In Asheville: On Wednesdays, pick up plants at Greenlife ($8 delivery fee) or Asheville Local Foods (prices adjusted to include delivery). Weather permitting.
Deliveries: We can deliver plants up to four hours away from our nursery for a distance-based delivery fee. Share the delivery fee with your friends or neighbors and get a discount by arranging a group order! |
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See our curriculum of classes on the website. Bring Chuck in for a private consultation on any of these topics or arrange for a small or large group class. More info? Click here. |
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With a UPN gift certificate, the recipient can get just what they want when they are ready to plant.
Or, let your friends and family know that you'd like a UPN gift certificate for a special tree, bush, or other useful plant.
Gift certificates are available in any denomination of $5.00 or more. We will send a paper certificate in the US mail. If you prefer, we can send a PDF file that you or your recipient can print.
You can pay for gift certificates with a credit card through our secure website, or contact us at info@usefulplants.org or (828) 669-6517 for other options.
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We're thrilled to offer the following videos:
Facebook
Useful Plants Nursery is on Facebook! Be a friend and/or fan, hook up with other Useful Plants people, and share your stories.
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Useful Plants Nursery is a small, permaculture-based nursery specializing in useful, phytonutritional, food, and medicine plants well-adapted to our Southern Appalachian mountains and surrounding bioregions. Our plants are grown without the use of synthetic pesticides at our nursery located at Earthaven Ecovillage.
I believe that growing your own food and medicine plants is a vitally important strategy and practice for regaining control over our collective and personal lives, our health, and our individual and bioregional economic well being. Our nursery is dedicated to putting those beliefs into practice and truly creating "Liberation through Abundance" as we serve your needs for healthy, useful landscape plants, and work together to reweave the web of life.
-- Chuck Marsh, nurseryperson, permaculture designer, bioregional inhabitant
UPN is a North Carolina certified nursery.
To see a full list of our plants, click here. |
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Useful Plants Nursery
111 Another Way
Black Mountain, NC 28711
828.669.6517
www.usefulplants.org
info@usefulplants.org |
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Winter is a great time to learn about growing fruit plants and plan your edible landscape. Be ready for early spring planting by planning your garden now.
We're very excited about several upcoming educational opportunities this winter. Dave Jacke will be giving a presentation and workshop at Warren Wilson College in an event co-sponsored by Living Systems Design, UPN founder Chuck Marsh's design collective.
In addition, it's time for the 5th Annual Barkslip Fruit School with Bill Whipple, where UPN manager and co-owner Debbie Lienhart learned to propagate plants from cuttings and graft fruit trees a few years ago. Some of those plants are bearing fruit already.
Finally, registration is now open for the Organic Growers School, which will be held the first weekend in March and include presentations by Chuck and Bill. We'll bring the whole crew and truckloads of Useful Plants.
Need inspiration or information?
Garden Like a Forest with Dave Jacke
Learn from Dave Jacke, author of Edible Forest Gardens, about designing forest gardens in a rare local appearance at Warren Wilson College.
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Gardening Like a Forest: Home-Scale Ecological Food Production. Saturday, February 12, 7-9 pm, Free admission.
This talk introduces the vision of forest gardening with some scientific background, a few living examples, and a sampling of some useful perennial edibles you can use in your own garden.
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Ecosystem Agriculture: Patterns, Principles, and Practices. Sunday, February 13, 9am - 5pm. Space is limited; register early.
This is an introductory workshop for gardeners, designers, and students of gardening, ecology, and design.
For more information and registration, see the Living Systems Design website.
5th Annual Barkslip's Fruit School
Join Professor T. Bud Barkslip, aka Bill Whipple, for the 2011 fruit school in Asheville. Classes start in late January and go through April. In addition to classes in fruit tree care, pruning, and grafting, this year's program adds workshops on maple sugaring and woodworking. For more information see the Fruit School website and for inspiration, see Bill's article in this newsletter.
18th Organic Growers School
The unofficial beginning of spring for WNC gardeners, Organic Growers School is returning to UNCA on March 5 & 6 for another great conference. Join over 1500 farmers, gardeners, chefs, food activists, and conscious consumers for the largest sustainable living conference in the Southeastern US. This year's conference includes new tracks in fruit production, urban farming, primitive skills, and poultry. For more information see the OGS website.
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Ask the Chuckster: Useful Plant Advice from Chuck Marsh |
by Chuck Marsh, UPN founder and horticulturist
Can I still plant in the winter?
Yes, you can plant in the winter – especially trees and shrubs. While plants are dormant they are still growing roots as long as the soil isn’t frozen. Planting them in fall or winter gives plants an early jump on things and come spring they’ll be past transplant shock, won’t need to be watered as much, and ready to get down to the business of growing.
Be careful if the ground is saturated with water. You’ll want to be extra careful to break up dirt clods and mix in some ground pine bark soil conditioner. Be sure to plant high if you’re working with a heavy clay soil.
What about pruning?
It’s still a little early for pruning here in the mountains – we want to wait until after the last of the hard freezes. The problem is that if you prune and then there's a really cold freeze, you could have more die back and need to prune again – pruning off more wood than you really wanted.
Around here I like to prune in late February, depending on how the season is going. On trees and shrubs I would only do very light corrective pruning in late winter as you’re removing potential fruit bearing wood.
Late February or early March is THE most critical time to prune grapes, blackberries, and raspberries. More on this later. Never prune Cornelian cherries in the winter because the wounds won’t heal and they will bleed when the sap rises. Wait till early summer to prune them.
Is it different in the Piedmont or mountains?
In the Piedmont your dates will be earlier. Depending on the season, mid-late January could be the best time for pruning. You can refer to our videos for pruning bushes and trees.
Our nursery is located in the mountains at about 2,500 feet. If you live at a higher elevation or in a colder micro-climate, you might need to prune later. Just look for that time after the hard freezes (temps below 20 degrees F) are over and before the sap starts to rise.
My site is next to a forest and I’d like to use native plants in the transition area. Are there any of the Useful Plants natives that would be suitable for edge planting?
Yes, we have some great native plants. They all need at least 6 hours of sun for full fruit production, and some will need more. We have a new web page that lists Useful Plants that are native to the Carolinas and Georgia, along with some others native to the Southeast or US. I especially like elderberries, persimmons, serviceberries, hazelnuts, aronias, black haw viburnums, black raspberries, and groundnuts in these transition zones. |
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by Bill Whipple
 Buying a fruit plant is not the end folks, it’s the beginning, the beginning of an epoch, life-changing voyage that will weave you through the richness of our being human. From heart-rendering destitution when your blueberry is trampled by the neighbor’s kids to ecstatic shivers of delight when you see the first fruit set on your goumi bush.
January is time for dreaming and scheming. As we recharge and our roots continue to grow beneath us, we scheme of what new wonderful plants those spreading roots can support. Unknown and unexperienced, only wiffs of recollection from ancient ancestral consciousness conjours a desire for connection with these sacred and beloved compadres of the fruit and nut world. Why do I obsess about medlars so? and the “degenerative putrification” that is the cause of their ripening to perfection of a spiced apple sauce, or why do I delight in the Cornelian cherry so with its March blooms of ethereal yellow? I time travel to visit French monks when Charlemagne reigned... to Neolithic famished, foothill, forest foragers from the Ukraine, as Cornelian cherries, native to that region, are some of the oldest fruits in domestication at 7000 years plus. What abundance offered so freely and generously, how the sweet/sour meat of the Cornelian cherry with its indescribable undertone of flavor hits my tongue and the long rugged seed, sharp on the ends, gets tucked between my teeth and gums until I get home to squirrel it in my fridge to plant out the next year.
Life goes beyond the apple, friends, exceeds the plum, past the edges of our cultural desert into a dessert of delight of the global variety. We have access to a diversity unknown to humans up to this time. Hardy varieties of camellias that I can harvest my own green tea from, where north meets south and we can have the musky-dines of the south overlapping with table and wine grapes that are safe in a more northern clime, woven with the hardy kiwis quickly climbing their way to the top of my fruit charts.
“Oh delight, my love of the fruits that come forth and together we share in an ecstasy of communion. Chaste makes waste. The bridge that crosses to the world reserved only for Gods is long enough only to span the nectar that runs down my chin!”
Why would anyone… how could anyone... what in the world should anyone… resist. It is futile. Shut off your brain and accept what has been known before records were written that these plants are here to help us and invite them in. Learn from them as they teach only what can be learned from love and experience. This wisdom comes and goes from the heart and is shared as such. Surely books and higher education have their place on the feet of true wisdom, as the mind is merely the dry brown stem that supports the gloriousness of the flower and the fruit.
I invite you to take a chance. Step over the bridge to the world “reserved for the Gods” and plant a tree. Select one, select several, select all! Let your heart leap! Eyes roll, gasps sent asunder when you look at pictures. Which fruits do your eyes go to when you go through the UPN pages. Turn your head off. Use it for fixing things and follow your heart to the enchanted grove of edibles that our peoples have wandered in for thousands of years. Go to some workshops and learn the priviledge of stewardship of these miraculous beings. Oh no folks, the route of this journey has only been considered. The map is empty and the compass beats in your chest. Draw a picture of how you want the world to really be, and see that fruits are the primary colors. Come play and frolic with us. We are having more fun than is possible to let know. Joy is where the end of a shovel and the lick of an earthworm meet. Dream and scheme. It’s what we are here to do. Turn off your brain it knows so much about our limits. So smug. So practical. Turn up the volume of the heart, it knows where the things that taste good are. doze in the shade, drink the sweet nectar, how can it get any better than right now?
For information on Barkslip's 5th Annual Fruit School, see Bill's website. Sign up by January 16th for discounts. |
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