Forestry Memories

Uig Nursery - Benmore nr Dunoon Argyll

Uig Nursery - Benmore nr Dunoon Argyll

Date Added: 28 April 2008 Contributor: Norman Davidson Year of Photo: 1964 Picture No: 327

Photograph courtesy of Pat McAuley.
Benmore Forester Training School students John Povall, possibly Len MacRae and Norman Davidson working at the Lining Out of Sitka spruce seedlings into Transplant beds at Uig Nursery next to the Forestry School. They are lifting the locking rings on the lining out board hinges, prior to opening and carefully lifting the board away from the lined out seedlings.
In this case a specially modified plough with a trailing edge roller has turned a wide row of soil against the vertical edge where the seedling roots were hanging down. The roller at the rear of the plough has packed the soil down and created a platform for cutting another vertical edge into the soil about 8 inches out from the last row. This vertical edge will be cut by another plough very similar to a normal farm plough with a disc coulter and once done another row of boards with seedlings can be set up for a repeat of the last two operations.

About this time at Ledmore Nursery a plough had been fully developed to carry out these two operations in one pass. In this small nursery if the weather and soil was bit wet the second part of the operation (and sometimes the first) were done manually by setting up a line and cutting the long vertical edge with the spade.

Groups: Forest Nurseries, Forester Training Schools and Universities, Forestry in Action, Groups of people, Tools, equipment and clothing

1 Comment

After the nursery closed, the area was used for Christmas trees. Some escaped harvesting and the background of this picture now has Norway spruce about 40 ft tall. Comment left on 07 January 2013 at 13:20 by Andy MacNicol
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