Giving Tree Nursery
Business Plan

Plants for an Abundant Future.

FRUITLAND, N.C.

Part I: Useful Plants

"We should not be growing food crops and trying to keep them alive. We need to have systems so resilient that we could try to kill our crops and we can’t kill the dang things!"

— Mark Shepard

Giving Tree Nursery works with
plants, people & place to…

meet ecological goals,
enrich landscapes,
share with neighbors,
heal the sick,
feed the hungry
teach the youth.

Plants

Giving Tree Nursery specializes in “Useful Plants” that contribute to people and the landscape. These plants are sold to Home Gardeners, Permaculture Designers & Landscapers, Ecological Restoration Projects & Organic Farms.

Our nursery stock is selected for edible & medicinal qualities, rarity, beauty & longevity in the landscape. We specialize in perennials & rare plants.

People

Our staff serve our community as designers & caretakers of landscapes, yards & homesteads. They use good design with a deep understanding of nature’s patterns & principals to establish productive & resilient systems.

Work at the nursery builds skills and exemplifies a way to live a meaningful and wholesome lifestyle. Our therapeutic & apprenticeship programs interact with the nursery to go deeper into Gardening as Therapy.

Place

Giving Tree Nursery isn't separate from the space it occupies. We use our plants to build soil & establish resiliency for local communities. We call this cooperation of land & people Botanical Community.

Useful Plants enhance neighborhoods, land trusts, farms and non-profit organizations as botanical investments in their soil banks. These plantings help people increase the value of their useable land. Plants are harvested for medicines, propagation material & food. This integrates our nursery business into our local neighborhoods.

Mission and Ethos

 

The greatest need of our time is the Rehabilitation and Regeneration of the Human’s relationship with the Earth.

Our mission is to transform land, yard and home into healthy & productive gardens that sustain human & wild life.

With a combination of useful plants, good design and cooperation we can replenish fertility & restore resiliency for life.

Our Ecological Vision

How we plan to accomplish our Mission of transforming land, yard & home with hands in the dirt & feet on the ground:

 

Foundation

The Giving Tree Nursery is the trunk that branches into our other projects. Plants are sold at the nursery, at plant shows and online. Education is offered as monthly workshops, online resources, plant labeling + packaging and consultation on-site.

Garden Installation

Over time, the nursery stock grows to provide Giving Tree’s Garden Installation Services with the plants needed to install gardens and food forests.

 

Education

A shift in how we relate to plants and the Earth is required for a sustainable lifestyle. We don’t just sell plants, we share the path of plants; living a lifestyle that cares for the earth & people, and generates a surplus of basic needs.

Remediation

By design, our nursery enables ecological restoration projects that clean and remediate damaged or threatened ecosystems. Profits will be used to fund projects designed for ecological restoration.

Usefulness

 

Usefulness is a plant’s ability to serve humans, animals or wildlife. There is a spectrum of Usefulness, defined by a plants input requirements and its output products. Essentially, Useful Plants provide maximum benefit for minimum input. They grow with minimal human intervention and still remain productive.

  • Minimum usefulness: Flowering annuals that require intense labor and resources to maintain - pretty but inedible or non-medicinal

  • Maximum usefulness: Perennial fruit trees that require little input for many yields - fruit, firewood, shade, shelter, medicine, wildlife habitat

Useful plants are the essence to a new "model of Community Economics" where medicinal, culinary and interesting qualities cultivate an atmosphere of resiliency in the landscape.

  • The community's landscape becomes a medicine cabinet, a wellspring of nourishment and supports daily life.

  • Useful Plants establish a localized nourishment system, not just of commodity foods, but through a wide variety of nutrient dense crops stored in the landscape. It is a closed loop system that has everything it needs to grow and nurture itself.

Criteria when considering a plant for propagation:

  1. does it have edible, medicinal or unique qualities for humans, livestock or wildlife?

  2. is it easily managed without excessive human intervention?

    3. is it resistant to disease and pest without fungicides or pesticides?

    4. is it productive with consideration to local average temperatures, soil type, average rainfall, daylight hours, frost free days?

    5. is it invasive to the point of being irresponsible?

Useful Plants are Ecologically Appropriate Plants:

 

Native Plants vs. Useful Plants

Every bioregion has characteristics that dictate the plants that will grow without intense fertilization, irrigation and pest management. Often, these are plants that have adapted to the region over a long period of time, and are often called Native plants.

Very few “native” plants are productive enough to meet nutritional needs. Useful Plants are those that grow in our native biome like Native plants, but are productive to meet human needs.

Grocery Store Crops vs. Useful Plants

Useful plants open us to many edible alternatives to typical “grocery store crops”, and can set local farmers apart from their competition in the marketplace.

By adapting farm & garden designs, diversifying our diets and gradually shifting our lifestyles to what our local landscape actually allows for, we can live in a cooperative relationship with our native landscapes.

For example, the characteristics of the Blue Ridge Mountain bioregion should dictate the species we cultivate and sell in our grocery stores. By going against our bioregion, we are forced to battle pests and diseases that attack mainstream grocery store crops.

Example: there is commercial interest in certain potatoes remaining the staple tuber in the grocery store. Yet, there are many other tubers, like sunchokes, oca, salsify, yams or yacon. All of which are better suited to the local biome, with greater nutrition and yield offered.

Aesthetics

Ornamental plants serve little function in the landscape other than aesthetic value and is in great abundance in almost all plant nurseries. We should recognize that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For me personally, a tree which I know is fixating nitrogen is a beautiful dance between leaves, roots and microbial activity in the soil. Plants we grow with aesthetic value serve many other functions and are also exemplary in their multisensory elegance.

Key Species

There are primary species that should be considered to be the first to be propagated. These species are critical to providing revenue, usefulness in the landscape and ease of propagation. to share with the world.

Part II: Nurturing our Future at the Plant Nursery

“A new look at farm design is required (and in demand)...For such endeavors to succeed, support services are needed, such as combined plant nurseries and new species collections for the provisions of seed, bud and scion materials, vegetative propagules, and grafted, layered, or tissue cultured plants, as well as processing and market systems.”

-Bill Mollison, The Permaculture Designers Manual

Plant Nurseries that provide unique, interesting, resilient and productive plants will be pioneers in this time of change and uncertainty. As resources dwindle or become too expensive, growers will be unable to continue with their current growing practices.

When farmers and market gardeners become interested in diversifying their crops, becoming self-sustainable and cooperating with their local bioregion, plant nurseries will be the bridge to a new way of producing food & medicine with wide diversity of useful plants.

Imagine a county or small city that accommodates all of the necessary plants for their many industries within their own bioregion!

 
 

There are many groupings of plants for future thinking growers. Examples of specific groups of plants for specialized plant nurseries:

  • perennial edible plants

  • staple root crop plants

  • medicinal & culinary herbs

  • support, nurse & mulch plants

  • livestock fodder

  • pollinator fodder

  • hedgerow tree species

  • conservation & reforestation trees

  • timber trees

  • bamboo species

  • desert plants

  • specialty: plant dyes, erosion stabilizers, coastal, aquatic, native flowers, endangered

Giving Tree’s Initial Focus:

  1. edible & medicinal plants

  2. support plants for hedging, mulch & green manures

All plants we choose to propagate adhere to our criteria for usefulness.

 

These two groupings of plants would enable a wide customer base:

1. Homeowners looking to utilize their small or large land sites

2. Landscapers and Designers specializing in edible landscaping

3. Orchardists and commercial agriculturalists shifting a part or entire system to a more sustainable and profitable operation

4. Giving Tree’s Installation Services

By appealing to these types of customers, we are able reach a large audience who have liquid funds. Coupled with proper education, our customers will be enabled to create gardens that provide food and medicine for themselves or to others for profit.

These groupings provide propagation material to establish Giving Tree’s own orchards and agroforestry projects, as well as materials for design & installation services.

How our Nursery meets Ecological Goals

 

1. Propagation of appropriate plant species - to design & install flourishing ecosystems for home gardens, forests and broad acre orchards

2. Educate and implement designs for private home owners & land owners to restore wildlife habitat, predatory insect attraction, nutrient accumulation and build topsoil

3. Supply the plants, mulch, soil, amendments & design strategies used to benefit wild & human systems

4. Reduce chemical interventions to control pests and disease through diverse plant communities and diverse genetics

How we Propagate:

 

In Ground

Plants are grown in-ground, situated in rows of wood framed beds in compost. This enables us to build fertile soil over time and radically reduce watering and the use of plastics. Plants are dug at the time of purchase, bagged in natural and compostable materials to retain moisture and root ball.

Mountain Gardens in Marshall is currently selling many plants in this style. Also, this is a common practice with plants sold as “bare root”

Container Nursery

While we develop our In-Ground Beds, we will be growing plants in containers with drip irrigation. Rows of containers will set on weed mat to avoid competition with weeds & grasses.

What we propagate:

 

Our aim is to provide useful plants to customers who intend to develop their landscape to meet the needs of their backyards & the greater bioregion.

Useful plants serve multiple functions in the landscape. The more functions a plant can provide our systems, the more likely we are to propagate a particular plant. We seek plants that maximize output for minimal input.

The following list are some the qualities we look for:

1. Perennial

2. Fast growing

3. Nitrogen fixation

4. Nutrient accumulation

5. Staple human crop

6. Medicinal or Minor Edible qualities

7. Wildlife habitat

8. Fodder

9. Disease or pest resistance

10. Climate tolerance (drought, heat, cold, etc)

11. Timber, coppice

12. Construction material

13. Aesthetic Value

Useful Plants of the Blue Ridge Mountain Biome

To mimic this particular biome, we can identify the plant species that are known to exist in this landscape prior to human intervention (natives), and the new species that have been introduced that are able to thrive without excessive human input. We also will evaluate the typical growing patterns found within the local landscape to determine what we can propagate.

*Temperate Forest characteristics and patterns*

  1. Precipitation exceeds evaporation over the year

  2. Humid Cold Climate with humid summers and the frost & snow of a wet winter. Frozen ground not common.

  3. Wet spring, dry summer

  4. Above freezing winters with most plants going into dormancy

*Examples of Key Plants this biome*

  1. Sibrian Peashrub - fodder, fast growing, human food and medicine, nitrogen fixation

  2. Maximilian Sunflower - perennial flower, pollen plant, wildlife food & habitat, hedge, biomass, fast growing, human food

  3. Black locust - timber, useful products, hedging, nitrogen fixation, animal fodder

  4. Sourwood - native, pollen plant, timber

  5. Comfrey - sterile, nutrient accumulation, green manure, easy to propagate, well sought after

  6. Persimmon - considered to be native, thrives with little care, fire resistant, produces larger yields of human food, opportune harvest time (early winter), wildlife fodder, grafted

  7. Nine Star Califlower - perennial cauliflower heads year after year

Part III: Starting our Nursery & Timeline

 

Year One

  1. Offer Giving Tree Garden Installation to local community using plants purchased from other nurseries

  2. Secure sources for plants for design and installation services while our plants are growing

  3. Secure investments, land lease/rent

  4. Source & purchase soils, tools, supplies

  5. Install irrigation, green house, staging areas, potting areas

  6. Acquire propagation material for key species and specialized species (seeds, cuttings, root division, tissue cultures)

  7. Create website with database of plant usefulness, design tips, online availability list and ecommerce store

  8. Outreach to our community through advertising and events

  9. Lead or co-lead 2 educational workshops or therapy programs

Year Two

  1. Increase diversity of inventory

  2. Develop strategies to move away from plastics and external fertilizers

  3. Add SKU & Labeling system

  4. One workshop per month

  5. Begin Work as Service Therapy Programs; Stewardship School & Apprenticeship Program

  6. Increase public outreach to make plants available to more of our community

  7. Begin planting field crops and processing into viable products

Year three

  1. Increase diversity in nursery plants

  2. One workshop per month

  3. Incorporate animals into orchards for management

  4. Collect seed from our gardens and start a online shop to sell seeds.

  5. Plant orchards of long term crops such as fruits and nuts for community use

  6. First hire for nursery management and daily labor

Year Four

  1. Sponsorship of 1-2 more nurseries for different bioregions

  2. Establish design and installation business to convert larger acreage farms to beyond organic methods

  3. investment into land for plant propagation and ecological restoration

  4. Diversify products offered through processing

  5. Distribute products to larger audience

Part IV: Complimentary Projects

Giving Tree also designs projects that utilizes our Useful Plants in other ways.

 

  1. Useful Plant Design

To prove that our ecological goals are achievable, our goal is to establish use cases. Useful Plant Design proves that we can, for little to no additional work, obtain a greater yield for minimal effort.

Giving Tree actively sets out to provide case studies that illustrate Useful Plant Design is a great benefit to wildlife and humans, and worthy of the effort to shift our understanding & farming practices.

There are many Useful Plants not normally propagated by a typical commercial nursery, and there are many niches needing plant material & education that are wide open for plant nurseries to focus their propagation.

For example, controlling erosion on construction sites is usually left to commercial nurseries who propagate plant species for that serve minimal functions in the landscape.

Instead, by properly selecting species for erosion control while utilizing good design & installation techniques, a landscape can be designed to control erosion and provide additional yields.

We can integrate plants into the landscape to provide near infinite yields for human & wildlife benefit, all the while performing functions that meet our ecological goals for the landscape.

Designing hedges to catch & store sediment at the uphill side while it providing a wind break on the downhill side. With a diverse planting, there is wildlife habitat, animal fodder & human medicines, and provides a microclimate for sensitive food crops between these hedge rows.

This illustrates how good design and ecological appropriateness relate. Adapting our landscape designs with a holistic approach, requires proper education and cooperation with our clients. We must first acknowledge the shortcomings of the current paradigm in landscape management fields.

II. Regenerative Horticulture for Botanical Communities

Botanical Guilds build soil for community. Botanical Community builds soul for the people.

Regenerative Horticulture is a method of utilizing plants in our community’s landscapes to establish sustainability and resiliency in the face of ecological and cultural problems.

Through the integration of appropriate design & useful plants into the landscape, we can transition from modern subdivisions and built-for-profit homes to sustainable communities, or what we call Botanical Community.

 
 

Regenerative Horticulture

  • utilizes the landscape to cultivate propagation material in the form of seeds, cuttings and bare root plants in a way, that contributes and benefits the soil, wildlife and community.

  • Most plant nurseries are bound to outsourcing large quantities of potting mixes, propagation material and fertilizers because they separate themselves from the soil beneath their feet in exchange for weed mat and black plastic.

  • Regenerative Horticulture utilizes the landscape as a way to cultivate propagation material in the form of seeds, cuttings and bare root plants. In this way, we build soil, wildlife and community while propagating our plant materials in-ground to generate revenue.

  • Our methods of propagation and sale of plants includes in-ground planting, where plants are dug up at the time of purchase or when it's time to propagate into pots.

Botanical Guild

  • Guilds are diverse arrangements of plants that maintain visual appearance and reduce labor input. A Guild establishes a place of interest for visitors and a home for wildlife

  • Guilds are Useful Plants propagated in-ground , in rows or diverse islands, all depending on what the community’s landscape can accommodate.

  • Plants are dug up for retail sale, each plant having interesting qualities, useful properties and talking points with opportunities for community education with signage.

Botanical Community

  • plants are cultivated in what we call Botanical Guilds in the landscape of collaborating communities, which we call Botanical Community.

  • Our plants become key components to the development of a community who wish to truly integrate into their landscape. These plants provide food, medicine, atmosphere, beauty to community members while they are grown in-ground.

  • a symbol or badge of an exemplary community. It is a testament to the community’s wisdom and their determination to live in balanced relationship with the Earth.

Part V: Sacred Space

The protection of our soil and propagation of useful plants in the landscape is the only true resiliency.

There is no limit to the influence we can have on the web of life. The only limit is our imagination's ability to dream and our active capacity to bring life to such ideas.

The landscape can be a sacred space interwoven into our community to support physical & mental health.

The only reasonable way forward.

At Giving Tree, we empower every home & land owner with useful plants that help landscapes transition into a natural paradise.

Education is provided at the nursery in the form of detailed identification cards, references via website and a knowledgeable staff.

This empowers all customers with the proper knowledge and guidance to begin having their landscape work for them while working in harmony with it.

Plants Transition us into a Better World

 

There is a great need for nurseries in nearly all major regions to provide useful plants to homeowner gardeners and broad scale farmers alike. It is a reasonable idea that all community centers have places of plant propagation that allow every home owner to have the education and access to the proper plants & tools to implement a self sustaining systems that accommodates their food and medicine needs.

Modern day man is failing to truly utilize whatever land they have through improper species selection and poor design of their landscape. Most homes specialize in growing grass and ornamental plants, which most often do not provide food, medicine, timber, fodder, or truly useful yields. Most farmers are not caretakers of their land, but miners and pillagers of the resources available to them.

Eventually, industrial farmers will convert their farms to a more natural/organic operations. People will realize that the good they do for their land, they are doing to themselves and vice versa. Thus, the plants, tools and education will be needed to encourage and enable this transition. We strive to be there to support our community and to advocate for the wildlife and earth as Stewards.