Our mission at Good Small Farms is to grow good food for local people. So why have we set up a tree nursery?
One of the things we quickly learned when we were planning our new agroforestry and woodland plantings at the farm is that the supply of trees and soft fruit bushes available to us was extremely limited.
You want native broadleaf trees for your new copse or shelterbelt or wildlife hedge?
No problem – there are dozens of suppliers who will deliver them to you from all over the country.
However, the vast majority of these trees are grown on a huge scale by only a handful of growers. Some of them produce cell grown trees; they don’t leave the sterile glasshouses they are grown in until they are shipped out to you. Others sell bare root trees, growing whole fields of single-species saplings at a time. None of these big guys are organically certified, and it’s a good bet they are all buying their seed from the single large commercial seed supplier for forest trees in the UK.
To us, this industrialised, centralised, system isn’t necessarily the best way of going about fulfilling all those ambitious tree planting programmes that aim to increase biodiversity, build natural capital, rewild and diversify.
So far as we know there is only one organic certified grower of native broadleaf trees at scale in the whole country at the moment (Organic Hedging and Trees).
There is also an emerging network of local ‘community tree nurseries’, often collecting their own seed, usually run on a very small scale by volunteers, and generally supplying only super locally.
Whilst there are a few small growers doing great things, we felt that there’s a definite gap in the market; one that needs filling right here.
There are similar and different issues when it comes to sourcing organic soft fruit plants, and organic named variety nut trees: they are almost non-existent in this country. Forget the organic and settle for a UK grown and grafted walnut, and you’ll still be lucky to find what you’re looking for. Again, there are a couple of pioneers and a couple of small producers, but almost no one is doing this in the UK.
So last year we set up our tree nursery. We laid out some beds in a rough paddock, read the Tree Growers Guide, hunted tree seed in hedges and woods, got scratched by roses and blackthorn, read the Tree Growers Guide again, mashed up hawthorn berries, set up old cattle drinking troughs in the barn for seed stratification, designed a system for hot callus walnut grafting, stuck gooseberry cuttings in the ground, planted shelterbelts, sowed green manures, and whooped with joy when our first seeds started germinating…
We have never done this before, and we’re learning on the job. There is a lot to learn. Who knew, for example, that some seeds need to be stratified, or exposed to low temperatures for two whole winters before they will even germinate?
And of course, we’re doing this differently than almost everyone else. We are growing organically, building soil health through use of woodchip, green manure and compost; building biodiversity by planting hedges, shelterbelts and flowers within and around the nursery. We are brewing nettle tea to feed our plants, we’ve put up a barn owl nest box in hope an owl will help keep the voles at bay, and we cut the grass around the site by scythe.
The seed for our native broadleaf trees is sourced almost entirely from our own farm, supplemented with a little additional diversity from two neighbouring organically certified farms, both literally just across the road. The cuttings for our currants and gooseberries are sourced entirely from our own mother plants, and we’re growing on our own UK grown walnut rootstock.
Our vision is to grow healthy organic plants in healthy organic soil, from local organic seed. It’s definitely a work in progress, and we are proud that our first plants are available for sale this autumn.
Jessie Marcham
