Liberty Tree Nursery is located on our five acre property outside of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada and run by me, Jesse, along with help and support from my wife Chelsey, our two daughters, a flock of turkeys, and sometimes our wolfhound, Jerry.
I've been growing anything I could get my hands on since I was very young. I remember getting a little tabletop greenhouse kit from the hardware store when I was about 8 and thinking it was just about the coolest thing ever. Not much has changed.
A fascination with seeds came a bit later. This is the part of this page where I admit that the nursery is largely an outlet for a seed collecting addiction. Seeds hold such promise for the future and there are so many of them. A single mature red oak can produce over 10,000 acorns in a mast year. It's incredible! There is a lot of satisfaction to be had from imagining the generations that will spring from the one whose seed you just had a direct hand in sowing. A piece of you lives forever when you plant trees.
A passion for the natural world led me into a formal education in forestry, but I always felt the pull towards the plant propagation space. In the years while I was in school and after, I worked in large forest nurseries in New Brunswick and British Columbia where we grew tens of millions of conifer seedlings for reforestation every year. When my wife and I came back from out West, I knew I wanted to keep growing but this time with a focus on different species, largely those that have value for conservation efforts or provide some type of significant non-timber value to humans, wildlife, or broader ecosystems.
The nursery started off quite small, and now it's gotten to the point where I'm growing well over 10,000 trees, shrubs, and other plants a year in an area with a relatively small footprint on our property. I'd really like to see what the limits are. How many trees can you grow and put out into the world in a lifetime?
A keen interest in plants - cultivated or wild - will keep you engaged for your entire life if you want it to. That's my plan anyway. Thank you for taking the time to visit the site. I hope some of my enthusiasm rubs off on you and encourages you to get out there and grow something!
Jesse
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Care Prior to Planting
Inspect the contents of the package to make sure the material (peat,sawdust,etc) around the roots is moist. If it's a little on the dry side, give it a sprinkle of water. The ideal state is moist, not soaking wet. Plan to plant within a couple days of receiving the package. In the meantime, store them in a cool, shady area where there is no risk of freezing temperatures.
Planting Day and Digging the Hole
Before planting your tree, remove the tree from its packaging and soak the roots in room temperature water for thirty minutes to an hour, but no more. Try to time this soaking so that planting occurs immediately afterwards.
At your planting site, dig a hole that is at least twice as wide as the root mass and just a bit deeper than needed for the roots to sit in the hole without bending or being crowded together. This will give the roots plenty of room to grow. Depending on the general shape of the root system, it can sometimes be helpful to create a little mound of soil within the hole that the tree can sit on and the roots can be draped over. This can make it easier to ensure the roots are all spaced out nicely before you begin backfilling the hole
Before placing the tree in the hole, you may consider driving stakes now (if using them) so that you don't accidentally damage the roots when pounding them in the ground. This is entirely up to you. Staking is often useful to help the tree grow straight until it really digs in and develops a thick stem.
To Amend or Not to Amend the Soil
You might be wondering whether or not you should add some good stuff to the soil that will be added back into the hole. There are a couple schools of thought on this, but we fall somewhere in the middle. Amending the soil with all kinds of nutrient rich composts and additives may spur growth, but too much of a difference in soil structure between the hole and the surrounding natural soil could cause issues with drainage, or result in roots that aren't encouraged to really drill out of the hole. Your tree is eventually going to have to survive on the natural soil on the planting site anyway.
Generally, we'd recommend adding a bit of bone meal or mycorrhizal fungi (if you have it), and if you're going to blend in compost, make it no more than 20% of the overall mix with natural soil.
Placing the Tree in the Hole
Now it's time to put the tree in the hole. Position the roots in a manner such that they are all spaced out nicely and not bent at the bottom of the hole. You'll also want the root collar of the tree to be level with the soil line once it's planted. The root collar is a spot located just above the roots and can be identified by a change in color or slight swelling of the main stem.
While holding the tree firm and upright, being gently filling the hole back in, first by adding it all around the roots, then continuing with the rest of the hole. Pat it down a little bit once it's halfway full and again at the end to ensure the roots are set in place. Not too much though, we don't want to compact the soil, just firm it up a bit.
Mulching
A 2-3" layer of mulch on top of the planting hole helps regulate moisture/temperature and keeps competition from grasses down. Make sure there is less mulch around the immediate base of the seedling though, as too thick of a layer can suffocate the tree. If you are planting in the fall and in a region with winters with an unreliable insulating snow cover, consider using a thicker layer of mulch just for the winter, and removing most of it in the spring.
Watering
Fall Planting: After planting, give it a good thorough soaking then leave it alone until spring.
Spring Planting: After planting, give it a good thorough soaking, then water weekly (if it doesn't rain) for up to two months until the tree gets established. Monitor in the first summer during dry periods and water as needed.
Protection
Tree seedlings are often preyed upon by rodents who girdle the stem, or deer and rabbits who chomp at the tasty buds. Protection is an additional investment, but a worthy one. It's no fun to pay $15 or more for a tree only to have it wrecked by a deer in the first year. We prefer making tall homemade tree cages from chicken wire or hardware cloth. These can be keep around the tree for the first few years with little maintenance before removing and reusing them for the next planting project. There are also great products on the market aimed specifically at protecting the stem, which are often called bark guards, tree guards, or spiral guards. All work great. If you do happen to be in the unfortunate circumstance that your tree has been reduced to a ground-level nub, wait it out for at least a growing season to see if it doesn't just sprout back from the roots.
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There's so much potential in a tree seedling; given the right conditions and time, a tree you plant today could be feeding wildlife and providing habitat and natural beauty for hundreds of years. There aren't many better examples of this potential than oak trees.
I've been particularly fascinated with growing bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) for a number of years because of its beauty, rarity, and the special place it occupies in our region's floodplain ecosystem. New Brunswick is home to a disjunct population of bur oak that is isolated from the main continuous range in Eastern and Central North America by at least 500 kilometres. Our bur oaks have incredible diversity in leaf shape, branching structure, and acorn morphology. It seems like every bur oak you come across has something unique about it that distinguishes it from the one next to it.
Photos: Two of the largest bur oaks in the province - a rare sight now (left). Immature acorns on a young bur oak (right).
Bur oaks are a rare sight in New Brunswick now, but they were once common along the lower Wolastoq river and French/Maquapit/Grand Lake basin. Centuries of overharvesting, clearing for agriculture and building have reduced them to a handful of stands and more or less scattered pockets of individuals. Their decline was lamented as early as 1841 when Edmund Ward published An Account of the River St. John, with Its Tributary Rivers and Lakes.
In his writing on Maquapit lake, Ward wrote:
"The shores of this beautiful lake, have abounded with white [bur] oak, whose quality cannot be excelled, neither equaled by any in the western world. But this invaluable wood has been profusely cut down, for the most trifling purposes; so that it is now nearly all destroyed."
Despite this decline, there is much to be hopeful for. There are efforts underway that seek to restore it throughout its original range and have it widely recognized and appreciated as an ecologically and culturally important species in New Brunswick. Some groups have already begun large-scale planting efforts. The incredible work of the Nashwaak Watershed Association, for example, has led to well over a thousand bur oak seedlings being planted, with more to come.
Unlike some other threatened floodplain species such as white elm (Ulmus americana) and butternut (Juglans cinerea), bur oak is not under immediate threat from any particular devastating diseases. With a wider public awareness, planting efforts, and protection of key populations, restoration of this species to its former glory can be achieved.
Wanted: Seed Trees
If you or someone you know with property in the historical range of bur oak have acorn producing trees, we'd love to be able to collect from them to grow ourselves and also share with restoration partners (please contact us). It is important to be able to source seeds from multiple local trees - as many as possible - to preserve the genetic diversity of our local populations. Knowledge of the location of previously unknown individuals or stands will also be useful to get a better understanding of the current state of the species in the province.
If you are unsure whether a tree is a bur oak, an easy way to identify it is by the shape of it's leaves. The more common red oak have leaves with sharp teeth, while bur oak has leaves with rounded lobes (see photo above). The acorns also have fringes on the margins of their caps.
These trees would likely be in or near the floodplains within the area highlighted on the map below:
Map: Likely range of previously unidentified bur oaks (within drawn borders).
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