We have started growing trees in air prune beds using wood boxes with hardware cloth screen material in the bottom. The concept of these boxes is simple. The tap root of the baby tree grows down to the bottom of the box and hits the screen. When it pokes it’s tail out the tip gets gently pruned by the air and stops growing down. This sudden stop of downward growth causes the upper parts of the root system to shoot out small feeder roots. After the first season the root system is much more diverse than looking like a carrot like conventionally field grown seedlings. This type of root system will allow the tree to take up more nutrients and build stronger healthier faster growing top growth. When grown in our healthy nutrient rich soil in the nursery, all the side roots feeding on all the nutrient will make very happy seedling trees. The essentially open bottom box allows for excellent drainage and air-flow through the soil as well. These types of trees will also transplant easier and survive better when placed in their final home.

Bur Oak in air prune boxes in early summer

We started our small backyard nursery here on Spring Creek in 2017 with three species of trees planted in the ground in our garden area. It was a good learning experience to raise those trees that first year. We were able to sell a few locally and plant a few on our own farm.

In 2018 we started using “beds” to grow trees. These beds were large plastic tubs filled with compost and natural materials. The idea was to save labor and not have to dig the trees out in the fall and not lose any of the tap root in the process. Some of the trees from the year before were transplanted into them and some had sprouted nuts planted in them. Again, this turned into a learning experience and we learned what worked and what didn’t with soil and watering systems. We also learned what didn’t work to stratify seeds over the winter of 2017-2018 and we ended up losing all of our oak and walnut seeds.

Finally, in the fall of 2018, we were able to gather large amounts of several different kinds of nuts and had excellent success stratifying them. We were also able to gather a large number of hard-wood cuttings to place from various shrubs. The spring of 2019 brought a lot of excitement when nuts started to sprout and cuttings started to wake up and come to life, providing an abundance of life in the nursery. We will be proud to make our first offering of online sales in the fall of 2019.

We appreciate you joining us on this journey and look forward to being able to provide you with quality plants well into the future.