← Seed and propagation H17-06 · Module 6 of 7 · Pages: 18 · Worksheets: 6

Your own nursery for fruit trees and soft fruit

How to set up a small nursery on the holding, raise healthy fruit trees and soft-fruit plants, lift them, grade them and keep them until planting

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Your own nursery for fruit trees and soft fruit

In short

  • For a family homestead a nursery of 20–40 m² (about 200–430 sq ft) is enough: sunny, well-drained, near water, fenced against rabbits and deer.
  • The nursery has four parts: stock plants, rooting, seedlings and rootstocks, grafts and young plants. Plus a place for heeling in.
  • Keep soft-fruit stock plants away from old plantings and renew them with healthy certified material every few years.
  • The nursery must not dry out: young roots are shallow. Drip irrigation and mulch.
  • Lift young plants in November, grade them by quality and plant or heel them in at once. Roots must never dry out in the wind.
  • Giving away and selling plants is governed by rules on propagating material and plant health. For your own holding work freely; for sale, check first.

What's inside

Chapters

  1. How much nursery a holding needs
  2. Site and soil
  3. Nursery layout
  4. Soft-fruit stock planting
  5. Caring for the nursery through the season
  6. Lifting, grading and heeling in
  7. Plant health and the rules
  8. A three-year plan
  9. Common mistakes
  10. Printable checklist

Worksheets

  • Nursery plan
  • Nursery calendar
  • Area and materials calculator
  • Plant inventory
  • Weekly check
  • Plant labels

Fields and checkboxes can be filled in with Adobe Acrobat Reader (desktop and mobile), and the calculator adds up by itself. Filling in may not work in some browsers. A print version comes with the screen PDF.

This guide in other languages:

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