Plugs
This ties in to the previous two notes. I've gotten requests for quantity purchases of native currants, gooseberries, hazelnuts, snowberry, juniper, swamp birch, water birch. I've been unable to locate these as plugs with local provenance.
Growing plugs also gives us the option of doing our own grafting. This creates a long pipeline: Example: Plant siberian crab seeds. 1 year later, transplant to styro, 1 year later transplant to #2 pot, 1 year later, graft a desirable apple to the crab, 2 years later sell as a 4 foot whip, or 4 years later sell as a fruiting tree. So, 5 to 7 years. But at the end of that you have a hundred dollar product that took a few minutes of your time total.
I've also had trouble getting liner stock for certain ornamentals.
At this point I don't have an economic breakdown for this. A first run at this this fall took 6 hours of labour to seed 12 flats at about 200 seeds per flat. Assuming half sprout. Next summer then will require transplanting into styroblocks. This will be slower than using plugs, due to the small fragile nature of fresh seedlings, but not nearly as slow as trying to empty and replant single cells in styroblocks. More research needed.
Getting this to work creates a market also for resale to other growers. The liner market in Canada right now is paradoxical: On one hand for the ones you can find, prices are low: 25 cents to a buck and a half for most 1-2 yr old seedlings. On the other hand, I can’t find them. The available niche is for someone who does this in open air, not green houses, or possibly screen houses. This drops costs by a bunch. (The fans on a greenhouse have to change the air once a minute on a hot day.)
I expect this to be more time consuming. When I get a plug, it's a year old, and it takes something under a half a minute to set it up for the next year. With my own seeds it will take 1 year in a flat, then a transplant. Overall I expect costs to be at least triple -- except that I don't have to buy the plugs. For this sort of project a lot will depend on who you have on the the potting bench.
This is one of the areas where automation will be a win: Flat fillers, styroblock fillers, automatic seeders, fully automatic watering. But it also means you can’t win unless you do thousands. Avoid the 1 year market. Go for the two year market. You’ve done all the work. Just wait another year.
Lodgepole Pine in our front yard.
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