Growers across the country have tinkered and trialed machines and implements from other industries and modified them for nursery use.
Here are examples that were presented at the American Nursery & Landscape Association New Ideas Session in January.
Multitask tractor
At Valley Hill Nurseries in Springfield, Ky., it seemed the mowing was never done.
“We’d never get caught up with mowing,” owner Todd Ryan said. “We’d stop mowing to spray Roundup or cultivate. It was a never-ending battle.”
Ryan wanted to create an all-in-one, multitasking tractor. He found a Clemens in-row cultivator that mounted to the belly of his Kubota tractor, which keeps the three-point hitch free for mowing.
Next he attached an Enviromist sprayer for Roundup applications. It sprays a fine mist, which reduced the amount of herbicide needed per application.
A fertilizer spreader was mounted to the front of the tractor. It throws granules in a 4-foot band near the trees.
“We’ve increased productivity about 25 percent,” he said. “Our drive speed is slower, but the multitasking tractor still speeds up the process.”
For more: Valley Hill Nurseries, (859) 284-5141; www.valleyhillnurseries.com.
Seedling/shrub pruner
Carlton Plants in Dayton, Ore., was spending too much time and labor topping seedlings and shrubs. Maintenance manager Randy McCool looked to the turf industry for help.
He found a used Hesston swather, which is not hard to find in the Willamette Valley, he said. He removed the main header and cut it from 12 feet wide down to 7 feet. McCool had a custom flail rotor made to replace the auger. He kept the original sickle bar and replaced the tires to get ground clearance over the seed beds and to travel down the 72-inch aisles.
Once the sickle makes the cuts, the flail grinds up the green waste into 1- or 2-inch pieces that fall between the plants and eventually break down, adding organic matter back into the soil.
“We also found we could use the swather to top some shrubs like roses and buddleia in the fall before digging,” he said. “I was concerned the original sickle cutter bar may not hold up well to shrubs, but it’s held up really well.”
The tires were filed with foam to protect them from thorns when topping shrub roses.
Almost everything on the swather is belt-driven, so McCool brings it into the shop once a year for routine maintenance.
For more: Carlton Plants, (800) 398-8733; www.carltonplants.com.
Hoop house doors
Home Nursery’s poly houses looked like most others -- hoop construction, wooden doors and layers of poly. But one of the nursery’s quality management teams wanted to design a better door.
“We needed a door that would stay up year-round, after the poly came off the house,” said Dennis Molitor, vice president of finance at Home Nursery in
Edwardsville,
Ill. “We needed to get in and out of the door easily, and we wanted to be able to partially open the doors.”
The team found just the right door at the local self-storage company. The single-bay doors are metal, they roll up and they can be partially opened.
The nursery researched having poly houses made with roll-up doors already in place, but that was cost prohibitive -- $1,300 per end. And Home Nursery’s houses are 720 feet long with doors on each end. Buy installing it on site, the price dropped to about $300 per end. The doors are attached to the poly houses with 2-inch-square steel tubing.
“It’s just as cheap to put these doors on the poly houses as it is to put the wooden doors on,” Molitor said. “And you don’t have to take these doors down and they last longer.”
For more: Home Nursery, (800) 628-1966; www.homenursery.com.
Tractor safety attachment
It’s tough to keep branches safe from tractor damage when the nursery is configured with close spacing. But Dunlap Enterprises in Blue Mound, Ill., found a solution in the corn fields.
The nursery has 500 acres of conifers and deciduous trees with 2-foot rows, said Mark Damery, mechanic supervisor.
The nursery needed something to protect the branches from damage when crews mowed or sprayed. Damery found a corn picker and knew the snout could be attached to the nursery’s 36-inch Kubota to push the branches aside safely.
“It took me about 12 hours of shop labor to take the attachment off the picker, build a frame and attach it to the tractor,” he said. “It was simple to do, and if we needed to remove it, it would probably take 30 minutes.”
Damery added rubber belting to cover the rear tires to continue the smooth surface from the picker snout to the back of the tractor.
“It’s been very useful, especially in the Austrian pine and spruce fields,” he said. “Before we had the attachment, if you brushed the branches with the wheels, you’d get brown needles.”
Previously the nursery tried attaching solid fenders on the tractors, but lower branches would often be damaged and mud would pack up around the wheels, he said.
For more: Dunlap Enterprises, (217) 692-2915; www.dunlaptrees.com.
Cooler trailer
Dwight Hughes Nursery in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wasn’t perusing the classifieds or salvage yards for a cooler. Instead, a customer called looking to unload an 8-foot cube cooler. The nursery received it in pieces on a pallet. Next the nursery found an old manufactured home trailer frame and had it cut and the tandem axles relocated to make a 14-foot trailer.
After putting all the pieces together, the nursery had a portable cooler.
“Our original walk-in cooler was full, so this was our auxiliary cooler. We just happened to put it on wheels,” owner Dwight Hughes said.
The recycled cooler is equipped with 5-foot steps, pressure-treated flooring and a caged compressor. The nursery added racks inside the cooler to keep plants off the floor for good air circulation. Daily misting of the space maintains 98-percent humidity.
The nursery uses the unit to store and transport dormant nursery stock to the field for planting in April.
For more: Dwight Hughes Nursery, (319) 396-7038, www.hughesnursery.com.
Buffer, fork system
Willoway Nurseries in Avon, Ohio, needed more productivity out of its canning machine. Too much labor was going into taking plants off the line and putting them on trailers. Willoway partnered with AgriNomix to find a solution.
“They came back with a container buffer and fork system, which has increased productivity by more than 30 percent,” said David Geary, Willoway’s Huron farm manager. “It was well worth the investment. We’ll have a total payback in less than four years.”
It was originally designed for the greenhouse industry, but easily modified for nursery use, Geary said.
Plants come off the potting machine and onto the buffer table. When one row of plants is filled, that row is moved forward. The system can configure custom patterns on the table. Willoway designed its pattern based on the nursery’s shipping wagons.
Custom-designed forks pick up the containers off the table.
The system is designed for any size container up to 4 gallons, Geary said.
“To keep it efficient, you need to run the same size pots at once. When you change pot size, you change the scallop bar on the table and the spacing on the forks,” he said.
During a nursery tour in
Australia, Andy Harding, production manager at Herman Losely & Son, saw a new contraption that really captured his attention. The hand-held device shot slow-release fertilizer into containers quickly and accurately.
Back in the states, Harding ordered the GreenElf to replace the old scoop-and-funnel method for applying fertilizer.
“With the old method, you have to scoop it out, and it might not be the proper amount, and wait for it to drop through the funnel. It’s very inefficient,” Harding said. “With the GreenElf, you fill it up, point it and pull the trigger. It paces the employee and it’s always accurate.”
The GreenElf is calibrated to the dose needed. It runs on rechargeable AA batteries, and an overnight charge keeps it going for a 10-hour work day, Harding said.
GreenElf Works, the unit’s manufacturer, provides a spreadsheet on its Web site to calculate payback.
“We did the spreadsheet and found it would pay for itself in five days. We couldn’t believe it, but when we used it, we knew that was true. It was amazing,” Harding said.
Last year the nursery shaved at least two weeks of man hours for fertilizing containers.
For more: Herman Losely & Son Inc., (440) 259-2725; www.losely.com. GreenElf Works, 011 (61) 2 9418 6925; www.greenelfworks.com.
Not much activity here it seems. Well, maybe I'll post one more just in case. Is anyone using KYSOR Walk-in cooler and walk-in freezers like those at http://www.kysorpanel.com
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