There’s a photo of me from 2018 sitting in my apartment kitchen, holding one of the first trees I ever grafted. I look ridiculously pleased with myself.
I had no idea I was about to kill 147 out of 150 of them.
That year I planted 100 grafted apples and 50 grafted Asian pears into what I optimistically called a “nursery bed” on my newly purchased three acres. I used birch poles and fishing line as deer fencing — a tangled mess before I’d even finished building it. I dumped raw cow manure around the little trees as fertilizer. I ignored the drainage problems because I didn’t know how to fix them.
By summer, the weeds had overtaken everything. The deer had nibbled half the survivors. The rest were waterlogged and sickly. I was so dejected I stopped going to check on them.
Three survived. They’re still on my land today, thriving now despite their tumultuous early start to life.
And somehow, that disaster was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Why Failure Is the Foundation of Real Plant Knowledge
The ancient Greeks had a phrase for it: pathei mathos — “suffering teaches.” Real wisdom only arrives after consequences force you to face reality.
Most gardening advice skips this part. It gives you the idealized version — the right spacing, the right pH, the right mulch depth — without telling you what it feels like to watch something you worked hard to grow slowly die because of a mistake you didn’t even know you were making.
That feeling is irreplaceable. It burns the lesson in.
Over eight years of propagating edible trees and shrubs, I’ve made most of the mistakes you can make. Wrong timing. Wrong site prep. Too much or too little water, too little drainage, not enough winter protection from the cold. I’ve killed hundreds of plants. And I’ve learned from every single one.
That accumulated failure is the foundation of this nursery — it gives me the ability grow plants I genuinely and intimately know, and share them with growers who are just starting their own journey.
What to Know Before You Buy Bare Root Edible Plants
Bare root plants are one of the best values in all of horticulture. Dug and shipped while dormant, they establish faster than potted plants, cost less to ship, and when handled correctly, have excellent survival rates.
A few things I’ve learned that most sellers don’t tell you:
Soil prep matters more than fertilizer. The number one killers of newly planted bare root stock is poor drainage, too much weed competition, and animal browse. Roots sitting in waterlogged soil — even for a few days — can rot before the tree ever breaks dormancy. I learned this the hard way in 2018. Amend and test your drainage before planting. Protect your trees from deer and voles. And use mulch!
Small plants establish better than large ones. A 12-inch bareroot seedling planted well with an excellent root system will nearly always outpace a 4-foot tree planted poorly within two or three seasons. Don’t be seduced by size.
The Edible Perennials Worth Building Your Land Around
Here are a few plants I grow, and why I grow them.
Apples and Pears grafted onto appropriate rootstocks, these are workhorses of the temperate homestead orchard. I focus mainly on disease-resistant and unique/heirloom varieties suitable to home growers who don’t want to be on the toxic spray schedule of a commercial orchard. I wrote another detailed blog post about apple varieties, if you’d like to learn more.
Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) America’s most underrated native fruit. Cold-hardy to Zone 4, virtually pest and disease free, and producing large custard-textured fruit tasting somewhere between banana and mango. My pawpaws are bare root seedlings — honest, vigorous, and ready to establish. They’ll take a few years to fruit, but they’re long-lived trees that will outlast most things you plant.
Hazelnut, Heartnut, Hickory, Pecan, and Chestnut The long-game plants of the edible landscape. Slower to come into production, but extraordinarily productive once established and requiring almost no inputs. Hazelnuts are the fastest producer of the bunch — often fruiting within 3–4 years. Chestnuts are experiencing a genuine resurgence among small farmers who find they command strong prices at markets.
Elderberry, Aronia, Honeyberry, Juneberry, and Seaberry The fast producers. Woody perennial shrubs that can fruit within 1–2 years of planting, filling the hungry gap while your trees mature. Seaberry (Hippophae rhamnoides) deserves special mention: a nitrogen-fixing shrub that produces extraordinary quantities of vitamin-C-rich berries and can thrive in compacted soils where almost nothing else will.
Goumi and False Indigo Workhorses of the food forest support layer. Both fix atmospheric nitrogen, enriching the soil around your fruit trees. Goumi also produces sweet-tart edible berries. These are the plants that make the rest of the system work.
Rare and Hard-to-Find: Che, Shipova, Medlar, Chinquapin, Sochan, and more. This is where things get interesting. I grow a number of plants that are genuinely difficult to source — the Che (Maclura tricuspidata), a mulberry relative producing sweet fig-like fruit; the Shipova, a rare pear-serviceberry hybrid; the Medlar, a medieval European fruit that “bletts” (softens) after frost into something like spiced applesauce. If you’ve been hunting for these plants, you’re in the right place.
Building a Food Forest With What I Grow
The food forest model — canopy trees, understory trees, shrubs, groundcovers, and vines working together like a natural woodland ecosystem — maps almost perfectly onto my plant list. Here are some ideas for you you to play around with:
Canopy layer: Apple, pear, mulberry, chestnut, or heartnut as your anchor tree.
Understory: Spicebush, medlar, mountain ash, paw paw or Cornelian cherry — productive small trees that thrive in partial shade.
Shrub layer: Goumi or False indigo for nitrogen fixation; aronia, elderberry, honeyberry, or nanking cherry for fruit; rugosa rose for hips and habitat.
Groundcover and herbaceous: Comfrey (fertility boosting chop-and-drop mulch), good king Henry, sorrel, lovage, sweet cicely, walking onion, and skirret fill the ground layer with edible perennial vegetables that come back year after year with zero replanting.
Vines: Grapes or arctic kiwi can climb into the canopy layer over time, producing abundantly in a small footprint.
You don’t need all of this at once. Start with one tree and three or four supporting plants. Let that system work before you expand.
On Buying Plants From Someone Who Grows Them
There’s a real difference between buying a plant from a person who propagated it and buying one that was drop-shipped from a wholesale grower. I grow everything I sell. I know what rootstock the apple is on. I know which pawpaw seedlings came from the most vigorous mother trees. I know which elderberry selection fruits earliest in a short-season climate.
That knowledge comes with your order. If you have questions about what to plant, where, or how — ask. I actually answer.
The Fruit Grown From Failure
Those three trees from my first disastrous planting are still on my land. I love them because they remind me of the difficulty of this work, and the early failures that propelled me to learn to be a better grower.
I think of them as a monument to everything I didn’t know in 2018 — and everything I’ve learned since.
If you’re just starting out with your first fruit tree, your first berry bush, your first food forest — it’s okay not to know what you’re doing yet. The failures are coming, and they will teach you more than any blog post ever could.
The fruit grown from failure is much sweeter than one that has only ever known success.
