root system in a pot that’s established, so even though they may be a 5ft tree, it might take an additional 2 years to catch up with a potted tree the same size.
Since I’m on acreage I didn’t care, and unfortunately I accidentally killed all 40 blueberries and 20 fruit trees. The 2nd year after planting I mixed the wrong weed killer when spraying. Many hours of work and money lost - lesson learned.
I was new to farming/living on acreage.
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