Exercise: Uprooting/digging, labeling and packing of nursery plants.
Materials required: Digging/uprooting tools, labels, sphagnum moss, markers, wrapping material (Hessian cloth)
Procedure(s):
Uprooting/digging of nursery:
- To avoid the damage to the roots, it is advisable to irrigate nursery, 3-4 days before the actual date of lifting the plants. The lifting of (evergreen spp.) saplings should however be avoided in case if there is heavy rain in the rainy season because earth ball does not form properly if soil is too wet.
- To achieve high rate of yield survival of evergreen tropical or subtropical fruit plants like mango, guava, citrus and litchi etc. these should be uprooted with a ball of earth.
- In case of deciduous plants like peach, plum, apricot, apple, pear, grapes, walnut, hazelnut, pecan nut, cherry, Kiwifruit and almond etc. can be lifted bare rooted.
Inspection of nursery plants:
- The uprooted nursery plants should be inspected by the team of experts for thorough check up for parameters like infestation of diseases, attack of insects, healthy root system and other pomological attributes. The unhealthy saplings should be discarded before packing and storage of seedlings.
Labeling of nursery plants:
- After thorough inspection, the saplings should be labeled crop wise and variety wise with the help of zinc labels, plastic labels or wooden labels for proper identification and labeled sale of nursery plants.
Packing of nursery plants:
- After uprooting and labeling, the saplings should be properly packed. The bare rooted nursery plants of deciduous species should be placed with moist sphagnum moss and wrapped in hessian cloth to avoid drying of roots.
- The saplings should be wrapped with moist grass or rice straw before putting in polyethylene bags and then kept in baskets.
- The strawberry runners and vegetable seedlings are first packed in moistened moss grass and kept in hessian cloth bags or in basket for long distant transport.
Packing materials:
- The different packing materials used for packing of nursery plants are hessian cloth, sacking cloth, paddy straw, dried grasses and plastics etc.
- The hessian cloth is derived from the best jute, whereas sacking cloth is made from raw grade jute fibre.
- Different plastic material includes low density polyethylene (LDPE), high density polythene (HDPE), polypropylene (PP) and nylon etc.
Precautions:
- While uprooting nursery plants, damage to root system should be avoided.
- Plants offered for sale should be uniform and true to type
- No negligence in inspection of nursery plants.
- The packing of nursery plants should be done carefully to avoid drying of root system.
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Participants