Native Urban Greening Series – Episode 2: Plantrite’s vision and achieving best outcomes

Healthy, top quality plants are essential to bringing any planting project to life. Careful propagation and growing plants to a robust stage is essential to ensure their survival in the natural environment. This video explores how the team at Plantrite ensures our plants are grown to be the best natives in the market.

Video Transcript – Vision and Best Outcomes 

Good-looking, healthy, top-quality plants are essential in achieving your ultimate vision for your landscape project. Plants do all sorts of good things: they form structure, they feel space and they green the environment. They also filter pollutants, both visual and atmospheric and most importantly they will soften the hard scape of your landscape design. But the difference between quality plants, the correct varieties and selections is often the difference between average and outstanding – and Plantrite prides itself on delivering outstanding landscapes. 

It’s important to understand that getting there requires many steps and processes to deliver premium quality plants and mother nature cannot be rushed. 

On average, the time it takes to grow tubestock is at least 6 months and 9 months for 140mm pots.To fully appreciate the effort required, let’s have a closer look behind the scenes at the sophistication in production technology and know-how that’s employed by Plantrite nursery.

Interview 1 – Glenda, Product Supervisor at Plantrite Wholesale Native Nursery

Trevor: Glenda the technology that’s employed here to produce the plants is amazing and it all starts with seeds. Where most of the plants come from seed, right?

Glenda: Yes, we do a lot of the seeding on our drum seeding line either into plug trays, 63 mm cell trays, into forestry tubestock trays. Most of that gets laid straight out to grow and gets sold. All of our plug trays come over to this machine. To get transplanted into either 63mm cell trays or forestry tube trays. The majority of our species are grown from seed this ensures genetic diversity with the species. A major part of this is provenance propagation we collect, germinate, grow and supply back to the customer the specific plants required for their project. 

Trevor: This automation must save huge amounts of time?

Glenda: It does, this machine on a good day can do at least 30,000 plants. Instead of having 5 people working for 2-3 days, we can do that in 1 day, through this machine. 

Interview 2 – Chris, Micro Propagation Manager at Plantrite Wholesale Native Nursery 

Trevor: Chris, tell me about the importance of tissue culture to Plantrite and what it offers the customers?

Chris: This laboratory is offering Plantrite more flexibility in the production of the bread and butter lines and we also manage an r and d program – where we’re introducing new elite gene types to David’s offer to industry.

Trevor: This is making plants that once were not commonly available, available in larger numbers now?

Chris: That’s the case for some of work like verticordia grandis but we also have a breeding and selection development program where we’re generating novelty and getting that into production and assessing that for commercial viability. 

Interview 3 – Michael, Potting Supervisor at Plantrite Wholesale Native Nursery

Trevor: Tell us about the process basically, once the tubestock is out in the field it’s over to you and your team?

Michael:  Yes, after tubing has done their job it’s out on the benches for a couple of weeks. We then pick it up when it has enough roots and then we put it into the next stage of development. Generally, it’s the 140mm pot that we do and then they go out to the field for a couple of more months before being sold to landscapers and retail. Once they’re in the field. we do a bit more maintenance on them to make sure they will stay perfect. That includes weeding, pest control, a bit of fertilizing, and some trimming. 

Quality plants don’t happen by accident. Careful forward planning and superior technology when propagating young plants and growing plants to a hearty robust stage, ready to transplant into the natural environment. Is all part of the everyday commitment to quality that David Lullfitz and his team at Plantrite strive for. 

If you’re looking for quality, reliability and a level of service that exceeds your expectations, you need to be planning your next project, no matter how big or small with the team from Plantrite.

Narration by Trevor Cochrane for Plantrite Wholesale Native Nursery