The growing season has begun!
Dr Abby van den Berg, international collaborator and one of our research team, visited the South Island from the University of Vermont Proctor Maple Research Center. As well as being a key presenter at the recent Tree Syrup Aotearoa Workshop, we took this opportunity to show her our field sites and to check in on how the plants were growing.
This year is the third growing season for the initial trial site near Hanmer Springs - and the trees are very happy, exceeding six feet in some instances. We seem to have managed to find a perfect location for sunshine, water access and protection from the wind.
This year we also established a second horticultural trial site for our research near Geraldine (South Canterbury). We have worked with a private landowner to plant one hundred maple trees in a 10m x 10m array. The saplings are doing well and making the most of the growing season, as you can see by the photo below.
Telemetered weather stations at the Hanmer Springs and Geraldine test sites are operational, and live weather data is shown at the bottom our homepage. We are tracking temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, pressure, rainfall and solar radiation on the field sites.