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About
West Texas Nursery
Texas
Forest Service’s West Texas Nursery (WTN) produces and sells quality
tree and shrub seedlings at an affordable price allowing landowners
to plant large quantities of quality seedlings for natural resource
conservation.
The
new nursery facility, opening September 2006, is located on U.S.
Highway 62/82 in Idalou, Texas, about 10 miles northeast of Lubbock.
Situated on 53 acres of land purchased by TFS in 2002, the nursery
complex includes two greenhouses, a packing shed, equipment shed,
lath house and an office building.
Our
Production
Each
greenhouse has the capacity to produce about 75,000 containerized
evergreen seedlings per crop. Once the trees reach a certain size in
the greenhouse, they are moved to the lath house where they harden
off over winter. Annual production is about 140,000 containerized
evergreens.
Twenty
one acres of the new nursery site is devoted to field production of
bare-root, deciduous trees and shrubs. Initial target production is
240,000 plantable seedlings of 25 species of trees and shrubs.
Our Past
Since the 1940s, TFS had been shipping seedlings from its Indian
Mound Nursery in East Texas, to the High Plains, but the trees had
low survival rates because they were not adapted to the climate or
growing season. Aware of the need and demand for acclimated trees in
this region, TFS established a presence in West Texas in 1971.
Lubbock was selected for its central location in the Great Plains
region of Texas, also known as the windbreak region extending
northward into Canada.
The
first six years were spent conducting empirical studies and tree
inventories to identify the best tree and shrub species for planting
in the vast arid and semiarid region of the state. It was apparent
by the number of tree plantings attempted by private landowners,
that there was a place for trees in resource conservation in West
Texas.
Landowners were planting larger stock from retail nurseries that
limited the number of trees that could be planted because of the
cost of individual trees and the species available were not the best
suited for conservation purposes. Also, the planting stock was not
locally grown which limited the survival success. It was a matter of
selecting the right species for the task and the right type of
planting stock. With this information in hand, TFS made the decision
to establish a nursery in Lubbock dedicated to producing tree and
shrub seedlings for conservation tree plantings in West Texas.
TFS’
West Texas Nursery became a reality in 1978 when the first
greenhouse was built to produce containerized evergreens. The
greenhouse and office was located at the Texas Agricultural
Experiment Station north of Lubbock. An eight-acre field nursery
for growing bare-root hardwoods was established in 1979 and a second
greenhouse was added in 1989.
Since inception, West Texas Nursery has shipped millions of trees to
landowners in the western two-thirds of the state.
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