From the Fields - Tom Jopson

By Tom Jopson, Siskiyou County nursery producer

For the conifer seedling nursery, everything is sown, and we’re trying to grow things pretty rapidly. Douglas fir are already fully grown, so we’re doing “short-day blackouts,” giving them short days to set buds. That started in early July. It works really well for Douglas fir in particular, which is a big crop for us. We are projecting the growth and then adjusting fertilizer and things to get them to the right size.

It’s a horse race. You fire the gun and you have 15 weeks or 18 weeks to pull it off. If you get behind, you don’t have that much time to catch up. The goal is to have a lot of them ready to plant by Oct. 1, because if we have rain, people have the option of planting them. Reforestation is a big deal now with all the wildfires. The seed is completely irreplaceable, and it is in short supply.

For succulents, the peak for mail-order plants was in the springtime, so the season is winding down. It slows down steadily through the summer and into the fall. Now that we’re past the peak, we spend less time on order fulfillment, and we start propagating varieties that we have to propagate in quantity. There are those that produce offsets once in the year, like the semperviva, which is a hearty rosette succulent. We are starting to propagate large quantities of things because we have more people available. We have something like 700 cultivars. We’re still fulfilling orders.

We are swapping locations within the nursery, so that is a big part of what we’re doing—building new facilities and upgrading our facilities to do a better job. For example, we added heat tables and grow lights to improve the rooting of these plants because everything’s done from cuttings. We’re in the process of installing that, which means I’m having to redo the electrical.