I love visiting local nurseries. Especially in the Seatac Des Moines area. With the close of Furneys, it was great to see someone start a Nursery business from scratch.
Meet Troy:
Troy has started a nursery business growing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. His list of cultivars is quite large and is still growing. Outside some of the larger nurseries he has one of the best selection of fruit trees around Seattle.
He runs it with his wife on a small plot of land in Seatac. His story resonates with mine and I highly recommend him to anyone who loves fruit trees. Especially exotic ones.
I picked up a Chilean Guava, Miranda Jujube and a Chocolate Persimmon from him. The Miranda is already starting to set fruit amazingly.
Based out of San Bernandino, CA she has the perfect climate to grow figs to their best.
Rare figs for the Orchard.
Our goal is to share top quality healthy fig cuttings with our customers. Over the years we have trialled and tested almost every variety we can get our hands on. We have the pleasure and honor to share them with you today.
Another source for cold hardy figs our of New Jersey
https://njfigfarm.com/
I have personally bought from Aaron, great looking cuttings. Lots of unknowns from the New Jersey area. I figure if they can ripen in NJ they should be able to fine here in Seattle.
"We are an e-nursery in the Metro NYC area that specializes in fig tree varieties from France. We also have a few excellent varieties from Italy, Spain and Greece.
French Fig Farm LLC is a State of New Jersey inspected nursery and sells fig trees via our web site. All of our fig trees are grown on site. Our plants are primarily shipped by mail. We can also drop off trees to customers at NYC Penn Station or at the Radburn Station in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Local Special Delivery is also available. Due to zoning restrictions and not wanting to call attention to ourselves, we do not have a retail operation."
"My name is WillsC owner of Wills Figs a Federally and state of Florida licensed fig nursery and Ourfigs.com an online fig discussion forum. My journey with figs started years ago when a neighbor gave me a single fig plant, I was hooked and since then there has been much trial and error but has been an enjoyable learning experience. Currently growing over 400 varieties of figs and adding more as I can find them."
So far 0 for 2 with Fast growing trees. I buy alot of trees from online nurseries. 99% of the time the trees show up in good health. However I've struck out twice now with Fast growing trees.
They have a great site and customer service but the tree packing process needs to be rethought out. It is just not working.
2 trees and both times the results were the same. A completely dried out tree due to not enough moisture in the soil during shipment.
The Jamaican Cherry
came from Fast-growing-trees.com and I'm glad I paid the $4 warranty
because the plant arrived looking really beat up. The soil looks like it
was replaced by peat moss and then covered by a bag to keep moist. The
combination of soil change and heat from the slow shipment choice
probably did a double whammy on the plant and it's struggling big time. I
hope I can revive it.
Hopefully they have a good replacement policy, because it's an uphill battle for this little tree from the get go.
Update: 6/5/16
Well the mutingia bit the dust. Fast growing trees will replace it however since it came in such poor condition.
Update: 6/14/16
I received my replacement tree from Fast growing trees. But it took 8 days to get to me unfortunately. It was hung up over the weekend and then didn't get redelivered until Tuesday instead of Monday.
I think the biggest problem I have is how they bare root the tree and then add in replacement peat and not enough moisture to keep the plant alive and healthy.
The good thing is they do have an amazing customer service and credited me for the tree. Would I buy from them again? Yes but only trees that are hardy enough to survive the cross country trip.
Update: 6/25/16
So I decided to use my store credit to get an Owari Satsuma. This little guy made it here just fine.
I'm pretty sure I need a loyalty punch card to Brian on Ebay. I've bought a bunch of figs from him. His plants look good, he's got great varieties and the pricing is solid.
Madeleine des Deux Saisons
LSU Scott's Black
Orphan Fig
I also stopped by NewCastle Nursery in my neighborhood. It's a small nursery with very high quality plants and Japanese maples. They do not have website and is only open seasonally. I wasn't actually looking to buy anything but luckily for me I was able to pick up a nice large Panache for $49 and flat of Brown Turkey figs from their produce section. The Panache was taller than me. They also had VDB, Kadota, Desert King, and a couple others.
13013 Newcastle Way Newcastle, WA98059Phone number
(425) 227-8400
“I
want to help people grow food for generations. In order to be able to
do that they need to be able to buy edible plants at a much lower price
than what most nurseries currently charge. My goal is to remove that
price limitation. Lower prices mean more plants and more food.”Gabriel Kahn, Owner of Harvest Nursery
I really like the principles at Harvest Nursery. Help people grow food and not let prices be the limiting factor.
The
nursery itself is in an odd place next to an apartment complex. There's
2 greenhouse, and only one available to customers. It's a relatively
small but they do have a 40 acre location that was just purchased. In
the small space are all the plants that I hold dear. Fruit trees and
berries. Don't expect to go here and buy a japanese maple.
The have a wide selection of $5 figs. A little on the small side and remind me of tissue culture starts. All the plants that have been propagated by HN have killer prices. The plants from Monrovia and other big distribution nurseries were some what comparable to other nurseries.
Overall I like this nursery. the only quirky thing is we were only allowed 3 bags for our plants, considering we purchased about 20 trees, 3 bags seems to be on the light side.
Up potting in the rain
The smaller greenhouse for customers. It has a shade cloth
We
ended up leaving with over a dozen pineapple guavas, Haichia persimmon,
mulberries, and loquats. Next time I have to check out their 40 acre
farm.
I loved being able to tour Frankie's Tropical Fruit Nursery on Oahu. They had such an amazing array of fruit trees. I wanted to buy them all but unfortunately couldn't and resorted to buying the fruits and eating them there instead.
I'm a fan of the Raintree Nursery Online Store. They have an amazing catalog of fruit plants. Their website is easy to navigate and super easy to order from. And from the previous orders they are quick to ship as well and the plants show up strong and healthy.
Lucky for us they are located in the Washington State. From the Seattle area it takes a bit more than 2 hours to get there, so pack a lunch.
I expected to see a massive greenhouse similar to Flowerworld but unfortunately because their business is mainly online the majority of their plants were in cold storage and only accessible to employees. So the areas that you can actually walk around were pretty limited to the one greenhouse and the front property.
They did have one greenhouse that housed their smaller fruits and FIGS!!! I was very excited to see the selection and pick out my own tree. I was in the market for a Mary Lane fig I but because I have weakness for figs I also ended up walking out with 2 others, Flanders and Panache. I've been resisting buying Panache, since I prefer to buy figs based on taste and not just how cool it looks. Oh well I figured I wasn't going to make this trip too often. Most of the prices were in $20s which is a great deal.
It was easy to fill the cart inside of the greenhouse. We ended up getting some goumis, pomegranite and gooseberries as well.
This is me like a kid in a candy store.
Even Blake got into it. He was checking out there huge catalog. "Hmm I wonder if they have that cotton candy grape?"
This is what made the whole trip worth it. The bargain $5 dollar bins!! These were less than perfect trees that were sold for a heavy discount! They ranged from Apples, plums, peaches, nectarines, pears and more. Between my brothers and I, we probably ended up getting about 20 different varieties.
There was also a little store with great prices on things like fruit socks and impress o tags that were $5 cheaper than online.
However, if you wanted certain varieties you would have to request them from the cashier and the bare root plants would be brought straight out to your truck.
Now all we have to figure out is where to plant all of our new tress. LOL.
Bye bye Raintree it was fun to visit, see you online.
All that fruit tree buying can make one hungry and it's time to get some grub, we ended up at the local restaurant Rambling Ribeye.
Update: 3/21/16
Here are the varieties that I scored from Raintree.
Update: 4/15/16 Looks like everything has woken up from dormancy except the raspberry red nectarine.
