sutton023

The good news : we start shipping this week, at the beginning of the order/shipping/pick-up queue. We've got some hazels ready to go, and chestnuts not far behind. Keep in mind that this does not mean that we are ready to ship all of our outstanding orders; many of the plants for our currently outstanding orders will not be ready until July. The less good news : we're sold out of hazel plants for the year. If your order has already been received and processed, there is a good chance that we will be able to fulfill even the most recent orders; however new orders and email orders not yet processed will most likely not be able to ship until next year. We are particularly low on Large-select and Xtra Large-select material; I'm afraid that there's a good chance that some of the orders we've already taken for these classes of plants may not be filled this year. For those of you in this boat, you will have the option to convert your order to another class with higher avail...

We have not yet shipped any standard tubelings this season, and do not expect to do so for another week or so. We've had a lot of delays with this year's planting season, some of which can be traced to two deaths in the family last December, and Meg's January foot injury, which is still slowing her down. Most recently, we've had a couple of weeks of colder weather which slows down the finishing stage substantially. We do, however, have a lot of strong tubelings in the pipeline– the closest fully-leafed-out hazels in the finishing house shown above have been decapitated and are nearly ready to ship; we will get them to you as soon as we can. Remember, tubelings can be planted throughout the growing season! Most of our planting at Badgersett happens in June, July and August. For those of you still placing orders for planting this year, I apologize that our order handling has been slowed down for the past couple of weeks. At this point it's possible that we are sold ...

I'm writing this from the main greenhouse here at Badgersett– we had the DSL hooked up today. Now, we should be able to do more office-related work out here, rather than having to do all of it either at home or at the local elementary school. This should really help a lot, since this way I can be at "the office" and managing the new part-time greenhouse help more or less at the same time. As I've said before, and will most likely say again– things are picking up, but we still have a long way to go. Today we should be getting to some of the order handling that has been postponed for the past couple of weeks. The hazel and chestnut tubelings in the greenhouses look great; we've started decapitation and are hoping to get the first hazel tubeling orders of the season shipped within two weeks. Chestnuts are a little behind, but healthy and in the pipeline. Due largely to the October 10 freeze last fall (we were out gathering nuts until about 2:30 AM), we are short on T...

This is just something to keep in mind- Eating nuts daily improves cholesterol etc. Lots of buzz on this factor recently, and it's increasing.

As a result of short help and lousy luck with health over the past 3 years, our pocket gopher population on the farm has metastasized. Look below for an old blog post from 2004 for abundant details and photos about how serious pocket gophers are for hazels. In the past we've relied on the specific gopher poison we sell, "Answer" (not set up on the web yet) - which is labeled for use on food crops, and works better than anything else we'd found, in terms of dollars/time/per gopher. However- we now have animals of various kinds, and while secondary poisoning is supposed to be uncommon, we really really don't want to take the chance with a working dog we've spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours on. And we have 3 dogs now. There's also a chance of secondary poisoning for our cats (5 - 3 barn cats for horse shelter and greenhouses), and our guinea fowl/chickens, which we are hoping to actually make some tangible money with this year, besides the...