Management of Plant Nursery for Successful Afforestation

Plant nursery plays important role in successful and economical afforestation program. Management plan is essentially required for managing nursery and to get suitable quantity of plants and seedlings as and when required. The documentation of management plan is also important to workout budget and schedule for the annual or long term plan. The management plan enlists both the short and long-term measures required for raising region specific priority species. Raising of plants in nursery is a costly and labour intensive activity if not planned properly. Before starting nursery basic infrastructure is required to support irrigation, fertiliser application, treatment to protect from pests, funguses, different pathogens etc. and protect germination from frost and provide suitable moist and shed at early stage of development. For efficient nursery management nursery need to divide into sub units viz., nursery area and propagation complex. Nursery area includes the nursery bed area and composting unit, whereas the propagation complex includes the mist chamber, hardening chamber, net house and soil mix preparation yard. Nursery area involves operations through out the year for raising quality planting material. Root trainers are mostly used in nursery for raising the planting material. Time schedule for major operations is very important to get best results. For composting September to October are suitable months, soil preparation, sieving could be done from December to March, ploy bags and pot filling between February to March and seed sowing between March to September months. Nursery experiments are usually 4-6 months duration experiments so their complete details such as design of experiments, duration of experiment, and nature of experiment received in first year. Such experiment give opportunity to understand ability of different species to reproduce by vegetative means mainly rooting of branch cuttings, nodal cuttings, juvenile shoot cuttings, rhizome cuttings, root cuttings, cladode cuttings etc. We can get good quality and fast growing planting material. Management of Nursery is a collective exercise and more research oriented schemes align with commercial enterprises. The composting unit is the main unit of nursery hence the time-to-time evaluation of the quality of the compost should be done and necessary pest and pathogen treatment to avoid and disease in the plants.