April Showers
Posted on 1st May 2018 at 16:07
Despite us holding our breath for good weather, for Paul to fertilise the trees, there was liitle let up in the conditions. The wet weather has continued on and off, at times being very heavy. However the temperature rose sufficiently so the transplants were able to be lifted out of the ground at the nurseries.
As you can see from the picture above during the couple of sunny days we had in April some of our pot grown trees have started to flush.
Whilst waiting for the transplants to arrive the boys have carried on handling the trees. The following video shows Kristien using a method to replace the broken leaders on some of our Christmas trees.
By tying a lateral from the top whorl to a fixed cane eventuallly this will be trained to grow vertically to become the new leader.
The following video shows how you can encourage any laterals which are growing upwards to eventually grow horizontally, giving the tree a more even shape.
Here we can see Kristien hooking the vertical laterals to horizontal branches below to encouraged them to also grow horizontally. This has proved very successful.
The ground is almost prepared and we should be starting to plant our transplants the second week in May. There is nothing more satisying than straight lines in a plantation of freshly planted Christmas tree transplants. Photos to follow. We may even catch Julie and Jan on the planting machine!
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