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About Us

Treefarm For Sale

Introduction

Who You Are

Growth Trends

Why It Works

Future Directions

Low Hanging Fruit

Seasonal Cycle

Due Diligence

How It Works

Next Step

What You Get

Notes

Sugar Bush

Buying for Resale

Caliper Trees

Edible Landscaping

Field Trees

Seedling Sales

Shelterbelt Production

Branding

Native Trees & Shrubs

Christmas Trees

Climate Change

Wild Crafting

Workshops

Carbon Farming

New Destination

Government Contracts

A Better Swedish Aspen

Infra Structure

Installations

Long Term Inventory

Plug Production

Retail

Seed Orchards


Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke

Caliper Trees

Every year we get calls from people who need a 2 inch caliper tree for their landscape deposit. A 2 inch tree requires a 40 liter container, and even then it’s marginal. Pay attention to watering -- it uses up all the water in the container in a hurry.

A 1.5 inch tree is quite reasonable to do. This translates into a 5-6 foot spruce, a 7-8 foot pine or a 10-15 foot leaf tree.

Economics of 1.5" caliper tree production

A tree block is a strip 6 feet wide x 240 feet long. It contains 720 #10 grow bags (40 liters), usually 3 or 4 species mixed, with different growth habits. (Consider: A spruce is wide at the bottom. A maple is wide at the top. Mix them up, and they don't crowd each other as soon.) The advantage of a grow bag is simple: You can put a seedling in it, and it won't develop a hollow root ball, but will instead develop a very fibrous root system. Google "Root control bag" "Hi-caliper"

Inputs:

It takes about 4 to 8 years for a block to mature. At the end of this time you have about 650 trees left that are 1.25 to 1.75 inch caliper, 7 to 10 feet tall, that retail for about $100 each.

With 14 foot aisles this allows 6000 trees per acre.

Typical Pine

Lodgepole Pine in our front yard.



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Want to talk right now? Talk to me: (8 am to 8 pm only, please) 1-780-848-2548


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Copyright © 2008 - 2018 S. G. Botsford

Sherwood's Forests is located about 75 km southwest of Edmonton, Alberta. Please refer to the map on our Contact page for directions.