Bare Root Plants for Sale
Thank you for your interest and happy growing!
PLEASE READ: If you are local or regional to the Finger Lakes area (able to pick up in person), feel free to reach out to hello@edibleacres.org with a clear wish list of plants and we will work to arrange a pickup.
We update our inventory on March 1st for Spring bare root sales and September 1st for Fall bare root sales. If you are visiting this page and see everything as sold out, please make a note in your calendar to revisit at our next ‘opening’ and pick up some lovely plants!
Our Fall offerings tend to have higher numbers of trees, shrubs, cuttings and a medley of our abundant and fall appropriate herbaceous perennials. Spring offerings will generally have more herbaceous perennials, grasses, etc and a smaller number of trees and shrubs. We weight our inventory in large part based on seasonal appropriateness for establishment. We hope you understand and visit again if you don’t find what you are looking for this time.
If you are super eager to get plants now, we now have a Permaculture Nursery page that lists friends of ours with ethical and thoughtful growing practices. We strongly encourage you to check them out and get some awesome plants from them too!
TIP: Use the tags above to help filter our offerings by characteristic (ie. click on ‘fruit’ to find any fruit bearing plants we offer, etc.) As we add more and more it is a helpful way to find a plant to fit your goals…
Seeds
Seeds
We are excited to be able to offer seeds from some of our favorite hardy and perennial plants. We have learned over the years what different tree, shrub and perennial plants want for their seeds as far as harvest, processing and storage and feel honored to be able to share them with folks interested in growing more plants for this world. Each seed type has been harvested and held appropriately for their needs, keeping them moist and cool as needed or dry as needed, etc. You will be getting the same quality of seed we depend on for our nursery growth.
Some details are provided for each seed type below. We encourage you to explore and read as much as you can to learn best storage practices, germination techniques and growing conditions for each type of seed. Different plants have different needs and there is no universal approach we can apply to all, leaning is valuable in this realm.
Our dear friend Akiva at Twisted Tree has a phenomenal learning program you may want to consider for a very deep dive in all things tree seed learning. Abundant Propagation is the name of the course. It isn’t free but the value in learning is absolutely worth the investment.
Seeds we offer are all tested to be at least hardy to zone 5B and most come from parents with no irrigation, no fertilizers and minimal care (for maximum hardiness and adaptation!):
Paw Paw - All our Paw Paw seed is processed from fruit growing in Central NY in the Finger Lakes area. Parent plants have experienced -20F or colder in past winters, so quite northern hardy line. We mix seed from extremely large, cultivated fruits and more numerous semi-wild types. Our Paw Paw seed line is incredibly diverse and open offering cold hardiness tested and highly resilient future plants.
American Persimmon - This is the same seed we use to grow out the American Persimmon seedlings we offer. Harvested from a 30+ year old hedgerow of seedlings originally from plant breeder Elowyn Meader in New Hampshire, these are perhaps zone 4 adapted very late bearing and large fruited trees. We try to select fruit from the most flavorful, largest and latest fruiting trees.
Chestnut - Our seed is collected from a 20+ year old planting of Chestnuts in Trumansburg NY. Mostly Chinese dominant parentage with some clear diversity in form, timing and size of nuts being presented. 0 sign of blight in the orchard. We collect and then sort to isolate smaller nuts for use in drying and eating and largest nuts to be saved for seed to plant and offer to others.
Black Walnut - We collect seed from a highly curated orchard of named parent trees. Our default seed offering is a blend of seeds sourced from parents like ‘Sparrow’, ‘Sauber 1’, and ‘Vandersloot’. Since the trees are near one another we recognize the mixing of genetics an so offer a blend. If you want a specific named parent tree represented in your seed, you can request one of the three listed in special requests/notes at checkout and we’ll try our best to make your seed most or all of that type.
Red Bud - Seed pods collected from shrubs with dense, compact and highly productive pod formation (meaning super loaded flowers too!). We do not crush and sort out seed from pod as we’ve found it not necessary for our nursery work and it’s tedious! Each pod may contain multiple viable seeds.
River Locust - (Amorpha Fruiticosa) Seed sourced from our seed grown plantings. Origin unknown, but plants exhibit extremely fast and clean growth with no disease issues and are highly productive of flowers and seed pods from an early age. These plants can grow in a phenomenally wide range of conditions, a truly powerhouse pioneer ally.
Seed Storage and growing Details:
Paw Paw - These are perhaps some of the most particular seeds we work with, but definitely easy to grow if you know the rules. Very simply they can not handle being dried out at all and they can’t deal with freezing. We provide them moist and and sawdust and encourage you to store them cool and moist in media, like more sawdust or soil, etc. Root cellar conditions are lovely or a refrigerator is OK so long as you check for dryness once a month until spring. Mold is fine if it forms, just rinse it off and put them in fresh media. We bring our seeds in media into a warm environment around March or April for our NY climate and hold them there for a week or two (high tunnel, warm room or even on top of fridge). This helps the seed think about waking up and then they are ready to be planted in air prune boxes or garden beds. They are slow to germinate, prefer a bit of gentle shade for late day or hot climates and need even moisture in the season to grow best. They are hardy just a a little particular when babies! They work in air prune boxes but must be harvested after first growing season since roots are sensitive. We prefer growing in super rich, deep beautiful soil for 2 seasons for phenomenally well grown field ready plants. It’s a long game but works wonders for them!
Persimmon - Similar ideas as Paw Paw but less tender. Seeds can dry a little but ideally treat them the same as Paw Paw instructions above and warm seeds in spring for a few days to week+ to help encourage germination. Suitable for air prune box growing or nursery bed in ground. Roots are sensitive enough to need to be harvested from air prune boxes after 1st year in colder climates
Chestnut - Wonderfully hardy tree to grow from seed. We encourage keeping them in moist media for the winter in cool and ideally not freezing conditions. MUST BE protected from rodent browse, so bucket with holes drilled in bottom and top and sealed shut buried outside or sheltered root cellar space, etc. VERY appealing to mice, voles, etc. Storage in fridge for winter cold stratification is fine but we find in the fridge they very often sprout much earlier than is ideal for our climate. You may then need to plant very early before conditions are ideal outside, or plant them in individual pots under lights and ease out into the garden after frost (not ideal). Rodent protected and buried outside tends to offer best timing for sprouting. Experiment and learn what works best for you! We love growing Chestnuts in air prune boxes, they work great in this context. In-ground nursery bed growth is lovely too and most trees are field ready at the end of the first growing season.
Black Walnut - Similar to Chestnut… Seeds do best kept cool and moist for the winter, rodent protection is important as well. Black Walnuts are ideal for air prune boxes as their long tap roots get very nicely shaped in this context and are much easier to dig than in-ground. Be aware of their influence with juglone root exudate in the soil and consider growing them in their own nursery space away from sensitive plants.
Red Bud - Nitrogen fixing shrub with beautiful growth and flowers and super hardy and resistant to deer browse! Seeds can and should be stored dry like standard annual garden seeds. We tend to have sporadic success growing Red Bud from seed and have learned our best results come from considering the whole pod a planting unit, rather than trying to individualize each seed. We ‘scarify’ seed by bringing water up to a boil and then taking that hot water and pouring it over the seed we are ready to plant in spring in a bowl. Consider it a pot of ‘red bud pod tea’ :). The hot water soaks through the pod, softening it and soaks into the seeds to begin the germination process. We leave that overnight and in the morning the pods are easier to open and pull out swollen seeds to plant into nursery beds. Or you can plant the whole pod on it’s side with a bit of soil on top and trust nature to open it up. Sometimes we’ve found Red Bud seed can need a 2nd year in the ground before sprouting, so a nursery bed that can be dedicated to them for a longer time may result in best growth overall.
River Locust - Seeds can and should be stored dry like standard annual garden seeds. In the spring when frost is past we simply sow seed in a nursery bed and they germinate readily. VERY easy from seed. You can get faster germination if you soak seed in warm water overnight but we have not seen that be necessary. Incredibly easy beginner tree/shrub seed to learn with. You may consider sowing directly in pockets around existing trees to have a woody, nitrogen fixing shrub start growing next to your orchard peach, apple, etc. Just some ideas :)