The nursery of the Glubokoye Experimental Forestry is the only one in the country with a full cycle of obtaining planting material
– With the start of the season, at least 3–4 forestry enterprises are loaded with seedlings and saplings daily, – noted the head of the nursery, Evgeny Tarasenko. – Currently, vehicles from Lepel and Богушевск are waiting for loading, they will take away more than a thousand seedlings.
In the spring, all of them will be planted in the open ground of reforestation plots and greening zones, including in the Gluboksky district. On average, forests are restored here annually on 140 hectares of last year's logging sites. This work is now in full swing. Various organizations of the district, which have actively joined the republican campaign "Let's Restore Forests Together," help the team to perform it quickly and efficiently.
– We prepare plots for such work in advance. Tree branches remaining after logging are mulched on them, and strips are cut with a plow. There is a forest planting machine and special planting devices. But no one has invented anything better than the Kolesov spade, invented almost 150 years ago, – emphasized the chief forester of the forestry enterprise, Viktor Mikhnevich. – Our employees and many of those who constantly help us in forest restoration are virtuosos in using this shovel.
By the way, the forestry enterprise begins this work with seed harvesting. For this purpose, it has a 100-hectare plantation of elite trees, where pine and spruce cones are collected. They are dried, seeds are extracted, and planted.
It is worth noting that observing the process of sowing seeds into cassettes is very interesting. Like a river, a conveyor belt flows through the huge hall, its mechanisms fill the cassettes with peat, moisten and disinfect it, place a seed in each cell, and cover it with a special moisture-retaining material. At the exit, the cassettes are stacked in large piles and taken to the greenhouse. Approximately 3,000 cassettes, containing up to 200,000 pine or spruce seeds, are moved from the workshop to the greenhouse per shift.
In the greenhouse, they must sprout and strengthen, after which they will be planted in the ground. The weather in the greenhouse is monitored by its own weather station, which determines the temperature and air humidity, according to which computers will adjust the optimal microclimate. A real production process where the product is a living tree.