100 stories from the hiking route

1968 – founding of Kullenga plant nursery

Information

Topic

The story of forestry

Coordinates

Long-Lat WGS 84

Latitude: 59.2016904

Longitude: 26.2122603

L-EST 97

x: 6564666.7
y: 626380.0

Location

Kauksi-Aegviidu Hiking route

Kullenga plant nursery was founded in 1968, when the Rakvere forest household established a pine seed orchard in the former Porkuni forest region for obtaining tree seeds.
To get seeds capable of producing trees with high-quality genetic material, only the offspring of the best trees have to be planted in the seed orchard. To do that, the forest stands with the highest growth are selected, from which, in turn, the best trees are picked. There are a few hundred of this type of trees in Estonia and they are called plus-trees. The selected trees will become documented ‘grade trees’. Scions are retrieved from the treetops of plus-trees, and they are engrafted to the trees raised from seeds. The trees grown from these scions are the copies or clones of their plus-tree parents in terms of their genetic material.
Once the young trees in the seed orchard start producing cones, the hard work pays off, as seed orchards are the best way for obtaining seeds that produce fast-growing, straight, and lean trees.
In 1968–1978, 16,400 of these engrafted trees or clones were planted on 65 hectares of the Kullenga seed orchard. The plants from that time are old and replaced by new ones, the offspring of the best trees.
Around 3.2 million pot spruces are raised as seedlings in the foil greenhouses of Kullenga. Half of those are taken to the RMK plant nurseries for nursing, whereas the rest are nursed on the field and taken to forest for planting after two years.