My father took this picture. It was a cloudy day and I wanted to show him what I was up to on my new farm. There was no barn, water or phone. I was planting trees in a little box I made from recycled railroad ties that came from a landscape job I was hired to do. The farm use to be a pasture where a few cows were kept. At one point someone tried some row crops but eventually it became a mixed pasture where hay was harvested. The previous owners wanted a subdivision there but this idea died when the owners split up their partnership and refused to do business with each other. It was from here I began digging holes and planting trees in the early 1980’s. I tried to make a plan on what to plant and where each time. That failed. It was too limiting in many ways. As I began to explore different possibilities, it dawned on me that it would be best just to test out certain methods and species on my own a little at a time. It allowed me to discover the different soils at my farm in the process. That is how my tree farm got started. It was from here I learned how to grow trees from seed and use a combination of letter writing, phone calls while joining several organizations to help me in my tree quest. I found large repositories of seeds in my area and those helped in creating my diverse planting. Wherever I went, I found new seeds. collected samples and eventually tried to grow them out in my planting beds and polyhouses. Some eventually found their way into my pasture. I did these “outplantings in the off seasons of late fall and early spring. I hauled water in 5 gallon buckets from my home 25 miles away. The most valuable part of this experience was finding food plants that could be used as a species themselves or transformed into something delicious and healthy.

To share this experience became the mission of the nursery of Oikos Tree Crops. It grew but slowly. It survived but rarely flourished. I remember taking business classes mid way through and discovering that as a business it would never be truly sustainable and likely my personal income would be enough to get by on but not enough to expand. The goals I had held earlier would never come to fruition. That was very clear. I was wasting my time thinking otherwise. I gave up. That worked.

From here as nursery sales continued to drop, (with the exception of the Covid year) I began to use the time I had available to improve and develop my seed sources, work on new dynamic plants and use and improve my out plantings. That worked. I can plant trees.

This cross of red oak was selected from a bed of several thousand seedlings showing increased vigor compared to other seedlings in the same bed. All were collected from a nearby farm field and roadside ditch. This particular seedling was 4-5 feet tall where other seedlings rarely reached 18 inches tall after two years. I moved it to my outback which at that time was only 50 feet away at the base of a hill. I tried to extract the tree leaving as much root as possible. Called “Rocket” this selection has a very open crown with wide branching and fast growth.