When the Buckeye State Tree Nursery first opened in 2024, Carla Jarvis planted chestnut trees by poking holes in the dirt with her finger.
“I just do that to give them a good spot to start rooting down into,” she explained.
Her nascent team had planted around 9,000 trees this way in the first month of the facility’s operation.
Two years later, the nursery’s workers can plant twice that amount in a single day.
“Here's the starting point of our production line,” said nursery manager William Barnhill, beside 120 feet of conveyor belts and humming machines.
The new equipment is the result of a concerted push over the past two years to ramp up production to meet the state’s growing need for seedlings.
In two years, the Buckeye State Tree Nursery has planted around 600,000 seeds, from persimmons to pawpaws, white oak to redbuds. Now, the first round of these burgeoning trees are being distributed to conservation sites statewide.
Planting seeds
Planting hundreds of thousands of seeds each year starts with getting the right mixture of soil, Barnhill said, stopping beside a machine near the start of the production line.
“Here we'll add our biochar, our mycorrhizae,” he said. “And then we will add water as well.”
Another machine wraps cylinders of the soil mixture into biodegradable paper tubes and pops them in a tray.
“And then once it comes down here, it'll go through our dibbler,” Barnhill said.
The tool drills little holes into the soil. Then, after workers stick seeds like acorns into those holes, a conveyor belt whisks the trays through a water tunnel and onto wagons to be hauled off to a greenhouse.
There’s a row of 10 greenhouses. The first is filled with hundreds of itty bitty seedlings planted just six weeks ago: black maples and redbuds, dogwoods and crabapples.
“Most of our tree species are native to Ohio or have been growing in Ohio for over 200 years,” Barnhill said.
There’s a big demand for these species. And that’s why state legislators established this project: After tree nurseries in surrounding states shut down, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources needed a place to buy large quantities of trees suited to the state’s climate and growing conditions.
Where are the seedlings going?
Now, two years after those chestnuts were planted by hand, the nursery’s first seedlings are big enough to be distributed to conservation projects across the state.
Some will be used in mine reclamation sites in the southeast.
“So you’ve got more acidic soil sites, you want something that can take a little but harsher conditions, so a lot of things they like, for example, is like a burr oak,” Barnhill said.
Others, like arborvitae, can be used to break winds whooshing across flat land in the northwest. And sycamores thrive in wet environments, where they can soak up excess nutrients before they get into waterways like Lake Erie and cause algal blooms.
The chestnuts are planted in state forests and wildlife areas all over Ohio.
Barnhill says the nursery has distributed more than 63,000 seedlings this year. And there’s still more to go around.
“If you email us, which is on our Division of Forestry website, the email will send you an order form and we can provide you with seeds,” he said.
You have to order at least a few dozen, and they have to be purchased for conservation’s sake, not by private industries. But otherwise there’s not many restrictions: You could plant them in your own backyard.
This work is just beginning. Barnhill says the nursery is currently doing lots of nurturing and watering to grow around 500,000 seedlings for future projects.
And next year, they’ll be planting even more. As the tree nursery continues to grow, they want to raise a million seeds a season.
