Nursery Updates: What are we up to?
Nuts & Bolts Nursery is just sprouting—we’re less than a year old—but we thought it would be fun to give you a tour of what’s happening now so you can watch us progress and be a part of our journey. Despite being so young, we’re doing a lot already!
When we first started working the land here, it was a long strip of grass (and a LOT of poison ivy) flanked by two rows of young fruit trees. We started by designing some raised beds using wood chips. “Why wood chips?” you might ask, “Don’t they suck nitrogen out of the soil?” Great question. We will go into much more detail about this in a future post, but in short, wood chips will suck a bit of nitrogen out now, but in the process become a magnificent sponge for all the nutrients plants need, capable of holding up to 30 times as much as some clay soils [source]. The wood chips, once decomposed, will also help retain moisture in the soil while also promoting drainage, providing insurance against both drought and flood. In addition, we can grow edible mushrooms on the wood chips that also help support the roots of the plants as they speed up decomposition- it's a Win-Win-Win! (more on our mushroom cultivation below 🍄) A thick layer of wood chips also chokes out the pesky grass and poison ivy, allowing us to cultivate the edible plants without them being strangled.
The shapes and layout of the nursery beds are also of interest.
They are not in straight lines or rows, and they seem to meander about in what might look at first glance to be a random way. In fact, the beds are placed and shaped very intentionally to be aligned with the curves and topography of the land. Each bed is laid on contour, such that it neither rises nor falls in elevation from one end to the other. These contoured beds force incoming rain water to be spread out and sink into the ground beneath the beds, deeply charging up the soil with moisture. Where a bed breaks for a path along one contour, the next contour down centers a bed across that gap, just like bricks in a wall. Thus, there is no easy path for the water to flow out, and the water has plenty of time to sink into the ground beneath our nursery. This also catches all the nutrient-rich sediment that might have gotten picked up by the rain on its way down slope. Drought-resistant infrastructure like this will prove super important in adapting to a changing climate in which precipitation events will become more extreme and be spaced farther apart.
With the beds shaped, we dug a few catchment ponds and used that soil, along with some homemade compost, to cap them. This capping layer will inoculate the beds with all kinds of beneficial organisms to speed up decomposition and support the plants, while also providing a space to sow seed into. We seeded it out last year to a cover crop of crimson clover and buckwheat, both nitrogen fixers to help charge up that soil sponge! Some of the beds were also inoculated with Winecap mushrooms: an edible, mycorrhizal fungus that supports the plants and feeds us!
Some of those beds got transplants or cuttings of shrubs like Currants and Elderberries. And they are looking so happy! Check out this Red Currant below that is just dripping with clusters of tiny yellow flowers! These branches are going to be bending over heavy with fruit in just a few short months; we can’t wait!
Other beds were seeded out to herbaceous perennials like Turkish Rocket or Sea Kale, which are also popping up like crazy. And, of course, many of the beds were planted out to lots and lots of garlic, because who doesn’t love garlic?
From left to right: Red Currant, Elderberry, Sea Kale, Comfrey, Turkish Rocket, Anise Hyssop, Stinging Nettle, Garlic.
And we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the Air-Prune Beds.
These are where we grow the majority of our nut and fruit trees from seed, as it allows us to grow healthy trees that transplant successfully. We will do an entire post on these soon, but the basic idea is that a raised bed is lined with hardware cloth on the bottom and then raised up off the ground, so when the taproot reaches the bottom, the tip is gently pruned back by the air and it grows a bushy heartroot system instead. If you’re interested you should check out this video from our friend Sean at Edible Acres on the subject. Below you can see all the little baby trees popping up in the Air Prune beds. So exciting!!!
From front to back: Apples, Peaches, and Pears popping up in one of our Air Prune beds!
And last but not least, we have the mushroom cultivation!
As we mentioned above, many of the beds were inoculated with Winecap mushroom spawn last year, and some of them are fruiting mushrooms already! We expect there to be many, many more mushrooms popping up this year, and we hope to be able to offer Winecap spawn ourselves through the nursery so that you can start a mushroom patch in whatever space you are cultivating, even if it's just a potted plant in your bedroom! We are also experimenting with some outdoor oyster mushroom cultivation, and hope to be able to sell inoculated mushroom logs (called BOLTS!) at some point as well, but this project is still in its earlier stages, so we’ll keep you updated as things progress.
