After over a year of planning, permitting, and building, we are finally in our new barn and office building! We moved in a few weeks ago, and are getting settled into the new space. We now have a great new area for our crew, and a large shop for tractor and implement storage. Upstairs are three offices, a small kitchen, and conference room. We invite our customers to call and schedule a vist to the nursery. We would love to show you around and tell you all about our growing methods and philosophy! Call us at 360-428-5810 or send an email to sales@urbanforestnursery.com.
Sign up for our Newsletter Subscription at www.urbanforestnursery.com and find out our current favorite street & landscape tree, as well as other great tips on watering, mulching, pruning, and more!
It’s great when a satisfied customer sends us a picture of their newly planted tree from Urban Forest Nursery, Inc! Here is an awesome example of beautifying an otherwise bare and boring strip of land between sidewalk and street. This is a Crimson Cloud Hawthorn and will have gorgeous bright reddish pink flowers with white centers. And the best part…the form! It is one of those trees where the branches grow in a somewhat irregular but symmetrical pattern, giving it an almost whimsical appearance. I have one in my backyard, and I can honestly say it’s one of my favorite trees. A great side benefit…the fragrance of the flowers in the spring is amazing!
Newly Planted Crimson Cloud Hawthorn
We just put out our first quarterly newsletter last month, and will be sending the next one in June. Our newsletters will be filled with nursery news, inventory availability, and helpful tips on making the most of your tree purchase. If you would like to be included on our quarterly email list, please visit our website (www.urbanforestnursery.com) and fill out your name and email address in the lower right-hand corner of the homepage. As always, if you have more specific questions or comments, you can email us at sales@urbanforestnursery.com.
This Saturday, April 3rd, is our annual tree sale at Urban Forest Nursery! It is from 10AM-4PM and open to the general public. Our address is 15119 McLean Road, Mount Vernon, WA 98273. We will have at least 200 trees included in the sale, including many different varieties and sizes of maples, flowering crabs, oaks, evergreens, etc. Please come rain or shine, and bring a truck and cash or check. We look forward to helping you find the perfect tree for your landscape!
For those of you that have experience taking inventory counts in a past or present job, you can appreciate the tedium of the task, as well as the time that it takes. Now imagine that the product you are counting constantly changes in size. This is the challenge of taking inventory in a field of trees. Unlike counting containers in a retail nursery (which remain the same size until someone physically “replants” them in a larger container), the only real way to measure a tree in the ground is by either its height or caliper (essentially, its diameter). Since the tree is obviously growing, it becomes a challenge to keep a real time up-to-date inventory.
Here at Urban Forest Nursery, Inc. we have recently started our first comprehensive inventory count. We are initially doing it in stages, where we will count about 1/3 of the field and then start using the resulting information in our day-to-day sales and invoicing management, to ensure that we are headed down the right path. This way we can “play” with the data for a bit before investing the time to count the entire property, which is about 30,000 trees over 32 acres.
We have discovered that it takes approximately1 hour to inventory 1000 trees. This is done with two people, where one person is measuring and counting the trees, while the other is entering data into a handheld computer. Once complete for the day, the handheld is then synced with an inventory program on the office computer. In our initial run, we have estimated a savings of about 2/3 time over a manual inventory count. Most of that extra time was spent entering the data once back in the office.
We will spend the majority of this spring/summer continuing the initial inventory count in stages, while experimenting with the various uses of the data in between counts. We will be sure to post more results and ideas as we learn along the way!
We are adding new ways for you to follow us! We now have a Facebook page – just do a search for Urban Forest Nursery, Inc. and become a fan. We also just joined Twitter under the name UFNINC. Coming soon will be links from our website to both Facebook and Twitter. Catching up with us has never been easier!
We are very excited about the recent launch of our new website! Check it out at www.urbanforestnursery.com. We now have an expanded list of tree profiles, including some great photos. Also, take a look at our Production page (off of the main Nursery page) for a detailed description of our growing methods. Coming soon is a real-time list of our inventory availability. Check back often for inventory specials!
Let us know what you think of the site…and as always – we would love your constructive feedback and suggestions!
The use of growbags continue to impress us. They are definitely the new ‘green’ way to grow trees trees. The rootballs are smaller, so easier and lighter to move and transport, smaller equipment is needed to dig, load and ship, more can be moved in the same vehicle, and less soil is lost in the production field, all good for the environment. Some question the small size of the rootball relative to the size of the tree. This works because you get more roots per square inch of rootball. The roots end up being more concentrated, because before planting, the bare root tree rootsystem is pruned back to fit into the growbag without touching the sides of the bag. You get the new roots that start inside the bag, instead of being cut off like some other production methods. Rootballs are also more solid, less likely to crack and breakup during shipping. Buyers tell us that once they understand the system they love and prefer them.
If you see the word rototiller in a landscape specification, be suspicious. There is no tiller on the planet that I know of that will adequately penetrate the compacted urban soils of todays constructions sites. Compacted soils must be deeply scarified or incorporated for them to do any good. Even if rototillers could get partway into the soil, they would then leave a slick interface difficult for roots and water to penetrate. A backhoe with a good operator make short work of compacted sites, fracturing and slightly mixing the soils with top organics and not overmixing, not destroying PEDS in the soil, something else rototillers destroy. When aggregates are bound together into larger masses they are called PEDS. Peds are naturally occurring units in soil structure that develop over time, important for plant growth and soil health. In otherwords, preserve the PEDS while breaking up the compaction! Use a backhoe!
