Forgotten Seedlings

Back in February the seeds were sown of this year's TreeProject trees. During March they germinated. And since then they've grown, although quite slowly over winter. Slower than in previous years; winter is colder here than in the city. They even got frozen in May.

Through September and October I was expecting to be notified that the landholder was ready to collect the seedlings, or that we should deliver them. When nothing happened, I thought perhaps where they were going was too water-logged for planting after all the rain we've had. But it is nearly time for the next year's kits to be started - we'll be getting ours in a couple of weeks!

Today it turned out that the landholder had lost track of two batches of seedlings for his order. It must have been a large order if 700 missing trees weren't immediately noticed. Our batch, and those of another grower in Ballarat, were the forgotten ones. He is coming to pick them up tomorrow.

So I gave the seedlings a last look over. Here they are:

You might notice that there are a few empty tubes. Some of the seeds had very poor germination this year. The paper barks and the tea trees all had only about 50% germination.

Here they are loaded into the ute for their trip to Ballarat:

Only five boxes after discarding the empty tubes. We dropped them off with the other grower of forgotten seedlings. We didn't see hers, but she said she had the same low germination rates and the same slow growth. In fact she thought these ones had grown more than hers.

The landholder will collect them tomorrow for planting out this weekend. Grow well, little trees!