As you may or may not know i have started to grow xmas trees for resale later on this is an account of what we have bee n up to so far
Field one
This is a couple of pictures of how the field was taking into consideration none of the land has been farmed for about 50 years just had horses on it
we cut it all down with a tractor
big difference now, we also had a digger in to remove some trees and to do some drainage work
Here begins on big learing curve
April 2011
The first lot of 300 noble fir go into the the ground we tried to plant them with a tree planter behind the tractor but all this did was to put the trench in the ground then bury the tree completely so we ended up buy just running the tree planter to put narrow trenches in rows and planted the tree by hand
October 2011
we planted a second lot 150 noble fir and 150 nordmann fir that year, as i was told autumn is the best time to plant this time we did not use the tree planter, a couple of weeks before planting i sprayed the rows with weedkiller then i rotovated the rows then planted the trees by hand a couple of weeks later once all the grass was dead
August 2012
we are finally getting thing sorted this year i rotavated the whole area using a tractor and rotavator on the back, we planted 66 noble fir and 198 nordmann fir and as a trial 16 lodgepole pine, we planted in august as the supplier said this is the beat time to plant
As you can see at the moment we are trialing and so far have discovered that the nordmann fir are better for a wet fielsd they can tolerate the ground being wet
Replacement
out of the first year planting i have replaced about half so far due to the trees dieing we have put his down to the field being to wet for noble fir so and dead ones are being replaced with normann fir
second year i replaced 7 nordmann fir and about 80 noble fir which proves that maybe nordmann fir do better than noble fir
Planting by hand became hard labour so this year i made this tree planter
the metal pipe is the same size as the transplant plug and you simply push it into the ground to the cross piece of metal which gives you the correct depth to plant to and ther is the hole put the plant in and firm it in, it is 5' long so plant one lay it one the ground that gives you the distance for the next tree to plant
basically the first field has turned into a trial field and i have one more area left into for another 300 trees next year
here are a couple of pictures of last years trees
noble fir
nordmann fir
aswell as trees outside we are trying some in pots which wil be sold as a smaller tree grown in pots these nordmann fir were planted last year, they are kept in a polytunnel i also have some of this years pot planted trees outside in pots to see the difference in growth
This is the next field it is about 4 acres which will give me the ability to plant about 1000 trees each year for 4 years approx as you can see it needs cutting down and a digger getting in to get it in a suitable shape for planting
by the time we are planting in this field i will have sorted out the problem with the tree planter and redesigned it so far it has all been one long learning curve
