Seedlings_Compressed

60 Years of Growing Trees

Juniper, NB 
Florine Turnbull of Juniper New Brunswick started her first summer job as a student in 1967. 50 years later, she is still working at the same place.

“It’s like a family here,” Turnbull said of the Juniper Tree Nursery, a J.D. Irving Woodlands operation celebrating its 60th year this year. The nursery opened in 1957 and was already 10 years old when Florine started as a “weeder” in the seedling beds. Then she worked as a seedling planter in the transplant fields. “It was good hard work and long days, and we didn’t have air-conditioned offices like we do today”, she laughed. Today, Florine supervises greenhouse thinning and monitors seedling growth quality. 

Andrew Cote was also born and raised in Juniper; he started at the Juniper nursery in 1972. 

“I jumped in to any job they asked me to do and I really enjoyed it.” His first job was pulling up 3-4 year old transplant trees that were then bundled up for bareroot planting in the forest. He was also involved in drying cones and extracting seeds during the winter months in Juniper. Today, Andrew supervises the irrigation and fertilizing care in the greenhouses 
In those early days when Florine and Andrew were working together, the Juniper Tree Nursery was producing 4-5 million bareroot seedlings each year. Today, with technology investments and over 40 years of seed and tree improvement, the nursery produces up to 24 million seedlings each year.

Still with all the production improvements over the years, both Florine and Andrew love the simplicity of planting trees and watching them grow. Juniper is the small closely-knit community where Florine and Andrew raised their families and around 700 million seedlings that are today's growing forests in Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. 

I don’t know if it’ll ever be out of my blood”, Cote says. “Every year when we start the greenhouses, the first thing I do after 10 or 11 days is get down on my hands and knees to see those little trees coming up. I enjoy that.”

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Long Service employees Florine Turnbull (50 years) and Andrew Cote (45 years) look through an old photo album of the Juniper Tree Nursery from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

60 years of Tree Growing Facts
• Seeds from locally sourced trees are grown at the Parkindale Seed Orchard 
• First Parkindale orchard was planted in 1983
• Today there are 4 generations of orchards in Parkindale
• Each year, the Orchard extracts up to 50 million seeds 
• Juniper seed line sows almost 2 million seeds a week 
• It takes a week to fill each Juniper greenhouse with 470 pallets of seedling trays 
• Up to four species of seedlings in each tray 
• There are 60 trays per pallet or 4,020 planted seeds in every pallet
• 1.9 million seedlings in each greenhouse
• Each of Juniper’s six greenhouses is filled twice a year 
• Since 1957, almost 1 Billion seedlings planted

 

Iterested in a career in growing healthy trees for tomorrow? Find the latest job opportunities here: https://careers.jdirving.com/latest-jobs

 

 

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