First Trees of the Season Have Arrived at Rohr’s Nursery!

For the last four or five years, we’ve been very lucky that we were able to bring the first load in the last week of February. And we’ve got multiple loads lined up for next week already. It gets a little tricky if we’re trying to plow snow and unload trucks at the same time.

Bringing the trees in early, like right now, they’re dormant. They’re asleep. It’s easy to transport them. There’s no risk of damage because the foliage hasn’t flushed out yet. So we’ll try to bring in a lot of our B&B, which is our larger balled and burlap stuff you’ll see out in our fields when you come in. Then the container materials start showing up more towards the end of March. But we’ll start with all the bald and burlap material. It’s larger. It takes longer to put away. There’s more involved in unloading those trucks.

We work our way in. We start at the outer edge of the nursery and then work back to the center where all the container material will be. With this first load, they’re all different sizes. I think our smaller stuff is 5 to 6 foot, but we’ve got some 10 to 12 foot stuff on this truck as well, around 6, 700, 800 pounds.

We use a lot of machines. Machine everything as much as possible. One of our employees, Dave, he’s been there forever and a day. And Dave, I swear he could pick up a fork off the ground with that machine. We unload all the trees off the truck with a set of forks. Because you slide the forks apart. And as you lift up, it supports the ball on either side. Because you really don’t want to pull them around by their tops. Properly handling this big stuff is really important too. Because you don’t want to do damage to it as you’re putting it away.

Now when people buy the big ones like that, how do they get it home? That is generally something that we’re going to go out and do. We offer a planting service. That’s something that for a fee, we’ll come out and we’ll plant it. That increases the guarantee to one year, 100% when we plant it. We also give care instructions when we’re out there.

I do have some customers that come in and attempt to do the five to six foot stuff themselves. You’re just going to need an open bed pickup truck or a trailer to be able to haul that.

We can do removal of smaller trees and shrubs. If it’s a very large tree, then we’ll sub that out. We’ll recommend using one of the tree companies that we have relationships with. I mean if it’s a two-foot diameter oak tree, that’s not something my crew is going to come out there and remove. We’ll have a tree company come in. And we’ll do that. We’ll give you three or four options to call. Get some estimates on stuff like that.

And then once that tree is removed, the stump is ground out, then we’ll bring in the new stuff and plant it. If it’s smaller stuff, though, we remove a lot of stuff on job sites as well. For the smaller trees and shrubs. And it would all be taken care of the right way.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).