sutton023

Hello folks, here's a final fall plant availability update. We are now (still)  taking orders for the 2013 planting season . We've stopped  shipping plants for 2012  delivery, a bit earlier than in the previous couple of years, because: 1) We are sold out of tubelings in a good state for late planting; what we have on hand is either too actively growing to reliably go dormant in time, or too close to dormancy to put in enough roots. 2) In the recent few years, fall planting has been overall less successful than before, and some of our growers have had very serious mortality. Most of this appears to be a result of unusual weather extremes: early freezes, excessive winter moisture and freezing farther south have contributed to direct mortality. Extended growing seasons or early warmth has also been confusing the plants and adding to transplant and seasonal-clock-reset stress. Given these developments, we can no longer provide our survival guarantee this late in the sea...

If you're on our catalog email list, you should already have seen this little note from orders@badgersett.com. If you want us to add you to the list, just send an email to that address! And, so you don't have to go looking any further, here is a link to the YouTube full preview of the 2011 Short Course introductory talk. Hello Folks, For the first time in six years, we've updated our plant catalog! And in addition, we once again offer other products for order on the web. This includes the 2011 SHORT COURSE DVD-ROM, which I know many of you have been waiting for. This crazy weather may be too hot and dry for some of you to plant, but now is a great time to get your order in for 2013 so you can be close to the front of the shipping queue come next May. If you're in a place where it is less extreme, or you have no problem getting enough water on, we do have quite a few plants available– the availability notices on the catalog pages are now current. Scroll down for a little...

We ARE currently taking orders for 2012 shipment of plants; as a rule we will take orders up to one year in advance of first desired ship date. We expect more bare-root dormant tubeling hazel and chestnut material than usual this year, and possibly some hickory-pecan as well. We also have excellent availability for nearly all classes of standard tubelings, except for some select and XL hazels which may be sold out, depending on how the early growing season goes here. We will be updating our pricing within the next month, BUT YOU CAN LOCK IN TODAY'S PRICES BY PLACING YOUR ORDER NOW! Along with the pricing update will come some new plant types, including the first-available-anywhere MACHINE PICKED seed. Highly experimental, of course. Since our plant catalog threatens to become even more complex, we may also add a "just send me some hazel plants" option. Hopefully I will be able to put some very basic updates on the main website as well. Soon to come: an official announcem...

When we started growing and breeding chestnuts here in SE Minnesota, there was no chestnut blight ( Endothia parasitica at first, then Cryphonectria parasitica ; though my own preferred name is Cryphodothia pseudoparasitica* ... long conversation...) known, for at least 50 miles, perhaps 100. It had been identified in Ames, Iowa, and seen once briefly around Zumbrota, Minnesota; but it certainly was not here. For the first 20 years, as our chestnut plantings expanded, we never saw it. When we were ready to test our chestnut genetics against the blight, we sent seed both to Auburn University in Alabama, and to the Hubei Academy of Agricultural Science in China. Tests in both places were overseen by Dr. Hongwen Huang; I will put his reports here, originally published in our Root & Branch #4: Date: Fri, 05 Apr 96 11:18:53 EST From: hongwen huang Subject: RE: report of blight resistance of your breeding lines in Alabama Dear Phil: In response to your request for the results of m...

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...