Is planting in the Fall best? or is Spring the better time for planting?

We think planting in the Fall is best at least speaking from the world of trees, woody plants, and shrubs. You might wonder if you should plant in the Spring or the Fall. Most people think Spring is the right time to plant because everything’s about to start to grow. It just seems to be the natural time to plant. Planting in the fall is said to be the best time, as plants don’t have to soon face a potentially hot and dry summer, but is it?

We are planting in the Fall and planting in the Spring, here’s why

When starting a backyard plant nursery you need to focus on a couple main issues. One is getting plants, planted and two is how much time you have for planting. We plant in the Spring as that is when many bare root plants are available. Most of the same plants are however also available in the Fall. So, to split things up we are planting in the Fall and the Spring. We are still working (not yet retired) so our time is limited to weekends and days off. When we will be potting up plants 500 to 800 in a weekend we get some helpers.

Growers have lots of plants from seeds or from rooted cuttings that are available in the spring. When we say Spring we are speaking of late winter to early spring when most trees, plants and evergreens are still fully dormant. We spend time in the Fall and Winter planning the next year, ordering plants, and waiting for things to green back up. So, Spring is an exciting time and we want to be planting.

Planting time in the Spring and Fall is cold!

The weather of early spring, however can be a little bit unforgiving, sometimes we are potting up plants in 30º weather! In our climate, it’s hard to know exactly when winter is going to really end. We can get a surprise snow storm in late March and even early April. Not that a snowstorm would cause any real harm and it is still best to get your plants in as early as possible in spring. You want to get them settled and get them ready to grow. On the other side of spring, which always seems to come by surprise is actually spring. You don’t want your dormant, bare root plants, waking up and starting to grow before you plant them and get them settled them into their pots. So, if you are planting in the Spring, do it early.

Planting in the Fall seems to be much more forgiving.

Plants are dormant by October in most climates. Thus, for us in the Northeast, October and November are the ideal times to plant. Bare root plants are available, and we need to be planting. We’ve ordered plants over the summer, they start arriving and we’ve got to be serious about potting up plants in the Fall. Planting in the fall gives plants a very long time to settle in their pots. They get well watered in and assuming they survive the winter they will be really ready to grow the next spring. We also find that we get almost a full growing season between Fall planting and waking up in the spring.

Some of the plants we grow are actually ready to sell after one Fall to Spring plus one full year so a total of just 18 months. The plants we plant in the spring are never ready until at least a full 24 months goes by.

We’ve also noticed that when planting in the Spring all the sudden you can get some very hot and dry days. This can be very difficult for plants that may not have well established roots. This will also have you watering like crazy as not every Spring come with a lot of rain. The heat and dry conditions are you biggest challenge, thus Fall planing really is best to avoid loosing your plants to an early hot and dry summer like conditions.

Why we are always planting in the Fall and Spring.

The main reason for us is to break up the work. As we are operating now, we are planting about 4,000 plants per year. This is a lot of work so we break it up. 2,000 plants in the Spring and then plant another 2,000 plants in the fall. Trying to plant 4,000 plants in just the spring or fall would be a monumental task for us. Planting 2,000 plants in a season also seems like a lot but we break up our plant shipments, do the planting over several weekends and we get some help. With 3 to 4 people we have planted over 800 plants in a 3 day weekend. Once we fully retire we will go to a 5,000 plant per year goal! It can be done.

In addition to Spring and Fall planting , we also have to have time for taking cuttings to root them. The primary activities for these are in the early summer when we collect softwood cuttings from plants to root them that same year. We also collect hardwood cuttings during the winter to root them as well. Plus we keep pretty busy selling plants in the Spring and Fall so there is much to do and not a lot of time to do it. There isn’t a season without a major activity that moves the nursery forward and increases our total amount of plants.

Don’t make any extra work for yourself when planting.

 

One of our big time saving decisions has been to try not to re-plant plants too many times or at all. We generally like to plant plants in the containers they will be sold in. For this reason, we don’t put small plants in tiny, four or 6 inch pots and then move them to 3 or 5 gallon pots. This is a huge time saving when you think in terms of hundreds and hundreds of plants.

Please see our article on our annual Nursery Management plan to get an good overview of a year in the life of a nursery.