Welcome to our humble abode!
Our nursery grows perennial food plants. We’re located in Ashfield, MA, zone 5a. We sell plants to home gardeners who want to grow their own food. Our plants will help you move your grocery store to right outside your kitchen door.
We grow our plants without the use of poisons. We ship and offer local pick up of bare root plants twice per year, in the spring and the fall.
We encourage you to propagate our plants. We want you to reap a bounty, so we share as much information about how to grow, propagate, and eat our plants as we can.
I came to horticulture and plant propagation through my interest in homesteading—my desire to produce food for myself and my family and be less dependent on a food distribution system that seems increasingly fragile, not to mention one that often produces low-quality food. In short, I wanted to become more self-sufficient, so I set out to learn how.
I worked as a landscaper for several years, learning about plants and installing gardens for folks in the area. I experimented with propagating perennial food producing plants mainly in pots and bins because we lived in an apartment where we weren’t allowed to grow plants in the ground. So I just had to stare at a lawn for a few years and dream of bigger and better things. Finally, in 2017 we were able to buy our own land. When we first got here, it looked like this:
It was an overgrown field that was the landing site for a logging operation a decade earlier. We spent months that summer clearing brush and discovering the nature of our land. Later, when we hired an excavator to dig the foundation for our house, we were astonished at the speed with which he was able to clear and shape the land, and we thought about how he could have done in a couple hours what took us all summer. But we were glad we did it anyway because we learned so much about our land—the plants that were already growing there, the way water moved across the property, the path of the sun in the different seasons—all required time spent in intimate connection with the land.
Somehow we managed to build a house and have our first son all in 2018. Since then I’ve been working to set up nursery infrastructure, gather valuable plant genetics, and produce plants for people. Some plants have come across the country to reach me, but many have been propagated from plants that were already established in the gardens of people in my area.
So, here we are.
Humble comes from the latin word humus, meaning soil or earth. Our family aims for a humble life, that is, a life intimately connected to the land where we live, work, and grow food. Each year the nursery grows and more plants are born, raised, and sent out into the world to enrich the lives of others.