Plant nursery

Plants in a nursery

A nursery is a place where plants are propagated and grown to usable size. They include retail nurseries which sell to the general public, wholesale nurseries which sell only to businesses such as other nurseries and to commercial gardeners, and private nurseries which supply the needs of institutions or private estates. Some retail and wholesale nurseries sell by mail.

Although the popular image of a nursery is that of a supplier of garden plants, the range of nursery functions is far wider, and is of vital importance to many branches of agriculture, forestry and conservation biology. Some nurseries specialize in one phase of the process: propagation, growing out, or retail sale; or in one type of plant: e.g., groundcovers, shade plants, or rock garden plants. Some produce bulk stock, whether seedlings or grafted, of particular varieties for purposes such as fruit trees for orchards, or timber trees for forestry. Some produce stock seasonally, ready in springtime for export to colder regions where propagation could not have been started so early, or to regions where seasonal pests prevent profitable growing early in the season.

Conditioning

With the objective of fitting planting stock more ably to withstand stresses after outplanting, various nursery treatments have been attempted or developed and applied to nursery stock. Buse and Day (1989),^[1] for instance, studied the effect of conditioning of white spruce and black spruce transplants on their morphology, physiology, and subsequent performance after outplanting. Root pruning, wrenching, and fertilization with potassium at 375 kg/ha were the treatments applied. Root pruning and wrenching modified stock in the nursery by decreasing height, root collar diameter, shoot:root ratio, and bud size, but did not improve survival or growth after planting. Fertilization reduced root growth in black spruce but not of white spruce.

Hardening off, frost hardiness

Seedlings vary in their susceptibility to injury from frost. Damage can be catastrophic if “unhardenend” seedlings are exposed to frost. Frost hardiness may be defined as the minimum temperature at which a certain percentage of a random seedling population will survive or will sustain a given level of damage (Siminovitch 1963, Timmis and Worrall 1975).^[2][3] The term LT₅₀ (lethal temperature for 50% of a population) is commonly used. Determination of frost hardiness in Ontario is based on electrolyte leakage from mainstem terminal tips 2 cm to 3 cm long in weekly samplings (Colombo and Hickie 1987).^[4] The tips are frozen then thawed, immersed in distilled water, the electrical conductivity of which depends on the degree to which cell membranes have been ruptured by freezing releasing electrolyte. A -15 °C frost hardiness level has been used to determine the readiness of container stock to be moved outside from the greenhouse, and -40 °C has been the level determining readiness for frozen storage (Colombo 1997).^[5]

In an earlier technique, potted seedlings were placed in a freezer chest and cooled to some level for some specific duration; a few days after removal, seedlings were assessed for damage using various criteria, including odour, general visual appearance, and examination of cambial tissue (Ritchie 1982).^[6]

Stock for fall planting must be properly hardened-off. Conifer seedlings are considered to be hardened off when the terminal buds have formed and the stem and root tissues have ceased growth. Other characteristics that in some species indicate dormancy are color and stiffness of the needles, but these are not apparent in white spruce.

See also

• Pot-in-pot

References

1. Buse, L.J.; Day, R.J. 1989. Conditioning three boreal conifers by root pruning and wrenching. USDA, For. Serv., Tree Plant. Notes 40(2):33–39.
2. Siminovitch, D. 1963. Evidence from increase in ribonucleic acid and protein synthesis in autumn for increase in proto plasm during frost hardening of black locust bark cells. Can. J. Bot. 41:1301–1308.
3. Timmis, R.; Worrall, J. 1975. Environmental control of cold acclimation in douglas-fir during germination, active growth, and rest. Can. J. For. Res. 5:464–477.
4. Colombo, S.J.; Hickie, D.F. 1987. A one-day test for determining frost hardiness using the electrical conductivity technique. Ont. Min. Nat. Resour., For. Res. Note 45. 4 p.
5. Colombo, S.J. 1997. The role of operational frost hardiness testing in the development of container stock hardening regimes in Ontario. New. For. 13:449–467.
6. Ritchie, G.A. 1982. Carbohydrate reserves and root growth potential in Douglas-fir seedlings before and after cold storage. Can. J. For. Res. 12:905–912.

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