(Transcript from video)

Elderberry Mother Plant and Rootings

Lyndon: Hello everyone. This is a rooting that we did from a plant called the Magnolia Elderberry. It has nothing to do with magnolia plant. It’s just a variety name. We keep them in water for a while and change out the water two or three times a week. It’s the easy way to germinate roots and then we change up the water three times a week. Keep them in a bucket then they grow roots. You see the amazing little white thingies? Those are the roots… then go back in the bucket. After they get roots we put them in pots and we grow them up.

We sell the plants. The thing about elderberries is they make these amazing berries that are really good for medicinal purposes, especially colds and stuff like that. You have to have two different kinds of elderberries. We have this very vigorous growing Magnolia Elderberry and we have the Nova. Somewhere around here we have a Medicine Wheel which comes from Earthaven but we don’t have it in this group.

I can take you over here and show you the actual mother plant those Magnolia Elderberries came from. This is the Magnolia Elderberry it was planted out of a pot around 2018.. it was about the spring of 2018. It was about this tall coming out of the pot. We planted it here in the ground and it’s to thicken off. I was like is this an unusual elderberry. Kind of a lot of them grow to this height but most are a little taller this. I measured it one day we got up here with a ladder. It’s got up to 11 and a half feet, I think it’s that was last fall,  I think maybe it’s even taller but it is an elderberry that came from the Piedmont. Either Chuck Marsh or Debbie Lienhart brought from the Piedmont probably a similar way.

Elderberry at Useful Plants Nursery

Courtney Brooke: Where can we get some elderberries like this?

Lyndon: At Useful Plants Nursery. We sell them Useful Plant Nursery in fact, which is where we are. But we take our plants on the road. We’re gonna take them to the herb fest, which is going to be May 1^st and 2^nd this year at the Ag center. If you’re going to the airport (Asheville airport) you go down the road a little farther and the Ag center is on the right.

Courtney Brooke: Okay get your elderberries… make elderberry syrup…  UPN (Useful Plants Nursery)

Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis)

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I first learned about pawpaws from Chuck Marsh. He was an enthusiastic advocate of new and under-appreciated fruit. When I became a partner in the nursery in 2010 we gathered and planted selected pawpaw varieties everywhere—his yard, at the nursery, and in Geoffrey’s and my orchard. When his first pawpaw tree started blooming, Chuck gathered flowering stems from other trees in the village and brought them to pollinate the flowers in his tree. He was a proud papa when his trees bore fruit that fall!

For the nursery, we gather seeds from superior genetics to grow into plants for our customers. One of our favorite pawpaw sources is Wynn Dinnsen’s Pittsboro farm. During a recent plant delivery, I bought 10 pounds of pawpaws from Wynn. The pulp will go into a variety of baked goods and ice cream. And the seeds will grow into pawpaw trees for our nursery customers.

Losing Chuck so suddenly has been a big shock, and I appreciate all the support our crew and I have received through this transition. We were 50-50 partners in the nursery and had each willed our half to the other, to give the nursery its best chance of continuing without one of us.

In addition to producing thousands of useful plants each year, the nursery provides much-needed jobs in the ecovillage—and will continue on. We have a great crew and plenty of plants for the fall and spring. And with these seeds, we will have pawpaw trees for years to come.

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Some folks work for companies located at Earthaven, including Useful Plants Nursery and the Southeast Wise Women. Others work for the community doing maintenance, bookkeeping, or office administration. A few skilled builders and technicians help keep our systems running, while a few folks work outside the community – commuting or consulting.

Many of us provide goods or services for each other, including farm products, baked goods, herbal medicines, elder care, window washing, and recycled or upcycled goods.

These goods and services are exchanged informally and through our Tuesday morning Coffee and Trade Hour, and at special events, such as the Bizarre Bazaar, which is highlighted in this newsletter.

Neighbors and residents are always brainstorming cooperative strategies they hope will morph into essential parts of the local economy. In this newsletter we present two examples: a Farm & Ecovillage Immersion program called SOIL, and a new landscaping company.

 Some of us are looking to 2014 as the year of the entrepreneur, so if you’ve been thinking of setting up a business in a community setting, let us know what’s in your idea box and we’ll see if we have any collaborative ideas to share.

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In December, the residents of Village Terraces Cohousing Neighborhood planted a new grove of hazelnut trees on the edge of their neighborhood.

We planted the European hazelnuts for their improved nut quality.

The nuts are high in oils, tasty with chocolate, and can be harvested up to a month before they are ripe so we can beat the squirrels to the nuts!

The trees came from Useful Plants Nursery, which is located at Earthaven and sells over 200 varieties of edible and medicinal plants.

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          In neighborhood news: The Main Street neighborhood changed its name to the Forest Garden neighborhood, the Village Terraces neighborhood held several work parties to load firewood into the two-story firewood shed they built over the summer, and Brian Love and Chris Farmer moved into their new homes in the Gateway neighborhood.

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          In November, the Useful Plants Nursery hosted a fall sale and Plant Jam. This was the first UPN event hosted at Earthaven and many people came out to see the nursery, hear local speakers, and take home some useful plants!

          In December Earthaven hosted a tour from the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA) annual conference in Black Mountain. Here they are hearing about Yellowroot farm from Julie McMahan and Andy Bosley.

Join us Saturday, December 12, 10-6 for the Bizarre Bazaar. We’ll have supervised craft making for children of all ages (dry felting, holiday decorations, snowflakes, etc) and a snack and drink table – have some/leavesome. Bring a musical instrument and make a joyful noise. Vendor tables available by donation and reservation. Call 828-669-2073 to reserve a table or for more information.

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We began our tour by visiting some of the medicinal and edible shrubs that are the specialty of Useful Plants Nursery. For example, there is Vitex, an attractive shrub with purple flowers which has berries useful for hormonal regulation, particularly for menopausal or menstruating women. Crampbark is another shrub used medicinally. People steep the bark to make tea which can serve as a muscle relaxant. It too is a viburnum, a highbush cranberry native to Europe and Africa. We went on to look at service berry, apples, Nanking cherries – all edible, and handsome. They raise seven varieties of figs, all equally cold resistant. They also stock Flying Dragon, a hardy citrus with spines, good for hedges. It was stressed that this was just a small selection of what was available. Bruce says “there is immense diversity here – at least 200 varieties and 150 species on less than half an acre of growing space.” The nursery’s web site, www.usefulplants.org, features a complete stock listing.

The benefits of complexity
The diversity helps ward off both disease and financial catastrophe. For example phytophthora infestans (the root rot mold that caused the Irish potato famine) thrives in a monoculture and is a perennial bane of plant nurseries and many root crop farmers, but UPN had only 8 deaths this year from this mold. Considering that all phytophthoras thrive in wet conditions and how rainy this spring has been, that’s not too bad at all. However, even if the molds had killed a group of plants or two, the nursery would have absorbed the shock and continued to thrive, because it doesn’t specialize in any one set of plants. The diversity also works wonders for pest management. The nursery doesn’t use any chemical sprays on its plants and will as often as not tolerate the presence of pests like aphids because they do little permanent harm and sometimes indicate soil problems.

Staying in business
UPN faces the same challenges that all businesses in our neck of the woods face – they’re far from their markets, have little access to formal financial institutions, and are technologically unsophisticated relative to their larger competition, putting limits on their speed of production and ease of marketing. Bruce has a lot to say about these issues “Four people work at this nursery; nothing is mechanized. This is simultaneously wonderful and economically backward. I love the people who work here and wouldn’t trade them for the nicest greenhouses in the world. However, the fact is that if we had the equipment, a nursery this size could easily be run by one or two people with seasonal help, improving the per-person returns immensely.”

“We do hope to mechanize to some degree, for example bringing in a soil mixer and some small vehicles to haul larger quantities of plants around our new field. Mixing sixty gallons of soil by hand every time you want to pot something gets pretty tiring, as does hauling them around, and it’s an inefficient use of time to boot. That said we have no aspirations to become a huge, totally tractor-driven operation. It’s not who we are. We don’t do the ‘pile it high, sell it cheap’ approach, but we’ve got to find a way to lower our prices all the same, at least in some areas. You can’t do anything in McDowell County selling a $16 goji plant in a 2 gallon pot. People laugh you out of the store, if they’ve even heard of a goji berry in the first place. To say nothing of lower-income folks in Asheville or Statesville, of whom there are more and more these days. Partial mechanization and increased propagation space will help with a lot of that, and that’s why we’re going to pursue it in some form.”

As for advertising and marketing, the internet is UPN’s way of getting around the fact that they are far from most of their customers. They publish a monthly newsletter online which has over 600 subscribers, and the number increases each month. Many people who have never bought a plant from them sign up on their website, and they have readers from California, Eastern Europe, and Singapore. Recognizing this potential, UPN is investing in this medium by hiring a part-time writer to handle the newsletter in a more professional manner and tie it more directly to sales. Even so, it may be difficult to capitalize on this new development, because mail order at the present time is an unattractive option. Their pots are large and cost a lot to ship. They depend on farmers’ markets, conferences such as the Organic Growers’ School, and big events for a great deal of their income. However, a promising development for more intensive exports has UPN’s growing connections with projects with similar views such as Bountiful Backyards in Durham and the Philadelphia Orchard Project.

Environmental issues and challenges
Being who they are, the folks who run UPN care a lot about environmental issues in general, and two large ones they face as nurserypeople are the encouragement of genetic diversity and preserving native species. Most nursery production is done vegetatively, meaning that a particular plant is ‘cloned’ many times for sale purposes. On top of that, most popular edible and medicinal plants in this day and age aren’t native to the Americas. However, the nursery’s essential mission is providing a “hedge” against likely food insecurity in the coming years, and climate change is pretty much a given in their calculations. Therefore, it’s sometimes anybody’s guess whether a particular species, native or not, will be well suited for food production in this region in twenty years. There are of course large ecological issues that may come with replacement of native food-producing vegetation with other sorts – inability of native insect populations to digest them, consequent drops in the populations of insectivorous birds, loss of genetic stock, et cetera – but Bruce thinks that the situation we’re in demands using genetic resources from elsewhere if they work. ‘People desperate for food are a lot more dangerous to everyone – including nonhumans – than ones who aren’t. The real test for us, therefore, is whether we think a plant can meet people’s demand for food effectively now and in the future, unless it poses a clear danger to an endangered species in the region.’ All the same, a conscious effort is made to stock hardy, adaptable native species like American hazelnuts, plums, groundnuts, blackberries, and elderberries, and UPN also carries relatively unknown native trees like paw paws and blackheart cherries.

The Expansion

This year UPN cleared a field, slightly under an acre, by Taylor Creek. They have been leveling the field gradually and currently have about 500 or so fruit and nut trees on it. They will have four or five greenhouses on the field eventually and almost 2/3 of an acre of growing space. Other structures to be built include a shed for pest control solutions, and one for vehicles, such as pushcarts and a small ATV or truck.

Levelling and controlling runoff down newly created steep slopes has been a challenge. They have put in ditches, seeded the banks with grasses. The silty run-off is not entirely controlled, but they are working hard on solving the problems. Bruce stresses that things are moving along. “This spring’s weather has made grading very difficult and erosion plentiful. Given that, we’re doing quite well. I know that a lot of folks wanted to see a beautiful, finished field by June – I know I did. Well, it hasn’t worked out that way. That beautiful, finished field is coming. Once the grading is done it can come pretty quickly. But that’s the essential logjam. We do have many plans for beautification, et cetera. We are planning on bringing customers here, after all! But the first priority is making sure that the grading is done and done right, irrigation is in, and our plants are resting on that field comfortably.”

For further information on Useful Plants Nursery, call 828-669-6517.  The nursery’s website is www.usefulplants.org.

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Bruce, Rudy, Alice, Eva, Julie, Johnny, and Mana have become full members!

Culture’s Edge hosted a wonderful Village Harvest Festival last fall and are looking forward to the second annual festival on October 12, 2009.

Arjuna’s beautiful Leela house is nearing completion and is getting its final coat of interior plaster this summer.

Ivy and Michael celebrated their wedding at Earthaven!

Useful Plants Nursery cleared an area in the old campground for a nursery expansion. The fruit trees have moved in, with many more plants to come.

The Forest Children took their spring play, Fantasia, on the road this spring, performing at the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF).

The Pokeberry building at Village Terraces is complete, with Bob, Debbie, and their two fuzzy house cats in residence. (see article)

Geoff and Debbie cleared a site for an orchard near the new campground and are busy planting apple trees and ground cover crops.

Imani farm has a new Jersey cow named LC (Large Cow), who produces most of the milk for Earthaven. Imani and Yellowroot farms are raising pigs, and three neighborhoods have new bee hives.

At Gateway farm, the five Shetland ewes had nine new lambs, and after completing the Pokeberry building, Brian and Farmer are building new homes for themselves in the Gateway neighborhood.

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Another sign of Spring at Earthaven is the expansion of Chuck Marsh’s Useful Plants Nursery from his homesite in Benchmark neighborhood. The nursery grows permaculture and edible landscaping plants that are well adapted to our mountains and the surrounding bioregions, with a specialty in phyto-nutritionals.

Kicking off the season at the annual Organic Growers’ School, March 11, Chuck offered workshops in growing useful plants and displayed his exclusive variety of potted herbs, berries, nuts, fruits and medicinals for sale. He’ll present day-long versions of the workshop at Earthaven on April 29 and July 8. You’re invited to stop by and see what he’s got in the nursery to share, including both plant science and folklore.

Chuck’s plan for the Spring and following seasons is to expand the nursery downhill onto a leased agriculture site occupying the bottom flats of the current main campground. The upper camping sites will probably remain in place for at least another year, while the permanent campground at Hidden Valley Road is gradually developed.

Wolfberries, Jaogulan (Chinese herb), Jujube, and Goumi are some of the more exotic plants Chuck features, alongside Elderberries, Blueberries, Raspberries, thornless Blackberries, Fig trees, Apple trees, Pecans and Walnuts, and various kinds of Cherries. If you give him a holler, you can set up a time to come pick out your own pots. He’ll give you the lowdown on the health values of delicious foods you never suspected would be so conducive to your well-being! You’ll also meet Chuck at his Useful Plants stall at the Greenlife tailgate market on Wednesday and Friday afternoons in Asheville and at most local herb and gardening festivals all year long.

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