Pests, Plastics, Politics and Prices

Processionary Oak Moth, Xylella fastidiosa, and Dothistroma Needle Blight are among the nasty pests we must watch out for. Xylella, with the highest impacts on horticulture, has the potential of causing annual losses of €5.5 billion, affecting a wide variety of nursery crops across the entire EU.

To combat the threat of the many pests, the EU has introduced a tough new regime that will affect us all. The new controls mean producers, importers and traders in plants must be officially registered with the Department of Agriculture. It includes all plant importers, Landscape designers, Landscape architects, Local Authorities, Landscape Contractors and anyone who imports plants. The object is to facilitate controls and to provide traceability in the event of produce subsequently showing signs of infection. This requires the issuing of Plant Passports and a host of other record keeping and I would advise everyone to consult the new regulations on the Department Web Site.

My son David is lucky enough to be in South East Asia and sent pictures like the one below showing vast amounts of plastic washed up onto the seashore. It got my focus back onto how we need to face the problem and one way is to stop bagging bare root trees. We have been looking for an alternative for 2 years and have not found an answer. I understand the need for root protection on site, but I would ask customers to give a little thought to the need for bagging every delivery.

In a recent announcement the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Marine, made a big deal about planting 600,000 trees on used Bord na Mona bogs. While the action is commendable and the numbers sound large, a 17km stretch of motorway uses more trees. The 2019 Climate Action Plan concentrates heavily on forestry and the only mention of non-forestry planting I could find was a piece about hedgerows and carbon mitigation, I also found no mention of landscaping and energy saving through tree planting around homes and commercial buildings or the use of roof gardens and natural roofs.

With the first round of GLAS (GREEN, LOW-CARBON AGRI-ENVIRONMENT SCHEME) in 2015/16 4,000 farmers planted two million native trees, 7,500 farmers planted 1,200 km of hedging and 1300 farmers planted traditional orchards. Unbelievably in this time of climate concern the government excluded the hedgerow and orchard planting in the following two rounds. This scheme gave huge support to the rural nurseries and garden centres, while the landscapers benefited from the preparation and planting. There are no plans to change the next rounds and I would encourage everyone to lobby your local representatives to bring back these GLAS options. 

In 32 years, I have never seen the like of the price increases experienced over the last 2 years. While nurserymen agree that prices needed to increase the rate has been far beyond anyone’s estimates. Several factors influenced this including a lack of stock in Europe post-recession. The Chinese started buying tree stock in the hundreds of thousands in Europe from 2016 and the most prevalent sizes were 8-12cm, so a great deal of young stock has been sold which should be on the market today. Factors such as the stifling summer of 2018, labour, retirement with no succession and the closing of nurseries during the recession has also contributed to the present stock shortages. In Ireland the nurseries have only a limited stock and once sold, they must go to the European market where price increases of 40% are not uncommon. My advice to customers is please check availability and price before committing to the sale as prices will change throughout this season and we may not be able to stand over the prices in this catalogue.

A big thank you to all our customers for their continued support over the last 15 years and I wish you all a great planting season,

Regards,

John Murphy