How we produce our trees

Welcome to the first, I hope, of many production blogs. My name is Warren Holmes-Chatfield and I am the Operations Director at Barcham Trees. In production it is our job to do the growing and maintaining of our trees in our distinctive white bags.

We are coming to the end of a busy period on production where we have been potting our new intake of field grown trees. This process starts in October and finishes around the end of April. The nursery really starts to fill up very quickly at this time of year especially when we start potting our large container trees.

Once potting is complete the next big operation for us is pruning of all the stock, this takes place all through the summer months. Starting with the pruning of oaks, moving onto cherries at the start of spring and on it goes through the hundreds of varieties that Barcham Trees grows.

Of course water is very important to the crop and we always emphasize this when you buy your trees from us, water is extremely important in the first 18 months of the trees life once it is planted out. In March we will start to get our irrigation system up and running. Irrigation tanks are filled from our 11 acre reservoir which was filled up during the winter months with 16 million gallons of water, that’s a lot of baths!! Once this is up a running the computer system delivers water and feed to all of the 120,000+ trees across our nursery and the growing season truly begins.

Posted by Warren Holmes-Chatfield