Nursery

A nursery is the part of a holding that turns one plant into many. Seed is sown, cuttings are struck, and shoots of a chosen variety are grafted onto rootstocks, which are young plants grown for their roots rather than their tops. The young stock is grown on until it is big enough to survive being moved, then sold, or planted out into the orchards, hedges and woodlots that will consume it. A nursery is an enterprise rather than a building: a greenhouse or a shade house is somewhere it works, not the thing itself.

Stock is grown in one of three ways, and the choice decides much else. Field production raises plants in open ground and lifts them bare-root or with a ball of soil on the roots. Container production stands them in pots. Pot-in-pot sinks an outer pot into the ground and drops the growing pot inside it. Pots dry fastest: they need water every other day through the growing season where a bed can go a week, and one trial spent an hour a week watering pots against two hours a month on beds. Water is the real constraint: twenty square metres (215 sq ft) of beds plus a thousand potted trees can want a thousand litres (260 gallons) on a hot day, and drip lines use sixty to seventy percent less than overhead sprinklers.

The ground matters as much as the water: a light loam of moderate fertility, drained so the beds sit above the paths, and sheltered from wind. Potting medium is the largest thing bought or made year after year, and it needs a dry store of its own beside the pots and tools. It also carries a risk that is easy to miss, since a mix rich enough for a bench can spread weeds where it is later used as a mulch. Survival varies sharply between species, so a stock list is built from what actually took on that ground, not from a catalogue. Selling plants usually needs a licence, renewed on an inspection for pests, disease and noxious weeds that also limits where stock may be moved.