If maybe you would like to order trees but you’re not quite ready to put them in the ground, why not pot them up and start your own plant nursery. It’s a great way to build an inventory of hardy stock for planting around your own property or for use in community or civic conservation projects.
Earlier this week we potted up some bare-root seedlings in a mix of compost and sand to give them a head start before planting them in the ground either during the coming fall or in years to come. These happen to be some young American Sweetgum trees we purchased from a nursery in Perkasie, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.After watering them in, we added our new trees to the inventory we have available for stream buffers, rain gardens, reforestation, and other rewilding projects. We’ll either stake or trim them to remedy the curved stems.In just a season or two, we have nice robust saplings ready to install in a project or in the headquarters garden. Starting plants in the nursery gives them the size they need to improve their chances of survival.This is one of ten Norway Spruce trees we purchased in a pack from a local conservation district sale almost ten years ago. We started each two-year-old seedling in a pot, then transplanted them into the ground a year later. All have been thriving ever since.Since being installed as a potted sapling reared in the headquarters nursery about fifteen years ago, this sturdy Eastern Sycamore has matured and is producing seeds relished by American Goldfinches and other birds.Growing in a streamside woodland, a really massive sycamore that got its start in your nursery could continue to provide valuable wildlife habitat over a lifespan extending one hundred, two hundred, maybe even three hundred years or more. These long-lived denizens of the floodplain provide homes for such beloved breeding birds as Baltimore Orioles, Bald Eagles, Warbling Vireos, Yellow-throated Warblers, and several species of owls,……including this Great Horned Owl, seen currently incubating eggs inside a legacy sycamore that has been an active nest site among its neighboring Norway Spruces and Eastern White Pines for decades.Yellow-crowned Night Herons, an endangered species in Pennsylvania, nesting in an Eastern Sycamore planted during the early twentieth century as a street tree very near the Susquehanna in mid-town Harrisburg. Ordering and planting trees today is essential for their tomorrow.
