How do we start early?

After you have determined what you want to grow and you have ordered your plant material or secured it from another grower, you must decide how you want to proceed. Some growers merely will wait to the last threat of frost before planting their rhizome (rootstock) or field start/cutting but we prefer to work with our rootstock to get a jump on things.

After we have done our own cuttings or transplants or have received our latest plant material to work with we immediately begin to get them acclimated to the soil from the yards. The hurdle for us in this over the years has been determining which yard will be used for each plant during the winter months, however in 2014 we are consolidating three yards full of plants to one single larger scale yard where we can consolidate both our plants and our time. This will also provide us access to immediate drying capabilities as well as direct, natural water resources for the irrigation of the yard.

If you review of the pictures illustrating some of the things we are doing you will see its really not that different from starting seedlings for your garden. My grand mother and mother got me into doing this when I was growing up and it just stuck with me.

We take the rootstock and examine it looking for any imperfections. We check to make sure its hardy and not pliable or rotted. We look for strong growth node prospects and once we have determined the location we place the rootstock in soil vertically- with the promising node area facing up- within a plastic cup that has holes in the bottom for water displacement. Often times you will find the roots on some of the older rootstock will reach out and actually go through the holes at the bottom. ** Make sure that you mark your cups with the Varietal name and date them along with where you plan to plant them- Row, Yard, etc.

After we have graded these rootstocks, we never like to throw anything away. One never knows what will come back even when it appears that the quality is not there in the root. We like to bury these in flats of soil and monitor them throughout the Spring and then if they warrant being transplanted we then take them out into the yard or we pot them instead.

The above picture demonstrates how we augmented the natural soil with some organic compost and controlled both the air flow, nitrogen and watering and brought back some of the root stocks that we thought might not perform well in the soil. Obviously, this illustrates that its never good to judge to early and its always a good thing to give roots a chance to survive. We called this area the HOP ICU!