Starting a Micro Nursery in My Backyard

I had three main goals:

1) Grow vegetables, herbs and edible varieties that are reliable, excellent producers, tasty and regionally adapted to New England

2) Support the building of carbon-sequestering, resilient soils with amendments and consulting on landscape health

3) Grow plants that strategically support biodiversity such as host plants for specific beneficial insects and nectar/pollen sources for healthy, diverse pollinator populations.

I had been thinking a lot about the idea of starting a nursery. I loved growing plants and I had come to believe that our world simply needed more diverse plant communities (especially in our cities!) to clean water and air, produce oxygen, sequester carbon, support thriving and biodiverse ecosystems... and I began to realize how many AWESOME ecosystem restoration projects around the world start with a nursery. Locally adapted seeds. Local materials and supplies. Local production means less transport and ability to focus on better variety and quality of plants. Sometimes even a very small nursery can do amazing things.

When the pandemic hit, in the spring of 2020, many nurseries near me started selling out of garden plants. It really hit me when a friend of mine - a new gardener - could only get daikon radish seeds for his first garden! Daikon radishes are great, don't get me wrong, but they are not the easiest or most accessible first garden vegetables to grow, especially if you've never eaten one before! But there was literally nothing else available! I thought, "I could grow extra plants!" I had a great supply of leftover seeds from working on farms, local seed swaps, and local agriculture start-ups in the city. I also had experience growing a lot of different crops as well as enthusiasm to learn how to grow varieties I had never tried before. We had an east-facing "sunroom" available that I insulated to become a growing space to start early plants like tomatoes, meadow flowers, and herbs.

The nursery was impermanent - there were no permanent sheds or any kind of infrastructure, making it easy to start and flexible. Everything could be moved on a whim, if needed, even the automatic watering system. Bags of amendments, seeds and tools that needed to stay dry were stored in a corner of the shared garage. I was lucky because the driveway where the potted plants were set-up just happened to line-up east to west so it got pretty good sun for a good part of the day in mid-summer. I used an app called SunSeeker to identify the spots with the best sunlight hours. Ideally you want at least 6 hours of sunlight for robust seedlings. More hours if you have it! If you don't, plenty of plants grow quite well in the shade... so choose varieties well!

I gathered old plant pots, planting trays and yogurt containers (with holes drilled into the bottom for drainage) from the local community so I could reuse plastic containers that were already in circulation. Our local "Buy Nothing" group on Facebook was amazing for helping me find what I needed! Thank you, neighbors!!

Many plants I grew from seed - I had some experience growing large amounts of seedlings from the seedling sales and general farm operations we ran when I worked at The Food Project farm in Lincoln, MA. Other plants I got from the amazing community of local gardeners who had many excellent native and beneficial plants in their yards that needed dividing, propagating or "weeding" to remove excess seedlings. These gardeners taught me much and were unbelievable allies in getting more amazing edible and ecology-supporting plants out into the world. I potted up the extra seedlings, cuttings and root cuttings and added them to the nursery often in exchange for soil amendments.

Soil amendments I bought in bulk and sold them at discounted prices (in recycled quart-size yogurt containers, of course!) to make it easy for gardeners in my area to access the right amount of often hard-to-find mineral blends for our weathered New England soils which were traditionally poor in certain micronutrients. Gardeners usually have to buy big bags of amendments and fertilizers at the store that they only need in small amounts for adding to vegetable gardens, compost, and landscapes. I wanted to make it incredibly easy to add the right amount of a complete mineral blend to the soil or compost so gardeners could grow the best possible plants! I also used these mineral blends in my own nursery plants to encourage robust, vibrant green growth with shiny leaves, pest/disease resistance, and awesome flavor.

This fall, at the end of the 2021 season my family and I moved to Pennsylvania. It was hard to leave the nursery community behind in the Boston area, but I realized that the challenges of moving or renting or not owning land are true for many people. If I could run a nursery wherever I was, then isn't it actually an opportunity in disguise to document that process? To rise and meet the challenge of each new place we live to continue to grow resilient plants and landscapes? As I write I'm not sure what the 2022 season will bring, but I know it will involve plants. And probably LOTS of them...