Some of the volunteers enjoyed a great day out at Wakehurst place. The azaleas looked glorious and the bluebells in the woodland were wonderful.
It was a little cold but, luckily, the rain held off.
Lunch in the house was nice, but the highlight was undoubtedly a private visit into the millenium seedbank. Wakehurst treated us to a guided tour of their seedbank facility; answering all of our questions and providing a fact-filled and entertaining tour.

The seedlings have been growing nicely in our trays and now is the time for transplanting. Two seed beds full of diminutive plantlets. Ultimately these are our future stock and the plants that will potentially find their way into nature reserves, allotments, woodlands, hedgerows and other sites across Sussex.
By mid-June all the seedlings have been transplanted and now are protected by shade netting until they are more mature.

By mid-March all the volunteers ensured that last years seedlings were successfully transplanted into the 'sales' beds. This left the seedling beds empty and clear.
As the new seedlings won't be transplanted into these areas until mid to late May, we have sown a quick green manure into both beds. Hopefully this will give more structure to the soil.
Similarly, the unused sales beds have been sown with more green manure. There is a lot more space than planted areas this year. Last year the 'beast from the East' froze quite a lot of our freshly sown tree seeds, just as they were sprouting; resulting in a fair few deaths.
On top of this we had probably our most successful sales season in the last ten years. Consequently we have a very limited amount of small plants left and a limited amount of fresh seedlings. 

We have now reached the end of the period of examining our bags of seed that were collected and stratified over winter. Thankfully there was a very high germination rate within the seeds collected. Hopefully they will now grow on in the seed boxes. The tables are now full, which is a good sign.
The poly-tunnel behind the tables has now had a makeover. One side needed the wood painting and the rainwater gathering system refreshing. The other side had completely rotten wood within it and had split in two! After some judicious use of screw and braces the structure is now secure.

An incredibly busy period in late winter resulted in our order bed becoming full and our stock bed becoming empty!
The best ever sales season for our bare-rooted trees proved a little problematic when laying out our stall at Seedy Sunday. We had barely enough trees to fill the table!
All the volunteers enjoyed themselves; chatting to friends, fellow volunteers and customers all day long.
As the last of our trees were sold on the stall we  now look forward to transplanting our existing stock of small plants into the empty beds and growing fresh plants from the seeds we hope are germinating in the stratification boxes.

Gathering seeds for stratification continued apace during October. The final seeds were deposited in a stratification box in November. We collected a very good variety and quantity of seed, filling three large boxes. Let's hope for a successful germination stage next year.

We are trialling some new hessian bags, as pictured, this year. The original bags were sown together by Tig, one of the founders of the nursery, but they are now falling apart, albeit after 20 years of good service.

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A major construction project was completed in November; our new dedicated order bed. After weeding the area and digging over and sieving the soil, the sides were constructed from cut Ash trees affected by die-back. The trees were stripped of their bark and cut to size, forming a tremendous long bed.

The whole bed is underlaid by mypex and we have added soil from other parts of the nursery to build it up. Customer orders can then be heeled in prior to collection.

All the other beds in use have now been weeded. The site is ready to take new customer orders and begin the winter maintenance tasks.

Tony, seated, takes a well-earned break after building the sides of the new bed.

Almost immediately after finishing the new order bed it is in the process of being filled with orders. By December, two-thirds of the bed was already full as customer orders came in thick and fast. Some new customers, including visitors to our stall at Bentley Woodfair in September, plus plenty of returning customers.
It is so rewarding to see how many of our customers come back when they want more plants, and how many recommend us to their friends/colleagues etc.. 

This year has been an exceptional one in terms of tree sales. Looking out over the sales section of our nursery i can see barely a hundred bare-rooted trees available for sale now...and it's only early December!

I hope we have a successful germination in 2019, to replace the trees now being planted by our customers in woods, hedgerows and allotments across Sussex.

Although there is no doubt the long, hot summer was most enjoyable, the team have spent an awful lot of time watering both our seedlings and more mature trees. 
The result is an extremely high survival rate in a testing time.

Special branch were thus able to take well over a hundred handsome looking pot-grown plants to Bentley Woodfair this September. The Marquee looked wonderful, with a fine array of seeds on display inside adding an educational element to our display. 
At least 60% of visitors to our stand were interested in growing trees from seed, which was incredibly satisfying. All the volunteers found it an enjoyable and rewarding experience talking to so many members of the public. Obviously having three glorious days of sunshine helped. I can confirm that camping under a clear night sky was.....freezing! 

We are now moving into the main part of our seed collecting season. Last Friday we processed over ten different varieties. These have now gone mainly into stratification boxes. The nuts, like the incredibly neat Beech nuts(pic.right), are covered with soil and kept in boxes over winter.
During this processing period most of the volunteers may be found huddled over a large table adjacent to our pond. It's a lovely place to process seeds ...and chat. The mild weather and our protected site enable us to happily sit outside in shirt-sleeves all day, only interrupted by lunch-time.
Collecting will continue apace into November, whereupon  an entirely new set of tasks awaits. 
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From November onwards customers will collect their tree orders, effectively  taking our mature stock away and making room for the new. We also start the annual tidying up/maintenance of the nursery. A busy time awaits.

The nursery is now heading towards the end of July with a severe water shortage. Both ponds are looking more like damp bog gardens than deep ponds. They have been topped up with the remaining rain water from our water butts, but there is now no more water in any of our butts, as the picture below illustrates.

Copious watering from our tap now seems the order of the day. As everyone only turns up once a week, the majority of our work-days are spent watering seedlings, pot-plants and small trees...just to keep them alive till next week.

July being peak holiday time, there weren't many volunteers on hand to continue this effort. Having a temporary Mediterranean climate in Stanmer Park certainly has a downside. The upside, wearing shorts and tee-shirts, languidly working through Fridays and having long lunches by the pond are some compensation for lugging watering cans around the site for hours on end.

The reward for all this watering is simply to see our nursery beds vaguely damp for a couple of days, and the plants still green and growing. We have put up shade netting where possible and put some pot plants in shallow trays filled with water.

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All of the germinated seeds have now been transplanted to the junior beds. The cold spell earlier ruined what  looked like a great year for our seeds. They germinated, went to seed trays and were promptly frozen in their trays at a key stage in their development. Where we hoped to fill three beds with seedlings, there are now only two beds worth of plantlets.
On a different note, the wild flower seeds germinated well in the meadow, with plenty of colour. Currently there are lots of wild carrot thriving in their new home.

The learning curve is wonderfully endless.

 We now have a pop-up ladies toilet on site. Situated in a quiet  and picturesque area of our site, the user has the option of privacy or a room with a view.
This facility, when added to our existing basic tap water and a supply of biscuits at lunch-time, demonstrates how far the nursery will go to gain volunteer satisfaction.
The old orchard, where the toilet is sited,  is lush with new growth after a lot of rain and now a lot of sunshine. Ox-eye daisies and other wild flower seeds, sown over a year ago, provide a lovely understorey to the Apple, Pear and Cherry Plum trees. The Hazel coppice adjoining the orchard is now in full leaf and looks incredibly healthy.
Moving around the site i can see the willow has been cut, the comfrey has grown well, the new orchard/meadow looks fine and the ponds have newts in them and dragonflies, demoiselles and damselflies above them. May is such  a nice month.​

the raised beds, despite our persistent addition of home-made compost, have lost a little vigour lately. Consequently we have had two cubic meters of organic soil improver delivered to us. 
In order to help our beds retain moisture and nutrients a little better we have taken off some of the old, tired soil and replaced it with a three inch mulch of soil improver.
Most of the more mature plants now have a mulch. The seedling beds are currently being mulched and seedlings transplanted from trays put into these new beds This will continue throughout June until we have three long beds of new plants...the cycle continues. 

We have now finished all the transplanting and only three more bags of seeds remain to germinate. Two of these, Guelder rose, are unlikely to show any sign of life until July anyway. Effectively, the winter/spring jobs of consolidating our remaining sales stock, adding seedlings to them and laying out the new seedlings into trays, has now been completed.
Our less fertile beds are receiving a mulch. The Wild Service tree cuttings get special attention...a mulch and some shade netting from the unusually hot weather we are now experiencing.

Springtime is also the best time to re-pot our healthy stock of Yew trees, all from the seed of the ancient Stanmer church Yew. Checking for vine weevil in their roots and refreshing the compost ensures their survival and good health. Plus volunteers gets to stand round the table by the pond and have a good 'chin-wag'.
The nettles have been gathered, bruised  and put in a large bin with water. In around 4-6 weeks time a smelly fertiliser will be ready for the plants.
Everywhere the sights, sounds and smells of Spring inhabit the nursery. We celebrate this new life every Friday lunchtime with tea and biscuits!

The first picture shows one of our seedling beds about to be emptied of small seedlings by Anne and Christine.
The second picture shows Geoff and Terry re-siting the seedlings into their new home with new compost and a good drench of water.
Once the transplanting is complete, in appx. two more weeks, the beds look immaculate and weed free...albeit temporarily! 
We are also still checking for germinated seeds in our stratification boxes, with only fifteen more bags left to germinate. The tables are getting fuller by the week.
Spring must be just around the corner.

Specialbranch had their regular stall at Seedy Sunday, the annual swap/ 'green' gathering, held at Brighton BHASVIC every February.
We had a very busy time selling trees, giving advice, networking and advertising ourselves to the public.
Lots of our volunteers joined us behind the stall to help out and make it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, aided by copious supplies of biscuits.

Now is the time to check our stratification boxes. We examine all the seeds we collected last year to check if any signs of germination have occurred.

The volunteers found a record 10 bags with very good signs of early growth on our first inspection, even with very cold weather in the ascendancy.

All of the germinated seeds were then delicately transferred into seed trays, covered with a little soil and put outside with some weather/mice protection on top. Finally, we recorded all the details in our plant 'bible'. Hopefully this year will provide us with plenty of fresh plantlets, to replace the now rather depleted sales beds.