Nursery

Our main project at the moment has been to establish a nursery.

We are going to need so many trees and shrubs for the acres that will become our orchards that it would end up costing an absolute fortune. So, we figured out a way to take the financial burden off our plans: have a nursery. We can buy plants in bulk, and then sell half of them to fund the ones we want for ourselves. Anything we don’t sell can always be kept and sold next year as a bigger tree, or planted into our own orchard. Win, win.

We bought a kit for a tunnel greenhouse, which is 50′ x 14′. Once it was assembled, we laid a weed barrier down on the ground and then started to fill the space with plants. We bought everything as either a plug or bare-root, and then had to transplant it all into pots and bags. Next step will be to set up an automatic watering system, but for the time being, Abe is kind of enjoying walking up and down the paths with a hose, watering his babies by hand.

All of our selections so far are adapted to our area, and produce some kind of food, whether for us or our animals. Here’s the current list:

100 x Chinese Chestnuts
240 x Pineapple Guava
50 x Loquat
50 x Stone Pines
10 x White Mulberries (the other 90 were planted directly into the ground)
80 x Apples (Anna, Mollies, Granny Smith, Ein Shemer)
80 x Plums (Methley, Santa Rosa, Damson, Scarlett Beauty)
60 x Peaches (Lafeliciana, Loring, Redskin, Suwanee)
144 x Fig (Texas Everbearing, Celeste)
144 x Blackberry (Arapaho, Natchez)
144 x Grape (Alachua, Dixie)
144 x Blueberry (Palmetto, Farthing)

There’s a few other odds and ends in there too (like roses and gojis), which brings us up to a grand total of 1300 plants that we have bagged and potted in the past two weeks.

We have plans for a whole bunch of other stuff, but they’re going to have to wait for a month, as we are running out of space in the greenhouse! Once it warms up a little, we’ll be able to move a bunch of these outside, and then we can start round two!