Hello,
bare root season has started and as luck would have it , I have cut my thumb bad enough to need stitches and some mud-free healing time. I’ve always wanted to start a thread about the processes and trials involved in operating a small (or big) nursery business. As much as I enjoy dredging the internet for PDFs, I think opening up conversations amongst the Growing Fruit community would be much more fun and inspiring for any of us curious about or working within the nursery trade.
My current interest are bare root related . The art and science of cold storage facilities , whole plant health throughout the bare root handling process and of course shipping related best practices.
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This topic is right up my ally! What plants are you focused on? What plants are we looking at in the bottom photo?
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Hoping for good healing for your thumb. Still building cultivars for the next few years here. Get the mother trees well established. Not sure how I will do our apples yet. Leaning toward non-profit community development on those. But my wife will be doing her regular license on flowering plants. She already has many dozens established. I will likely shift the more home grower slanted apples over into her side.
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I visited a nursery that sells bare root and it wasnt anything like i thought… not to mention i see everyone on social medias takes pictures of their bare root things dry as a bone in the sunlight to get likes… seems once a thing is dormant and dug they are mostly bulletproof as long as the temperatures dont get too warm for too long and they break dormancy.
I dug some blackberry plants and stuffed them down in some feed sacks and forgot about them for nearly 8 months… it wasnt until they grew out of the bag that i remembered… so i guess feed sacks would also work really well in storing bare root things.
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pretty cool, wish I had the confidence for storage like that,must save a ton of saw dust shlepping and floorspace. I must admit I have some bare root pictures on my website, but these were plants fresh dug and washed, hopefully people arn’t disrespecting their plants for likes out there.
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thanks for the thumb hope Danny . What does a non-profit community development look like? I’m lucky enough to have access to a 1 acre school garden/orchard that my wife teaches gardening and wellness classes from. Most of the orchard is still young, but there’s plenty of older trees to graft onto and spaces to plant stock. Side note, I’m raising the crown of the larger trees so the kids can actually walk around as well.
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clockwise from top left; Walnut , Chestnut , Elderberry, Hazel (Filbert?), Kanza Pecan , Pawpaw. These were dug out of air prune beds wich will grow stone fruit grafts next season. I would like to see my Plum grafts grow faster, maybe more fibrous roots and some
soil drenches could help.
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The margins for bare root trees are pretty small and you are competing against suppliers with systems in place that will keep them that way.
I buy bundles of bare root trees from large nurseries like ACN and grow them for a few years so a tree that cost me maybe $12 can be sold for $300- many of which I install as big bare root trees with massive root systems for a total of $600 per. Nevertheless, it was 10 years before I began drawing a profit and the work of operating such a nursery and caring for so many orchards, most of which I originally installed, is a massive endeavor.
I don’t know how well my model could succeed in most parts of the country, but if you have enough rich people nearby to create a market for such a service it certainly is doable.
That said, if I didn’t live in a place with so much nearby money (I’m about 40 miles from the border of NYC) I’d figure out a way to truck and install big bare root trees far away. That is a niche market where margins are good. Bare root trees have a bad reputation because the window for installations is small, but you can move a lot more of them in less truck space and you can find part time labor at digging time because many people involved in landscape work are often looking for jobs once they are done rounding up leaves. There is very little literature about running a nursery that sells such trees bare root- a lot of the methods to keep the roots from going deep and how to move them without stressing the trees too much has to be self taught… unless you got a lot of advice from someone like me.
The hard thing is publicizing such a business. A couple years back someone found me on the internet who worked for a huge real estate developer in N. Carolina. I ended up selling 70 big bare root apple trees through the contact- they brought the big truck and my helper and I loaded the trees.
I wish someone like that had contacted me this year because I have at least that many apple trees ready to sell. I’m 72 years old and have run this business for half my adult life so I’m getting a little lazy towards doing things like launching some kind of new marketing campaign. I think at this point, I’d rather just scale down- my profits will be fine if I just grow fewer trees.
The hardest thing about the business is estimating what demand will be 3-6 years after ordering and planting inventory…
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Well the community development is working with community gardens, food banks and urban food forests. And also helping folks set up for profit orchards in an advisory role. Helping with apt selections for their goals. Hooking them up with resources and funding help. Where to locate experts on issues. Like chemicals…not my strong suit…but I know the locals who are good with it, Networking really.
School gardens are full of great ideas. I’m thinking about cordons on fences and walls. Maybe some fans.
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Looks like you have your trees in bins in an unheated building or cold basement? (edit: just noticed the coolbot pro, so it’s a walk in cooler - nice) I suspect the guys stacking them roots exposed to the air are paying close attention to relative humidity. I’m going into about my fourth year with bare root fruit trees… here’s my experience. Note I’m just north of ND in zone 3. The first couple of years I would lift all the trees, count them if I was organized, bundle into groups and heal them all into one bed… like the Edible Acres method. You can set them in deep to protect them from the elements and keep them from drying out, and roll the dice with rodents. By the third year I wanted to make things easier and stop worrying about rabbits and voles, so I built a root cellar and last winter I ended up storing closer to your method in the photos, everything packed into creates of damp wood shavings, on some heavy shelves in the root cellar… which stays just below freezing all winter and humid. I got used bulb crates form a local greenhouse. It worked. This winter I changed everything up, new seedlings were all grown in a plug trays or small pots and I now have them packed in crates lined with poly bags with shavings. Older bare root stock was all packed into crates initially, but to save space I bundled them and wrapped in large poly bags with some shavings. In a bundle you can stack them on a shelf and they take up much less space. Btw for organization each bundle might have more than one thing in it, sometimes there’s small counts. Each bundle or bin has has a numbered tag, counts went on a clipboard, that went into a spreadsheet… and then into shopify inventory. Winter pre orders here run from dec through march and bare root shipping season is April. About your plums, in my experience the way to get faster growth is to use larger two year rootstocks, and fall budding.
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Hi Doug,
interesting to hear about your plug technique, zone 3 must be tough on little trees. At first I was worried about having enough humidity with an ac system, but it’s drawing air from our damp Oregon winters I guess, R.H hasen’t dropped below 90 percent yet.We got these little 10 dollar meters for our seed storage fridge that work pretty well. For the older stock do you cover mostly the roots with poly or the whole trees? My pulling, grading, inventory process is very similar wich is incouraging .Could I bug you for your fall budding process? (chip or T, bud wrapping technique, aftercare). My current thoughts are to bud them this spring as bench grafts so I don’t have field graft. I would really like to bud all my grafts though, that seems to be how the big boys get consistency.
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Hi Alan,
Do you have a formula for your price points? I’ve heard strategies like materials plus 50 cents per square foot per week x 2.5, but who knows where that came from? Though grafting is labor and time intensive I suppose it’s a way of offering something a wholesale outlet doesn’t. That’s my hope anyway. I would also like to develop other services related to the nursery. I offer pruning but that tends to coincide with the already stacked winter bare root work load. What does your tree work look like in the spring and summer seasons? I do like the idea of my bigger trees going into a pot-in-ground system using root prune fiber pots. Hopefully that would save on some digging. I am interested to hear your thoughts , sounds like you’ve put in the time!
@mike-n For the bundled trees it’s just the roots you need to keep wrapped up, I used clear leaf bags with say 50 or 100 seedlings in a bundle, maybe a gallon of damp wood shavings, I’ve been using some slightly composted material from an old sawdust pile because it holds more moisture than fresh shavings off the planar, and then wrapping around the bag with some bale twine nice and tight. Some I double bagged. The tops of the trees stick out, there’s probably some benefit to keeping them dryer. When I store scion wood all winter I’ll throw some peat moss in the bag to catch condensation, just thinking about water beading on the branches, it’s probably better to let the tops breathe.
Budding is a work in progress for me, I’m better at grafting and usually get a good take on apple and pear bench grafts so this spring I’m going to give a run at bench grafting plums and apricots onto my smaller rootstocks like 1/4". I get the best result budding in early august on 2 year old stocks say 3/8" caliper or more. T budding is probably the way I’ll go this year, but chip budding also works if you can get the chips to line up by using similar sized scions.
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Business plan? Profit Margins? I’m an improvisasionist. If something doesn’t work, I try to figure out why and try to fix it. When I started, there was no model to work from and I had a child on the way- I just figured if I ran hard and fast enough I might make a go of it and I’d do deep breathing when I’d start to feel a sense of panic…
Fortunately, I started my business right around the time that rich people with country homes decided it was a good idea to grow their own food, or have someone else do it on their land.
If someone wants to follow my lead, they will have a big leg up compared to my starting line because the market already can be known to exist and my modest success proves that it is possible to make a go of it. My son suggests if I was a planner, better organized, and more focused on profits it might even be successful enough to mildly impress him. He makes a lot more money than I do working for a big corporation.
Actually, he’s somewhat impressed by how I get to pick who I work for and reject those I don’t, so my working life is surrounded by people who I like. That is not an uncommon accomplishment of reasonably competent trades people When you have that reputation, people assume you are honest and unless the economy tanks, your rep assures that there will always be enough business.
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I plan on playing around with the idea of propogating trees this next season and selling locally. I don’t think there’s a market for a plain grafted tree, but there may be for a multigrafted tree. I know in my area, nobody sells them from what I’ve seen. I’d have to pay around $100 plus shipping to get one (or drive a long distance). Is it feasible to have them potted instead of bareroot if I don’t plan to ship? I know the irrigation might be a concern but I just feel like bagging or potting would be easier in smaller quantities.
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I’m not the best person to answer from an established business perspective. I am planning to get my nursery license this year and sell publicly. Last year I ordered wholesale plants and sold the extras to family and friends to pay for what I kept. This year I plan to keep more for my collection and put a little green in my pockets to waste on something else. My plan isn’t to become the largest nursery in Virginia, but rather to make it a side gig that helps pay for my plant buying habit. Keep all of this in mind because the nursery biz is not, and I have no plans for it to be, my primary income.
There is one huge benefit to potted plants. They are moveable! They can be planted practically year round in my climate (obviously excluding the short periods in fall, winter and spring that the soil is too wet to dig and a few days in winter when it’s frozen) This allows you to sell long after dormancy has broken, which is the time most folks here want to plant for some reason. This was one shocker to me. You will probably not be selling many plants at ideal planting times. You will be selling plants when people feel it is planting season. Here it is after everything is greening up for spring and folks feel “spring is in the air”. Another benefit is that pots allows you to reorganize and rearrange your nursery spot easily. You can even move heat sensitive plants into full sun in the cool spring and then to part shade during hot summer. The huge downfall is watering. The pots get hot and dry out. Of course where I am the ground dries out too in summer, but it takes a lot longer.
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I would like to mitigate how much sheer pot juggling I do. I originally planned for a seasonal bare root nursery model with quicker growing potted items filling out the rest of the year’s sales. This model would probably be more successful with a publicly open nursery space. I have found potted plant sales to be about half as much as bare root sales in a farmers market scenario though. I have noticed a lack in vigor with potted stock compared to bedded stock as well. Going forward I would like to try larger 2-3 year plants/trees with in- ground fiber pots, I’m a root prune believer and think this would offer a quality “potted” tree with less digging and root disturbance.
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I would like to mitigate how much sheer pot juggling I do. I originally planned for a seasonal bare root nursery model with quicker growing potted items filling out the rest of the year’s sales. This model would probably be more successful with a publicly open nursery space. I have found potted plant sales to be about half as much as bare root sales in a farmers market scenario though. I have noticed a lack in vigor with potted stock compared to bedded stock as well. Going forward I would like to try larger 2-3 year plants/trees with in- ground fiber pots, I’m a root prune believer and think this would offer a quality “potted” tree with less digging and root disturbance
