With high night and day temperatures this years crop is now mororing away. We were up to 6 watering cycles per 24 hours when the temperatures hit 30 degrees last week and the reservoirs are lowering fast now although there is still plenty of water to last until the end of October.

Barcham has just come out of a very busy period with Grand Designs, the Chelsea Flower Show and our Gary Watson Seminar here at Barcham now behind us. The latter event attracted over 350 dedicated arborists to the nursery to catch up on the latest research from the UK and the States, concentrating on root physiology and how roots dictate the fortunes of urban trees. A big thank you to Gary Watson, Glynn Percival and Andy Hirons for their research and delivering this information. Thanks also to Mark Johnson for chairing the day.

Cold night temperatures have made it a slow start to the growing season but with temperatures set to rise through to the Chelsea Flower Show the trees are beginning to storm away into full canopy. Generally speaking, if you get night temperatures over 10 degrees celsius you will be in for a riot of growth this time of year.

Both field planting and container unit potting were completed by Easter and now we are into the cultural work of spring  / summer. Our container trees are on two irrigation cycles per day and we are putting and inch and a half of water on our newly planted field trees by water cannon this weekend.

Thankfully we have had 2 weeks with no rainfall so we have been able to complete our field planting before it rains this weekend and our potting programe only has another three weeks to run.

It's always a sure sign of Spring being around the corner in that our Hamamelis x intermedia Arnold Promise at both Barcham and in my garden started to flower this week. Next to show will be Cornus mas in March followed by Betula ermanii foliage emerging by April. We have now potted over 52,000 trees this season and with only another 23,000 to go we should be finished by Easter. Our reservoirs are completely full, much to the delight of our resident King Fisher.

We are still harvesting rainfall at 1000 cubic metres per 24 hours and our reservoirs will be full by the end of January at this rate. It has proved to be a very wet winter.

We came back to work to find a winter wonderland at Barcham but this didn't stop us potting over 5,000 trees up in the first week back. We have now potted 24,000 trees so far this autumn which will be ready for sale from next September onwards. We aim to pot between 60,000-70,000 by the time we finish potting in March.

We are now trying to move into the 21st century with our Barcham Trees website, and at the moment I am working on the finishing touches to get this launched in the very near future.  With this new website we are aiming to reach all individuals that are interested in trees.  Proving information and photographs of the many species that Barcham stock, as well as a few more weird and wonderfuls.