Want to grow fruit and nuts at home?

Have you been tossing around the idea of growing your own food for your household? Are you tired of accepting whatever you can get at your local grocery store, tired of junk food mostly comprised of high fructose-based corn products? How about safe, wholesome food free of pesticides and picked at peak ripeness and fresh? These are questions we constantly asked ourselves before we decided to move back to Oklahoma from Washington state in 2018.

We decided to move back to help take care of my mother diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. My parents gifted us 10 acres of family land and we started to build a house and farm. I’m not sure if we knew the struggles involved in our journey.

Wanting to grow and hunt food off the land, we knew we wanted to grow crops that are low-maintenance and free or limited of herbicides/pesticides. Limiting carcinogens and eating natural wholesome food has been our goal from the start.

We began by planting fruit and nut trees, because the length of time before bearing age. We knew if we would like to see sizable crops before the kids were grown, we needed to prioritize planting these first. We also love the fact that trees are a component of permaculture. You plant them once and they can provide generations food and often annual yields. Chestnuts can provide an annual crop that is wonderful for roasting, grinding into a gluten-free flour and providing food to the wildlife we preserve and harvest from.

We decided to start a tree nursery to provide people with a reliable source of trees that would perform well in our conditions. I would encourage anyone that owns property or has friends or family who would allow them to plant fruit and nut trees on their property to do so. There is a reward component that you can’t get too often in our modern world of instant gratification.

Most our grafted trees and chestnuts will produce yields in 3-5 years, so it isn’t too long to wait. You can plant two apples in your yard for fresh apples. If your yard is small, we would be glad to accommodate with custom grafting onto dwarfing rootstock. You can plant two pawpaw trees in a shaded part of your yard where most fruit trees wouldn’t grow as they are naturally an understory tree. You can plant hazelnuts in a foundation planting or along a back fence as a reliable nut crop that can be pruned as a small bush. If you have struggled planting maples in central Oklahoma, you could plant a sassafras as they are tolerant of clay soils, to provide a beautiful display of fall foliage.

The growing conditions of Central Oklahoma can be taxing on all plants. Choosing the right species and ecotype for your site conditions is imperative. Provenance is your best friend, as this allows you to grow a low-maintenance tree once established. Oklahoma is very plant diverse as we are in the cross-timbers, where the eastern forest meets the great plains. We have a wide range of diversity from the Caddo sugar maple from the southwest to a native palmetto, Sabal minor var. McCurtain to the southeast.

Struggles we encounter here include drastic temperature swings throughout the winter, late frosts, hot drying winds in the summer with triple digit temperatures with little to no precipitation. This places stress on trees and trees sourced from other areas have a difficult time adjusting to our climate.

We have had good luck utilizing provenance in our orchard plantings for successful growing. We also utilize trees of exceptional quality from different parts of the country for plantings and breeding projects. Things we look for are high fruit and nut quality, disease resistance and drought tolerance. These are both useful tools for successful plantings.

We hope through countless hours of research, failed plantings, networking with state foresters and landowners, walking the woods to source native germplasm, corresponding and befriending other fruit and nut growers that we can provide trees that will help you succeed in growing food for you, your family and friends.