We have some beautiful American plum flowers. I’m very excited to get a plum harvest this year, and add plums to the list of fruit trees and shrubs that produce in under five years after planting. This list also includes peaches, currants, honeyberry, hopefully hazelnuts 🤞, and elderberries (all pictured here on a beautiful spring day).
Check out our Arbor Day tree sale on Friday April 24th and Saturday April 25th from 9am-5pm. It will be at our main nursery site at 33 Cashmere Road in Livingston Manor.
We will have chestnuts, hazelnuts, American elm, shagbark hickory, hardy pecan, all bare root, and tons of potted rooted cuttings, including elderberry, currants, honeyberry, and willows.
@livingstonmanorny
Eastern camas (camassia scilloides), first photo is from right now, second photo is during flowering last year. This is a spring ephemeral with an edible bulb and stunning flowers. Related species were a staple crop for Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest.
Eastern camas can thrive in open meadows or forest shade, and its flowering roughly corresponds with the last frost date for an area, making it a great indicator for when to plant warm season crops.
Check out our spring bareroot plant sale! We have hybrid chestnuts, American elm, shagbark hickory, and hybrid hazelnuts.
Trees will ship in the next couple of weeks as it warms up. We also do local pickup, DM for info.
Unfortunately, some of our trees were damaged by rabbits over winter, but we are offering those on sale for $5! Any tree sold has active buds and should fully recover.
Check out our website: /
We’ve been planning our annual crop plot this year with a goal of breeding locally adapted staple crops. Check out our full blog post on the topic here:
/blogs/news/beaverkill-nursery-newsletter-march-1
We just got a couple of big orders in from the GRIN (/), Sandhill Preservation Center (/), and Wright’s Heirlooms (/). Each of these have played a big role in maintaining crop diversity, albeit at much different scales.
Pictured here:
1. GRIN seed packs
2. A very nice white grained sorghum from Tanzania
3. A Japanese variety of Job’s tears
4. A pink pole bean from Appalachia
Some places have an incredible diversity of plants in a small space. This meadow in the piedmont of Pennsylvania is located along a stream on a rocky ridge jutting out from the otherwise arable landscape surrounding it. Due to its rocky terrain, it was never used for agricultural purposes, and retains a high diversity of plants. It is a representation of how diverse our meadowlands can be. The following pictures are a small fraction of the plants in this spot.
Pictured here:
1) Winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata)
2) *probably showy golden rod (Solidago speciosa) (not a golden rod expert)
3) Bottle gentian (Gentiana andrewsii)
4) Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum)
5) White vervain (Verbena urticifolia)
6) Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana)
7) American groundnut (Apios americana)
8) Bladdernut (Staphylea trifolia)
9) Spicebush (Lindera benzoin)
10) Canada Lily (Lilium canadense) (excuse the bad photo)
This hazelnut was planted in 2022 as a one year old bareroot and is already producing catkins. I don’t think we’ll get nuts next year because it is the only one that is this big. But this shows that hazelnuts do not need very long to come into production. It was planted on some of our worst soil and has received very little attention.
