IPPS Conference 2023

It was great to have had the opportunity to be able to attend the IPPS conference ‘All About The Roots’ in Denmark in October 2023.

There were 5 of us in the group from the LSA and after making our own ways out to Copenhagen, we met at the hotel the night before the start of the conference. It was good to meet the wide range of people that were also there from a number of different countries.

The first day started with a coach trip to Sweden – we crossed the Øresund Bridge which took us from Copenhagen into Malmo in Sweden and from here we ventured out to the first nursery visit of the trip. We visited three nurseries this day, Stangby nursery – a tree nursery that supplies municipal areas; Splendor plants – a nursery that grows plants and creates its own compost tea that is applied to the growing areas monthly; and Klinta Tradgard – a nursery that only grows in sand with no organic matter, allowing mycorrhiza to give the plants all the nutrients it needs.

The second day was more local to the area we were staying in and we started off at Gunnar Christensen planteskole, this was a nursery that had an assortment of over 1 million plants. We had a few different speakers here and the morning was split up by hearing about peat reduction, plastics, labelling amongst other products in the industry. We then headed to Nordic Harvest which was a vertical farm that grows 4 products that supply supermarkets across Denmark. It was interesting to see how it differs from normal salad production and the scale of it. The final visit of the trip was to Pometet which was part of the University of Copenhagen. This was a 14ha site of lots of different varieties of fruits, berries and nuts that are used for research by schools and chefs. Here we tried some home brewed apple and quince wines – very interesting flavours!

The final day was the AGM and conference where there were a number of speakers that covered a number of topics including Heathers, plant biodiversity, perennials, and trees. It was a very informative morning and great to hear from other growers and companies in Scandinavia.

The three days were great fun and it was really good to speak to a lot of other people in different sectors of the industry and different countries. The dinners we had each night at the hotel (lots of pickled fish!) were a great opportunity to get to know people and learn about their jobs and how growing differs in other countries compared to the UK.  It was great that the 5 of us from the LSA had this opportunity and it was nice getting to know each other much better as well.