Harvest Department
Steve Babbitt, Manager
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Harvest Department
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| Our Harvest Department is committed to providing our customers with the highest quality heavy grade B&B plant material, dug to A.N.L.A specifications, in order to meet our customers’ needs. Princeton Nurseries’ Harvest Department is responsible for the inspection and tagging of material sold from our specimen field and for all digging of this material. Each B&B plant comprising a customer’s order is tagged individually. Every effort is made by our tagging staff to tag matching plants so that each customer receives the most uniform plants available. Because of the wide assortment of sizes which Princeton Nurseries offers, the Harvest Department must be capable of digging a range of ball sizes from a 16” pop-out to a 96” ball. Although we have always offered some of the best quality hand dug balls, over the past decade we have reconfigured our planting blocks and production plan to accommodate machine digging for most of our mainstream material. As an example, in 1994 only 26% of our material was machine dug; in 2001, 90% was machine dug. |  | |
In an effort to harvest the large volume of material booked by our customers for spring orders and to avoid being held up by the wet conditions of early spring, the Harvest Department has implemented an aggressive fall and winter harvest program. We have selected certain varieties and certain blocks to harvest our spring orders in late fall and winter. Any “window of opportunity” to dig during these months is taken, and all the material is brought into the Shipping Yard where it is placed in an enclosed building or in an area where it is insulated from winter winds and heeled in with wood chips. By January 1, 2002 we had 19,000 units harvested and stored for spring orders, and we expect this trend to increase steadily in the future. | ||
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| Last Updated: April 03, 2007 09:44 AM | ||