Carpinus betulus

Back in November, we were learning how to sow tree seeds. I picked Carpinus betulus, the common hornbeam, and it has to be sown as soon as possible fresh from the tree (whilst still almost green) otherwise it has a tendency to go into a deep dormancy which would otherwise take the seed longer to germinate. These beds were prepared by us all and sown with freshly collected seed. They are effectively special raised beds and quite often this is how some trees are grown commercially.

The seeds should hopefully germinate later this spring, and coincidently the week before this was taken we were emptying the bed from the previous years students, and learning how to grade the seedling for commercial selling (£ per height). Next week we’ll be planting 3 metre high hornbeam’s and learning how to pleach train then in another part of the garden 🤓👍🏼

This is a really good useful downloadable document for anyone interested in sowing tree seeds and some info about certain pre-treatments 👍🏼 https://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/fcpg018.pdf/$file/fcpg018.pdf

That’s really interesting, I must admit it’s something I hadn’t thought about, something new learned today. 👍👍

Fab read Rich 👍🏻👍🏻

Fantastic Rich, it'll be interesting seeing how they do,me and the Mr have just put in some hornbeam hedging 😁👍I grew some young Rowan tree's last year from seeds from the national trust and some alder buckthorn saplings too 😊

I worked at a fruit tree nursery for a while. The process of seed to market really is kind of interesting