Growing Nut Trees in Vermont's Cold Climate: Adaptation & Innovation in Northern Nut Farming

Buzz Ferver and the development of a new nut culture

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Buzz Ferver of A Perfect Circle Farm. You might know Buzz from his involvement with rediscovering parts of John Hershey's farm in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Not only is he a wonderful resource of historical knowledge on the tree crop movement here in the United States, he's also a phenomenal plant breeder with some really interesting stuff going on. We chat about his farm in Vermont, the trees he's working with, what makes his nursery bed so unique, and what you should consider if you're interested in starting a tree nursery.

Andy:

Buzz, thanks for coming on. Tell us a little bit about your farm and some of the stuff you've got going on.

Buzz:

Andy, thanks for having me. The name of my farm is Perfect Circle Farm. Find me on the internet at perfectcircle.farm. I have been on this piece of land for 10 years, it'll be 10 years in April and I have been on a very deep dive into edible nut trees and shrubs, along with fruits as well, but my natural bent is towards nut trees. I'm in Vermont, I'm in central Vermont, so 4B just changed last week to 5A, which is ridiculous for where I am and totally inaccurate, but that's okay.

It's cold, pretty cold here, and so a lot of the plants that I am growing here, I was told by many people that I'd have a lot of difficulty, they'd never grow. “You're crazy to do that”, which kind of just fuels my fire, and so I've grown an awful lot of plants from seed and grafted plants here and have been collecting the germplasm that I've been working on. I'd been collecting for at least five, six, or seven years before I got here. So I came from my last small homestead to this much larger farm with quite a few of my mother trees and starts. I was doing it part-time and working full-time and doing this part-time until two years ago and it's been full-time now for two years, so it's been an interesting transition.

Andy:

I'm sure it is. One thing I do love about your farm is if you go on the website, the amount of cultivars that you have listed on the website is just unreal. The depth of knowledge that goes into having that much is really impressive. Whether it's persimmons or chestnuts, I think you still have hicans listed, but I believe when we spoke last you said you weren't growing anymore.

Buzz:

Oh no, I'm still growing hicans. I'm excited about hick because the hicans that I've observed— Well, let's back up a little bit.

First off, cultivars, varieties, and plants. It's good to get that right. So a cultivar is a plant that's been produced intentionally through crossing or other hybridization by people and given a name. That is a cultivar. A variety is something that comes true to seed, or you know it's an aberration from normal, but you can plant it like a thornless honey locust. It's um, still has some variety, and so most 90 or more of those seedlings will come without thorns, and so that's variety. And you know it drives certain people, not me; I'm pretty flexible, but it drives certain people crazy that variety and cultivar are used interchangeably.

So, for me, when you're growing a seedling, it is usually neither a variety nor a cultivar, never a cultivar, until you decide to give it a name. Then it's like this is one that should be cultivated, and you name it and, you know, put it out for people to try and grow graft and so forth, but that is always vegetatively produced a cloned cultivar.

What I do is I have been tracking down, I call them, the giants on whose shoulders I stand, on whose shoulders I stand. I've been tracking down their plantings; John Hershey and Fayette Etter and Peter Campbell on and on, and visiting their sites, which are 100 years old, some of them have cultivars that they grafted in the 20s and stuff like that, growing and collecting seed from them because they're growing usually amongst other fantastic plants.

When you're talking about seedling trees that I have, which, and I'm ridiculous, it's almost a mental condition about provenance, like if you see my seedling nurseries; literally, there are thousands of stakes with a tag who the mother tree was, you know where it came from, and you know the day we planted it, and it gets to be a lot.

You know where it came from, and you know the day we planted it, and it gets to be a lot to manage, you know, but that way, I know something's really successful or tremendous, looks tremendous as a baby, I know, oh my, and really hardy, of course, for me, really hardy. Then I can go back and say, well, that is what I have to propagate, and so that's kind of how I kind of organized this farm. It’s mostly of the seedling trees, which I do have hundreds, if not thousands, of different selections organized by their mother tree and from what orchard they came from.

These growers who've been doing the same thing I'm doing, the seedlings of these great cultivars that were grown and collected in orchards where there were other fabulous trees. The chances of those plants being superior are much higher, and that's been proven over the past hundred years. The past hundred years of what I've observed, especially with John Hershey, makes it real clear to me that, yeah, the best way to get improved cultivars, to improve seedlings that then can be turned into cultivars like wow, this is a great one. '

And John Gordon, who you may or may not know about, was another one. He was constantly planting thousands, if not tens of thousands, of seeds in order to get improved selections. And a lot of those lessons come from the dude in California who moved from Mass to California, Luther Burbank (who we’ve discussed regarding beach plums). He would plant 100,000 seeds, select two, and then breed those together and keep going. He was out of his mind as far as seed selection. So that's what I'm trying to do here for cold, hardy fruit and nut trees is put together a lot of seedlings that I can observe and make those choices about. Okay, these are the ones I want to plan out and watch for the next 10, 15, 20 years.

Now hicans, back to that. Hicans, in my observations, are typically ripe about the same time as shagbark, and shagbark is typically right about the same time as shellbark. So shagbark and even shellbark, shellbark in zone five, shagbark in zone four here where I live, just two miles from me, there are some big old shagbarks that someone planted down in town that produce every year. So I have hopes that I can get hicans to fruit. Maybe not the giant ones, you know now, the McCallister's and the James and the ones that are, you know, as big as a lemon, but, um, a lot of them are smaller, and they're shagbark size. So I think a lot of them will will fruit. And, of course, hicans are my favorite hickory nut to eat, the one I love the most.

Andy:

It's hard to turn it down. It's got the best of both worlds, hence why people are doing it.

Buzz:

And they're always thin shelled, easy cracking, come out in halves and quarters easily. You don't need a massive cracker. It's not like opening shellbarks, where they can be brittle, and they still come out well, but you really have to wail on them. So it's just an easy nut to crack and eat.

Andy:

And it's delicious, and my kids, it's their favorite, not by far. So the selection you have, I know on your website you've got, I think, like eight different hicans. Is that what? You're still growing out where you are right now? Or, um, have you kind of whittled it down since you moved?

Buzz:

No, I'm still growing them all. I'm still growing. It's probably more than eight. I mean, it's probably. McAllister, James, Bixby, Cobol, Sweetie Country Club, Clarksville, T92. I'm sure there are five or six more. I don't have them all every year. It's very hard to get hican Seed. You have to go and collect them yourselves. It's impossible to trade, almost impossible to buy or trade. Yeah, there's a bunch more. No, he can't. Etter Hybrid, Burlington Wright, aka Hershey Marquardt. The list is pretty long of all the hicans.

Andy:

Yeah, Now, are there any in particular that you're uniquely excited to see how they play out, or are you still kind of in the "let's see what happens" phase?

Buzz:

So I always I defer to John Gordon. Now, John Gordon was a grower in Buffalo, New York, and you can find his website on the Wayback Machine. It's Nut Trees North. John Gordon wrote, and John was a very active member of the Ontario Society of Ontario Nut Growers. John was a very active member of the Ontario Society of Ontario Nut Growers, which goes by SOM, and Grimo and Doug Campbell. Several other people were very active in the Society of Ontario Nut Growers, and they wrote a book. Actually, John Gordon wrote the book, and it's called Nut Growing Ontario Style. It is a little paperback like this, and it is 97% reference. He writes everything in bullet points. There's no story. It's like bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, and Nut Growing Ontario, all point.

Andy:

All business, huh?

Buzz:

Well, it's organized. It's organized by, you know. The chapters are overview, basics, and then it's black walnut, chestnut, filbert, air layering and stooling, heartnut, Persian walnut, hickory, pecan, et cetera, et cetera. So it's by every genus and what it is. It tells you how to propagate, what the needs are, how to handle the seed, what the highlights are, grafting, and how to plan out. He's got charts from every size of the tree; figure out the butt area. It's X, much butt area of stump per acre. And then he tells you how to cut them out over time, right, because a lot of these trees need to be pushed up. So it's a really interesting book, and it's no-nonsense.

So from a propagator's perspective, I've learned more from this little book, which is, of course, out of print. You can get it online or you could get it online. I've been trying lately. There are no copies available, and they used to be cheap and nothing. None of the good books are cheap anymore, but if anybody's interested in growing nut trees, I learned more about the fundamentals of growing nut trees from this book than any other book I have read.

And so John Gordon talks about seedling selection, and he talks about what to look for in promising seedlings and big in Buffalo, which is 5b, I think, he's still growing in a pretty cold area. So, he talks about the second or third year of looking at seedlings. What you're looking for is large, dark green leaves which show you that the plant is very, very vigorous and has a lot of chlorophyll, so it can push really hard as far as solar collectors are huge Relative vigor, like it grows much more quickly than most of its surrounding neighbors of that same seed lot. And then bud placement.

He discusses where and how the buds should look to predict rapid growth, vigor, and good production in the future. I use his model to select the clear standouts from all these different plants that are much more vigorous, much darker green, and have better bud placement.

So what John Gordon did, which was fascinating, is he would find one of these things after its second or third year, these seedlings that he thought were vigorous, and he would take them and graft them onto another tree, a great big one, and he called that tree his parking lot, and he would put 20, 30, whatever trees that he was evaluating seedlings that were only three years old, on these much larger trees, which would push them into fruiting in a year or two, and then he could get a much quicker evaluation. And that's how he was able to introduce so many heartnuts, hickories, and pecans from his work because he was pushing them using this parking lot method, which has been used by others as well.

So what I'm looking for here, if I'm planting blocks of eight different heat cans, I'm looking for the hardiest, most vigorous, best-looking outliers, and those are the ones that I plant out here for observation and to watch them grow. So that's how that works. Right now, and amongst all the various hicans, I would not say there's anyone that stands out as superior. It's like, oh, that's the one I'm going to plant the most of. None of the hickories have much of that, the only. I will take that back. So Granger throws some amazing seedlings with huge, dark, dark green leaves with lots of vigor. Granger is a shagbark, most likely a pure shagbark. Found by John Hershey in Granger County, Tennessee, not far from Bonnaroo.

Andy:

It's really interesting stuff. Now, I know you do some really intense volume for tree crops. When we last spoke, you talked about having like 50,000 seedlings going, yeah, and you mentioned that you've got some really unique styles for managing your nursery beds. I don't know if you could talk about that a little bit.

Buzz:

Sure, so we'll use the example of persimmons, which is what your 50,000 seedling reference is of. So persimmons is my favorite fruit, and it has always been my favorite fruit. So I grew up in central Pennsylvania or southeast Pennsylvania, the center part of the East Coast, and there were persimmons around, not a lot of cultivars, but a lot of pretty cool plants that we would eat. So I have always loved persimmons, and when I found out there were cultivars of them and then got around to tasting some of the cultivars, you know, I kind of had another meltdown about oh my god, and then tried, planted them by the hundreds of years in grafts and some 4b where I am, and they all died. I couldn't get any of them to survive. Some would survive one winter, sometimes they'd go two, and then they would die down to the top below the graft, and so that was kind of a blow.

Simultaneously with that, I started planting seedlings, also organized by provenance and mother tree, and with the idea that probably embedded in the historic genome of the genetics of the tree is hardiness that is above normal, you know much more. Hardier, so cold tolerance there, and I've heard of some other growers. I started planting them by the thousands, and they would die by the thousands. They would winter die. The cold would kill them to the ground a lot of times, but it wouldn't kill them all the way.

And some of them, you know, would die really bad the first year, and then the second year they would die less bad, and the third year they would die less bad, and so forth. But as those years went by, the number of them that would die back the least were the ones that I would be attracted to and then would collect and line out and out of 35,000 seedlings from all cultivar Virginiana, very few hybrids.

I'm trying a few hybrids. Now I have one plant that has shown zero winter dieback in four winters. That's my baby, you know. I have maybe 30 that are just behind that that don't show much dieback, and I've also identified a couple of different cultivars that seem to have shown much less dieback than normal.

And other than those two, I've probably trialed 40 or 50 cultivars in many hundred, you know, half a pound to a pound, three to 600 plants each, and there's random survivors, survivors, but in two cultivars, one of them being Hess, which there's only one person that has Hess that I know of, and Hess is a John Gordon selection, and that's Donald Compton. He sent me Hess seedlings one year.

And then there's another one in Hershey which is kind of odd, kind of watery and flat and bluish and not very normal, looking for a Virginiana that I believe is a cultivar called Berman, and that one seems to have in general, way more hardiness, but the fruit is not great, it's only okay. It's real watery kind of it's only, it's only. Hess is much better. Hess seems to be like a regular, like an early golden type. So that's, that's those two I'm excited about and then my few others.

Now, having said that I have yet to see any flowers on any of the seedlings I have yet grown. I had high hopes for my four and five-year-olds this past year, but on May 18th, we had 25 degrees all night long over 12 hours, so they were all leafed out. So they all got burned hard, and in their recovery, they neglected to flower, or I was unable to find any flowers in any of the ones I had in any of my hundred or so that I'm keeping good tabs on. But I still think if I've given it a little more, a few more years, I'll have some selections that are fully hardy in my zone 4b, which is 25 below 25F, below almost most years.

Andy:

I'm interested in what the nursery beds actually look like and what makes them unique.

Buzz:

So the nursery beds here, the seed beds that I grow, are modeled after. It's kind of a mix between state nursery styles. I don't know if you've ever seen a picture of the state nursery with the long, long beds and another grower who was really one of my earliest mentors, this guy Gerard Hansen. And Gerard Hansen was in his 70s, I think, Well, 60s probably when he started teaching me. In the 70s, when he taught me a lot. But he was an organic grower of trees in Nottingham, Pennsylvania.

He was one of the Hansen brothers who came from Germany, and the Hanson brothers had a big nursery in King of Prussia, I believe, or Valley Forge somewhere up there in Pennsylvania, Gerard was a black sheep, but he wasn't able to stay in business with them so he went on his own and he was a very, very, very gifted grower and taught me a lot about greenhouse growing with cuttings and greenhouse culture and then taught me grafting of ornamental plants. He was a big, big grafter of dwarf and weeping evergreens, along with many other things. He grew regular nurseries, lined out nursery tree stock for bread and butter money, and then for the few, you know, for um specialty, he would graft all these crazy plants. And so he taught me his bed style, or I observed his bed style. He told me why and how he did it.

The only Hansen Brothers Nursery I could find in PA, likely related to Gerard.

And so the beds I, the beds I make, I till them very, very deep. I usually till them either very hard with a chisel plow before I start on them, or I'll till them with an excavator 24 inches deep. I turn the topsoil, I turn the topsoil under with the subsoil, so I make the bed four feet, roughly four feet four to four and a half feet wide. I till it 24 inches deep. Once it's turned, rub, you know, broken down, I peel the sod off, put that to the side, turn the bed under, pick out all the rocks. I put in six to twelve inches of compost that I make here on the farm, and then I till that all in, and the bed ends up being about four feet wide with a two-foot two to two-and-a-half-foot mulched aisle way on either side.

I plant the rows I see, perpendicular to the long axis, so across the bed, and I put them about the rows, the seed, perpendicular to the long axis, so across the bed, and I put them about the rows about six inches apart and the seeds about somewhere between one to two inches apart. They run. They'll run the whole way solid, except I'll sometimes I'll make a slightly larger space as I switch from mother tree to mother tree, and so they grow up very thick and in a good year when all the seeds are viable.

They're weedy the first year, and we usually end up weeding once. Once a year is all we weed. Oh, and the other thing I do is I prepare the bed a year in advance and I till it multiple times in order to get ahead of the weeds. That brings the weeds out. The weeds germinate, I till again, the weeds germinate again. I'll till again, cover crop in the fall, and in spring, I'll turn that under early and then plant the beds out, and so the weed pressure is low the first year anyway because I've preconditioned that soil to get rid of as much of the weeds as I can.

Usually, there will be certain weeds that will show up, so we usually weed those beds once the first year in July, when the seedlings are small. And so you look across my beds; they're four feet wide and solid. The idea, if I get great germination, is the second year. They all leaf out, and it ends up being closed. Canopy, 18 inches tall and so low weed pressure just from the amount of shade, works like a charm with walnuts, pecans, and chestnut plants with great germination and great vigor. Hickories are so darn slow. It's hard to get them to do that in the first two years, but even in the second year, we usually just might spot weed for really bad perennial weeds throughout the year. But we'll do one wedding in late July year, but we'll do one wedding in late July to clear the deck.

Again I am looking for to me in my experience, dandelion. You know, regular wild dandelion makes the perfect cover crop for an earthy bed. It doesn't compete at all with any of the trees that I've seen. It doesn't get tall enough or thick enough, even when they get big and they only last two years. So they cycle out, and they're loosening the soil up as you go. So I'm really encouraged if I see a solid stand of yellow flowers, um, in the nursery beds. I'm happy because I know I won't have many weedings to do that year because we don't weed them out, we just weed out the stuff that gets tall and rangy, uh, sorrel, um, various sorrels and goldenrods, stuff like that, um.

We don't use any herbicide, pesticide, fungicide, no sides. We're not organic but we follow the practices as best we can, which is like 99.9% of the time. And so all my beds are, you know, to the casual observer appear quite weedy, but I'm I'm always looking at them like are the trees being affected or slowed down by the weeds? And when I can answer no in my head, I'm not worried about the weeds. When I start to worry that the plants are getting overtopped or the weeds are coming up and falling down on top of the trees, that's when we get in there and weed. But I try to make it happen so that we weed as little as possible.

The reason I till those beds so deeply is I harvest with an excavator. That's how I harvest the plants. So we get underneath them and lift them two or three rows at a time, pull them out once they're loose, do the pre-call on them, bundle them, and then keep going down the row like that. And I've set the beds and the paths up so that my excavator fits on the path and can go over the bed. Usually, we'll get one bed started or out easy or, you know, for looking for an opportunity so I could be in the one row over from where I'm actually harvesting. But sometimes, I have to harvest the row right on the row. So basically, we just run on top of the plants, and the plants just bend out of the way, and they're popped out.

For a small operation, it's a super efficient way to grow an awful lot of plants and harvest an awful lot of plants bare root because that bare root window is small. You know you have to get those things out. For me it's after the soil falls out and the snow goes away and before the buds swell, so it's a couple of weeks is all you get to dig all those plants. Yeah, so that and that's, and that is how Gerard Hansen did his beds. He also. The one thing he did that I can't do is he would do this in the forest, and he would thin out the forest, including pulling stumps on three-foot diameter oaks, but leave a skip canopy, like 60, 50, 60 percent shade, but 70 feet up to the start of those things. You know, because they were closed-canopy forests, and then he had his beds in there, he had even lower weed pressure.

And, of course, by having beds that are deeply tilled like that, the root systems that you're seeing out of those beds are very similar to an air pruning bed. There's not a lot of tap rooting, with the exception of hickories. The roots come out easy. They're vigorous and big and they don't get broken, and you're not dealing with hard clay or any of that stuff. They come out super easy. You do have to irrigate a little more because the soil is much more open, but not a lot. You know, it's not like having a pot, having trees and pots, which is a huge amount of work keeping those things watered.

Andy:

Yeah, especially the weather we've had the last few years. I mean, this past year, we had good rain, but man, the last two or three summers have been tough; it's either drought or flood here.

Buzz:

It's either, what's one of the other. This year was the wettest year I've ever seen in my life. We had about 40 inches of rain from June 1st to September sometime—like a year's worth of rain in four months, three or four months. It was terrible, and so I didn't water. I didn't have to water the pots as much, but nobody had a lot of sun because it was always cloudy.

Andy:

Now, I know chestnuts are a big one for you, so I'm interested a little bit about what you're doing for breeding work, because everyone's kind of got their own thing on what they think is the best path forward.

Buzz:

Yeah, so I've just barely started to do breeding work. As far as making handmade crosses, maybe I've been doing that for three years here because I haven't had plants that were big enough to be produced until recently. But I do a lot of selection of trees and trialing of various hybrids from all over the place, but a lot of them are from Connecticut, from the work of Arthur Graves, Dick Jaynes, the other two fellows I can never remember Jones, and Neitermacher, something like that, and then Dr, Sandy, and Anagnostakis, who was breeding hard in the early part of the 2000s, and so there's all kinds of beautiful trees there, of all kinds of crazy hybridization. And also, Connecticut is still quite warm. It's on 6b there, I think. But as far as soil conditions and generally cold temperatures, it's similar to where I am in many ways.

One of the things I have on my farm here is the soil is not great for chestnuts especially. It's too heavy and it's also too alkaline. So here I'm getting a good opportunity to say, okay, well, which chestnuts will survive tighter soil than they like and then sweeter soils than they like? One guy worked for me for the last two years. I have one patch I'm looking at right now out the window, and he would call. He called them my Hardy Swamp chestnut Because it's in a cold pocket. You know, I'd often raise up where I put a chestnut like make a berm so they have a drier crown. But yeah, it's a lot of work.

So I've just been kind of like lining them out and so I've had some incredible survival of certain types of hybrids. So the Chinese are, it seems quite random with them which ones will survive and where. But you start adding creneta, which is Japanese chestnut, into some of these crosses, and I get surprisingly better survival, and they tend to have, you know, more tree form growth anyway timber type, tree form, apical dominance than a lot of the trees which I'm big on. I'm going to leave behind a forest here when I'm, when I'm gone, rather than, you know, orchard, apple, orchard chinese chestnut kind of orchard. So I'm big on the Japanese hybrids, the creneta, and of course, you know, Dr. Sandy's been mixing those up with Colossal and those Anagnostakis and Graves and all those people before her. They were doing Chinese, Japanese, and American crosses all the time, a lot of those crosses because they were looking for blight tolerance and tree form. So I've been planting a lot of those genetics. I think we planted 10,000 chestnut seeds in the last two years.

Now, one of the things that casual growers should know is when you're selecting for something like hardiness, too much clay in the soil and too much water, or too sweet, you're roguing at least half of everything you harvest. So when I harvest a bed of 100, I probably throw away 50, and that's not just with chestnuts, that was, but that's with most things because there's a top half and a bottom half, and with lots of times it's very clear that you know these plants. So the bottom half and we just toss them, I'll give them away, or, you know, throw them in the compost pile and then, from the top half, we um sell the best ones, graft to the. Well, the best ones. I line out here the top five percent, I line out here, and then the next 30%. We sell and or use rootstock for all my grafting work because I find it to be much better to grow your own rootstock when you're grafting plants.

Andy:

Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense. If you've got the resources, how do you retool them a bit to get some use out of them?

Buzz:

Well, you'll find I'm going to just bump in. So buying plants for rootstock. So we're grafting three to 5,000 plants a year here, a lot of them nut trees, and so if you try to buy those in, it is so erratic. Good ones, bad ones, total junk stuff you throw away. It's amazing. So I have learned the hard way that it's much better if you produce all your own rootstock and you have plenty of extra so you can actually use the ones that really suit you. Large, larger calipers, big root systems, and vigorous plants make a much better graft, and fresh, fresh rootstocks, too.

Andy:

When you're going through and winnowing through what you've got for resources, how are you identifying rootstock? And are you going through replanting things and saying I'm going to let this get a little bit? What does that look like?

Buzz:

Yeah, that's a great question, so I'll go through that again a little slower. So let's say we have a bed of 100 plants. We're going to dig all those in one shot, usually in the second or the third year, depending on the genus and the relative vigor of the plant. As it grows right. Some genus grow much faster than others, so they're all coming out in the second, the slower ones come out in the third, and so when I take those 100 plants out, 50 of them are the bottom half.

This is a rough number, but usually, you can see the dividing line between the plants that look good to great and the plants that look fair to poor, so I would usually sort out those fair to poor ones and discard them because the investment in trying to take them forward it's not worth it because they don't have enough vigor on their own. They've all been given an equal shot in that bed, and certain ones just prevail. They just grow better. The root systems form better. The nut place. The nut was stronger. There was. They just grow better. The root systems form better. The nut place. The nut was stronger. There were more resources in that nut. Whatever the reason might be.

So we tossed the bottom 50. In the top 50, we have plants to sell, plants for rootstock, and plants to line out here for me to further line out. It's like five or 10%. That's all I'm going to do. I'm just looking for those top few seedlings that we talked about that have that John Gordon criterion of being the best ones, and those are the ones we put out in nursery rows here, and then that might be five or 10%. So I'll take, you know, five or 10 of those hundred plants, keep them to plant out in the ground usually, and the other ones are going to be sold or go to rootstock.

Rootstock selection is a different kind than for sale, actually, because, with rootstock selection, I want a really strong, really vigorous root system, but it can't be too big. I have a certain pot size, which is three and a half by three and a half by nine so that rootstock has to fit in that pot. So that's how we sort rootstocks, like what are the best ones that will fit in the pot, the ones that are better than that? They all get sold out to the public because I'm trying to get the largest plant I can to fit in that pot.

But I don't want to cut them and hack them. Then you're just destroying the root system. It's just no fun to do that. They're not going to bounce back, they're not going to perform as a grafted, as a rootstock, and so that's what we do. So that's how we make that cut. That's how I kind of figure out, like we'll go through an inventory a bed of a hundred plants oh, there's a hundred of this one. Okay, I got 50. I'm going to throw away 10. For me, I need 20 rootstocks. That means I have 20 for sale. That's how we, that's how that works out.

Andy:

When you're identifying rootstock, I'm assuming you're using that for selections from other beds. So you've got your 100 trees 50 are tossed, 20 are going to sale, 20 are, 10 are for, you know, improved genetics, 20 are for rootstock. That rootstock isn't getting applied to what you just harvested for your improved lines. That's going to either cuttings from other trees, things like that, exactly those rootstock plants, and the way so it's also successive is where I'm getting at.

Buzz:

The rootstock plants and the ones for sale. They go into a cooler. We have a large cooler. We put all the bare root plants that we're going to keep and sell or plant, and they're in. They're held at 35 degrees and 34 degrees until we're ready to process them and the rootstock ones. So we'll ship out all the orders. They all go out. When the weather's conducive and I decide to line out a bed here, we'll line the ones that went for me out and then the rootstocks go.

This is an interesting thing to understand. We will graft onto them that same year; we take them from the cellar, put them in the greenhouse where I have the heat on at 75 or 80, and then push those plants, push them into leafing. They start budding out, and they start leafing, and they are typically still bare root, and they're either going to be in buckets of water or they're in buckets of wood chips, well-rotted wood chips, and once they start to leaf out that's when we hack the top off graft them and then, with most nut trees, the minute we graft them or the soon after they're grafting, we pot them up, and those plants stay in the greenhouse and they heal and start to leaf out and they'll be in the greenhouse for about a month, maybe longer if we have time and space, maybe all summer if we have a summer like this.

We'll barely be able to fit ourselves in there because there are so many grafts that we're trying to push along. But most of that stuff will get used in the current year for the rootstocks we need for this year. The stuff we're going to plant out for ourselves.

There are two ways that can get lined out. They can go out in a nursery row where they're planted on two to four-foot centers for further observation, where they can go back into another bed planted maybe five or six across the bed that same shape bed, where they might be for two more years so I can observe them more closely. Persimmons usually I usually get persimmons for four to about four feet before we put them out in the wilds of my back 40 to fight it out with the deer and the weeds, and they're back there.

Andy:

Are they getting hit by deer persimmons?

Buzz:

I’m always thinking, I'm gonna get a deer fence, I'm gonna get a deer fence. I'm not big on, you know, tree tubes work well, but it's a lot of maintenance, and I'm not a big fan. I got enough plastic in my life so I tend to just plant like an awful lot. And then I plant a lot of prunus and malice for the deer to eat like catch crops almost. I give them something to do, right? And I also plant a lot of the nursery rows that I'm improving far to the back because I'm cascading down my field. I plant that out in the deer plot. I plant the cover crop in the fall as deer plot food. So the deer are there hauling through that eating the plot whatever's growing in the plot turnips and radishes and other grasses they like all winter. So they're fooling with that a lot and destroying my apples and cherries that I've planted after, my bush cherries and apples, you know, yeah, and my persimmons.

Andy:

I've never had them get hit by deer, but I've heard some people say they've had that problem. The leaves are so leathery that I have a hard time seeing them. Yeah, it's not the leaves, so much for me here.

Buzz:

The deer hammer my stuff, my chestnuts and persimmon. They hammer, and they go for the buds in the winter. Yeah, they're looking. They chew the bark and the buds. They pound them. Yeah, apple, apple is their first choice, man. Apple and cherry are like deer crack, so that's the first choice. They'll pound all of them first, and if they run out of that, then they'll start in on they'll also do hickory. Yeah, they leave. They leave black walnuts alone and chestnuts. Not too bad, depends on how hungry they are, what they have to chew, on how deep the snow is up here.

Andy:

You're also doing some work with oak trees and bur oaks, which I'm a big fan of. We just did a bur oak competition. The biggest one I've got is the acorns are 1.6 ounces, each one 1.6 ounces, 650 grams or something.

Buzz:

That's monstrous.

Andy:

Yeah, it's about 40% bigger than the next one without a cap. I've got some. They're about 10 feet away from me if you want to see them.

Buzz:

Yeah, go get them, man. Yeah, hold on one second, hang on.

Andy:

Here we go; look at these things.

Buzz:

Yeah, that's a monster man. You know I collect these, too, right? I have sources, and that's the biggest I've ever seen, I think.

I don't know if you know who Mike Stringfield is, he has an unbelievable one. And then Dale Hendricks. You probably know Dale. Dale, yeah, Dale's one of his woods. We call it Dale's Giant. It's almost that big; it's just one size down. And then Hershey has a couple of big ones. And then, do you know who Lucky Pittman is?

Andy:

I know the name.

Buzz:

Lucky has a collection of grafted oaks. He's been collecting them for 30 years. So he's got a great selection from Don Cobb and from Daniel Seneca. He's got this one Burr by English. It's monstrous, man; I mean, just a huge amount of nuts off that tree. And then Hershey's got the really sweet ones, which I think now the sweetest of his might actually be Ashworth, which is a white hybrid, small, small but it's sweet. You can eat them like chestnuts; they're just, you can just eat them. And that was found by Fred Ashworth and grown a lot by Bill McKinley.

Andy:

Is that the one he found on the side of the road?

Buzz:

That's the one he found on the side of the road.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, I think Ken Asmus has some of those too, probably yeah.

Buzz:

Yeah, I think.

Andy:

Ken loves oaks, too. We chatted quite a bit about them, yeah, so you've got a few selections. Is there anything in particular that you think you're particularly excited about or interested in seeing how it handles your nice cold weather?

Buzz:

It's. I have probably 30 or 40 selections of oaks grafted two winters, three winters, and four winters in, so like Dale's Giant, which is the next size down from the one you have there in Pennsylvania. Now, here, they don't get that big.

Andy:

Yeah, I'll be really interested in the growing season in terms of warm weather.

Buzz:

Yeah, it's funny, I don't see any of the oaks the ones that are typically anywhere on the East Coast not hardy. Here they all grow. It's like, how big is the acorn, and how long will it take? I get those acorns from Lucky, this Burr from English. Last couple of years, I have had a lot of them started. You know, there's no problem, they're gonna. I know they're gonna be hardy, and they were grown, they were bred in Ithaca, I think, New York, but just will they get quite that big?

Grafted oaks, they'll fruit the first year you graft them. It's crazy to see the first year, and sometimes the second year, they'll fruit. Even you think, oh, that's just because there are flower buds on your grafting stock or, you know, on your sign. But no, in the second year, there'll be even more. And like Dale, these Dale's giants, you know they're putting acorns on the second and third year. So I get acorns on them every year, but they just don't. You know they were getting cold, and they're still not pushing out of the cap like they did. So they don't get that size. They're probably two thirds, yeah, and that's probably going to be the case with all of them in zone 4b, they're just not going to get as big. So the small ones, you know, that are a dime, dime to nickel size, that are sweet like Ashworth.

Andy:

He found that one with 3b, so that really, yeah, well, that makes sense, given where he was, yes, well, you know, a pot, stand right, whatever that sound is up there.

Buzz:

He found it somewhere up there, and so it's hard as nails. Um, and Hershey and Ashworth were in communication, so now that I have them both grafted here and can observe them, I'm like, oh, these are the same plants because the Hershey's have no tags. There's not a plant with a tag on it.

Andy:

But it makes sense once you think about it.

Buzz:

Yeah, they'd be exchanging germplasm for sure. And it is sweet. I can tell you that one which I have tagged as CDS number one, which stands for a cul-de-sac, the first one in the cul-de-sac, and it is the deer's choice. It is literally they'll go to that before persimmon. You cannot get seed off that thing unless you're there when they fall because they're gone in the morning, and the deer, I don't know if you noticed, the deer split the acorns in their mouth and spit the shell out.

Andy:

No, I didn't. I've never seen a deer eat an acorn.

Buzz:

They eat these like they love them. Well, deer love chestnuts. Crazy over chestnuts. It's the same thing. They spit the shells out. And the same thing with persimmons At Hershey's. When the chestnuts, when the persimmons have dropped insanely, there's a couple there that drop, like in one week, everyone drops; the deer spit the seed out. They eat the persimmon and spit the seeds out. They don't chew them up. The ground is littered with, like you know, a solid quarter-inch deck of persimmon seed. It's wild to see.

Andy:

Yeah, that's insane.

Buzz:

Yeah, you start looking at these trees, and then the interaction with the different animals that are involved is like, wow, who knew the deer would spit shit out?

All you have is empty hulls. And it tricks you because they'll split them enough so that it's still half of this. It looks like it's still a whole seed.

Andy:

For folks that want to uh see what you're doing. Do you have uh social media or website, anything like that you can send them to?

Buzz:

I have my website. It's mostly there is a gallery there, and if you click on the photos in the gallery, it'll pop up with a text. But a lot of I think a lot of people don't know that, so just scrolling through the photos and it's just, you have no idea what they are. If you click on the photo, the text will come up. It tells you what it is and it's kind of the highlights of the things I've collected over the past four or five years. And then on my Facebook page, I'm trying to understand how Instagram works, and frankly, it's like like it's still mysterious to me.

I have Facebook dialed in. I'm old, you know facebook's for old people, as they say. So, my personal page is Buzz Ferver. It kind of keeps you up with what I'm doing. Come with the crazy stuff that you might want to see. I have A Perfect Circle farm page because, apparently, you can't get any integration with Instagram without, you know, that kind of a Facebook page. So I have have that. I don't go; I don't even go to it. It's just I'm too busy with just my life, growing stuff.

I need somebody who just wants to do social media for me, like a volunteer. You know, just who works for seed nuts or something? There's at least someone who could tell me how Instagram works. I have young friends that are like flower farmers and nut farmers, and their Instagram shit is spectacular. I'm like, how do they do this? What is it? What is all this? You know, how do you get a text on there and little videos and stuff right over my head?

Andy:

Yeah, you've got a lot of really cool plants. People need to see them. People need to be aware that they can buy them. Plants people need to see them. People need to be aware that they can buy them. The website's perfect circle dot farm.

Buzz:

There's a Buzz Ferver on Facebook, and it's public. Anyone can go there, comment, and do whatever. You can try to friend me, but I think I have 5,000 friends already, so it might not work.

Andy:

Yeah, awesome. Well, Buzz, this has been really interesting. I'm definitely going to want to follow up with you about a whole bunch of other stuff we didn't even get to talk about today: permanent agriculture history, tree crops history, and crops history. There's a lot of stuff to unpack, and there's only so much time we can spend on it. Exactly.

Buzz:

Well, if you wanted me to come back at some point and talk about the historical business I've made, what I've seen, what I've learned from those, that kind of stuff, I'd love that.

To hear this interview, tune into episode 189 of the Poor Proles Almanac.