This Micro Tree Nursery Is Epic! Big Profits, Tiny Space Market Gardening BUT WITH TREES!

Okay everyone, by now we all know the cat is out of the bag. In market gardening you can make really good money farming on small acreage. But how about nursery? How about trees? Is that possible? Is that realistic? Can we imagine a micro nursery that could make enough money to earn you a living? The answer is yes and that's what we're visiting today. It's very tight, very small and I couldn't expand more. So I had to put everything I had as close as possible so I could fit all my trees. You don't have an excavator, you don't have a big crew, you don't have a really expensive setup. Here on those three lines I have a thousand five hundred trees. Wow this is amazing. And you're planting new trees every year and the bed's going to be cleared and planted anew. So it's like market gardening but for trees. Yeah that's it. It's a lot of fun. I love what I'm doing and I love propagation so I'm having a great time here. Okay we're in Frelisburg, Quebec, not too far from the old mill and I'm with Mathieu from Pépignage Barcage. Hey what's up? Yes I'm happy to be here. So I first met you, was it last year or the year prior? I think last year. Yeah we did canopy and we came and visited here and I came back from my visit to your place and I was like oh my god this is it. Like I had never seen what you're doing before and I came back so inspired because like okay this is exactly what's possible. You are a nursery. Yeah a fir tree and nut tree nursery. Yeah and you are doing it on what half an acre? A bit smaller than that I would say a quarter of an acre. And you've been doing this for how long? This year it's my fourth growing season. Okay and what makes this really different from regular nursery work or regular nurseries that we would meet elsewhere? I think first of all it's all the plants but most of the plants are in the ground so it's a bare root nursery. Yeah. And I've used also market gardening techniques so I have raised beds a very dense production some rotation also and I have also a little potted plants area and I use air pruning beds so I integrated a lot of different techniques propagation techniques to create this nursery. So I have a lot of questions and but I just want the readers the viewers to kind of see the space like it's this is a really micro nursery this is a micro quite small concept so why don't you take us and and show us around? Yeah sure let's go. So here's my nursery so as you can see everything is really dense like I plant everything between five and seven inches apart and seven to ten inches on the on the row on the row and I use the the spacing of market gardening so the the beds are 30 inch wide yeah and the length is it really depends. So what's growing here? It's willows. Okay. Willows and also elderberries. Okay both it's like they're you're growing two crops on the same bed. As my I don't have a lot of space and I'm a micro nursery I don't want to have like hundreds of like hundreds of willows hundreds of of elderberry I want to have like maybe 10 20 of each so I'm growing many crops on the same bed. Okay and I have beds where it's only apple trees because that's one of the good the good seller so I have maybe a thousand five hundred apple trees so I can put them all in the same beds but first for berry bushes or or willows it's on the same bed there is different crops. Okay so if I take the camera and I swing it across the board so what people see is how many more or less how many beds you have here? Here in this section it's six beds. Yeah and if with what over there what we're over there it's approximately two thousand square feet of beds. Two thousand square feet of bed? With a thousand more that I can have that I can create so I have a tarp over there. Yeah no it's pretty it's really beautiful. And everything's white right now because I've in the nursery trade an insect there's an insect that can make a lot of damage it's the potato leafhopper. Okay. So they come in June early June they overwinter in the US they come with the wind and then when they feed on the plants they inject like something that will stop that will stun the growth of your tree so it's really important to be careful with that and a way to protect your trees from this insect is to yeah nice this year I'm trying that until now it works well I still have to use a pesticide because it's a very like this insect is can cause a lot of damages. Yeah okay well show us more trees and just so you know I don't know much about green like so I like I'm I'm you really need to explain the basics to me because I'm not really familiar. Yeah sure like this one it's the it's the one that they use for ramel wood chip and it's very sensitive to the insect I was talking about to the potato leaf. So that's another willow? Yeah it's willows willows I have maybe 10 different willows different colors different size different uses like this one is mainly for like visual it's more for the visual effect like to cover like to protect your house from the road from the noise. If we jump bad? Yeah so those ones are pink champagne currant so they are little little fruits they're quite acidic a bit sweet a bit tart and they're very good and people really like to to find them on the market like it's one of the biggest seller at the market people come and they're like oh wow I used to have that at my grandparents I used to pick berries with them and they kind of disappeared in the last year. Okay. But there is a big comeback so I don't know if you know them they are small red like the most commons are red yeah red currant and they're delicious I harvested them all so I cannot show you. So the viewers and myself seeing this like I imagine that now it's in the field yeah the goal is to root it out put it in a container and then bring it to market to sell it well how does that work? No so it's a one year cutting it's still actively growing. Okay. So you see that's the the cutting of last year. Okay. I usually propagate them with a summer semi hardwood cutting so it's a one year cutting that I will uproot and sell in autumn through the platform so people will come and pick it up at the farm or I ship it to them they can also order in spring and then if I am not able to sell all of those through my wet site I'm gonna put them in a pot and bring them to farmer's market. Okay but the that tree stays in the ground and it from spring to autumn yeah and then and then what happens? Then I uproot it okay and put it in cold storage sell it. Okay so every yeah well like I'm saying I don't know anything yeah so every every spring you need to plant a new garden a forest garden. Yeah I could leave them for two years but here in Quebec there is a lot of rodents like we have voles we have rabbits we also have deers yeah and I try to overwinter them straight in the field and also we have like a lot of snow we have like ice storm and they don't overwinter well in. Okay so it's favorable to just take them out and then put them in storage? I think if you're in the US or in different areas you could grow them for two years in the same bed and also as I'm doing everything with a shovel yeah no tractor yeah it's but it's easier to uproot them when the root system is a bit smaller and I could sell them as two years old plant but it's more work and I don't know if it's worth it for a small scale nursery. So I don't want to put words into your mouth but I will. Let's go. Like you don't have an excavator you don't have a big crew you don't have a really expensive setup no and and that's the reason why you make money. It's true I don't have any like big infrastructure or expensive equipment like I plant I'm going to show you later my my planting tool and I use like mostly hand tools and I have a small greenhouse that's a carport that I converted to a greenhouse and I'm alone like most of the job is done by myself and the only like in spring I have my parents and some friends that come for a weekend or two and they help me just to organize the farm for the the season but all the planting I do it by myself and also another big big activity that needs a lot of hands it's uprooting all the plants usually we do it in a weekend with my parents my wife and some friends. Hey Matthew just before we go to the fruit trees I see this also oh yeah oh you're touching it so this is for deer this is yeah it's a deer fence because here there's a lot of deer activity it's called a 3d electric fence so they are from the outside so they come here they touch this they see there's more wires they get an electric shock and as they have poor vision they don't really want to jump over like it's not a hundred percent uh deer proof but here with big deer activity it's been working it's been working yeah and it's probably a lot less expensive than putting these uh high maybe this whole setup for a quarter of an acre with a like a electrifier on a battery it's 500 bucks nice still as it's not a hundred percent deer proof there is still a little stress of like like the first year I started the nursery the deer came there's a lot of stress deer can eat the whole yeah deer came the first year mid-season mid-may and ate like 90 percent of my trees okay so you you learned from that I learned the hard way the first year was a lot of mistakes and uh good this is year four it's year four yeah yeah great but it's still like it's nursery 2.0 but in my nursery 3.0 I'll invest in a eight feet eight feet fence yeah but to start and to just to get going like yeah yeah this works and there is deers like there is an apple tree maybe 20 feet away that's been eaten like at least twice since the beginning of the summer the deers they come in the nursery during the winter because the electric fence doesn't work and they eat my cover crop so the deers know about this place yeah and they never came back so for now it works okay friends jumping in here quickly just to let you know that we're currently exploring at the institute the idea of creating an online course for micro tree nursery so if you're interested in this kind of information if you think you would get value from it and that you'd like to explore this topic with us click on the link below to leave us your email okay that's it back to the show now the goal of this place is to produce my propagation material so I'll use the scion wood to graft my apple trees I have pear trees plum trees so I also I keep some fruit so I can taste the fruits because I have a collection of maybe 100 100 apple trees 20 pear trees 20 plum trees I didn't have the time to taste them all so I plant them I leave a couple fruits so I can try them and then I use the scion wood what's what's what scion wood how does that work so it's a year's growth so you cut it like you cut it somewhere it depends what you want to do with it if you do uh summer summer grafting budding you would just use one bud so you will take this bud and then graft it on your rootstock okay but what I do is the the winter winter bench grafting so I use another technique where you use two buds or three buds I usually use two buds so I would just harvest my scion wood yeah and then cut three buds then make the make the cut make the same cut on my rootstock grab them and then I plant them for a year so but now it's in not now but in August it's going to be the time to here in Quebec to start the summer grafting but I don't do that because in order to do summer grafting you have to plant your rootstock a year in advance and then graft and then grow it for another year and as I uproot everything at the end of the season I decided to use another technique and more comfortable to do bench grafting like you're inside during the winter it's you have more time you have more time you don't have to bend it's I don't know it's just easier and for my setup it works well everything was planted so densely because that's the goal yeah it's the goal because I don't want to use a lot of space and I don't want the trees to become like nature I will keep them small by pruning them and harvesting the scion wood and also it's when I arrived here in April three years ago that's the only space I had like you'll see from a drone view it's very tight very small and I couldn't expand more so I had to put everything I had like as close as possible so I could fit all my trees there and it works well for a nursery setup as I said you will try to keep your your plants small and also for cuttings for for the berry bushes you want them you want to keep them like juvenile so you want to cut them every year to have like a big growth so you can use cuttings and you want like young wood to make the cuttings you want the year's growth fresh okay so we move down to these guys there these these are smaller these these aren't for rootstock they're so that's my new collection so those are the there's like maybe a hundred apple on this row and they are grafted on b9 it's a dwarfing rootstock and I'll use them as my personal collection to harvest the scion wood and also to taste all the fruits as I said I didn't have like it's very hard to find a hundred different apples in the shop so if I want to taste a black oxford or if I want to taste any kind of apple I have to usually either buy the apple tree from another nursery or buy scion wood graft it and then grow it and taste the fruit so and also I like this aspect of the nursery that you call it you're you're a collector yeah so now there's three three rows per 30 bed these these are these are the ones that you'll uproot and sell in next year yeah those will all be uprooted and uh they will go on my on my catalog so I have uh here on those three lines I have a thousand five hundred trees okay a thousand five hundred trees how much per tree it's really it's going to depend on the size my first price is thirty eight dollars so 40 would be five thousand dollars right here for at forty dollars uh it's gonna be maybe fifty thousand like on this three rows that was missing a zero that's amazing and trees that size it's more 48 dollars that's amazing and it's not like I try to to have the price that other nursery have like I'm not more expensive or like I try to accommodate the price yeah you you're part of the good guys yeah it's not it's just that the cost of production also that I don't have a lot of expensive tools expensive infrastructure like my cost of cost of production is quite low yeah so I have a good margin on each of them so I don't need to sell them more than I sell them now yeah yes because you can make more money but that's another topic he's just a good guy this guy he's gold okay he's hard of gold and he has a lot of talent and a lot of knowledge it's amazing like that's why Matthew when I came here Matthew when I came here I was like so blown away because I see the production and it's so tight and it's so there and and because I've been doing this all my life for me I see dollar signs everywhere because that's just how I am plants yeah you see beautiful plants I see both yeah but it's amazing it's amazing okay so we're we're moving on so these are the same these are these are apples one year old apple yeah two year old apples or uh one year old depends yeah also mixed all the like that's one year old yeah and those are there is some one year old and some two year olds this was too wet to work so I just keep it as a prairie and it's a good it's a good wildlife area so there's a lot of pollinator so I even though I don't have a lot of space like just I like also to have wilder areas but over there we can yeah black tarp yeah black that's where you're preparing your next field yeah that's gonna be my next field because I as you said recently on one of your videos uh cover crop are really important it's really I really see it when I do a cover crop and then I plant in the cover crop like the plants they grow really better after because because remind remind ourselves again this is like an annual market garden you're planting new trees every year yeah and it's the bed's going to be cleared and planted anew so it's like market gardening but for trees yeah that's it it's uh so it's the same like when I'm not planting trees I either plant a cover crop or next time next year I'm gonna grow vegetable on one bed that I don't use for for trees just for myself yeah for fun but I either grow a cover crop or just cover it for for the season like like you can see here I don't want my beds just to be bare it's a lot less work than a market garden because you plant once and you harvest once yeah on the same bed usually with with vegetables you plant and then you harvest a lot during the season here when the planting is done the season gets a lot quieter do you think like a market gardener like me could be planting some of these trees also in part of his rotation and have for sure it could be in your in your rotation instead of having cover crop you could have trees or shrubs and then uproot them sell them and a lot of farmer farmers market they'll really have like a plant sale in spring you could just add that to your plant sale or bring them to the farmer's market because people are really excited to see uh to see my plants at the farmer's market they come and they're like wow I didn't expect to see to see plants and they end up buying like shrubs or trees and I don't know it's it's a good feeling to see people very surprised to see you there and being very happy to see like the elder berries the currants that they used to eat at their grandparents place golden russet apple I try to have like a bit of everything at the farmer's market so everybody will find their their pleasure amazing so in the middle of my nursery I also have this uh this landscaping for biodiversity so I have planted a lot of native plants I also have used plants that uh I want to try the fruits so like what's what's here so that's wild mint that's a chum so it's a hybrid of cherry and plum that's a yarrow this is I don't remember the name in English but this is a veronique there's a lot of different plants this and a type of asclepias or butterfly weed I don't know in English it's just beautiful I just I also like to have a beautiful work environment and I love flowers and it's just great just to be able to walk here and see all the insects on the flower or they're just so pretty for me it's important to have a space a workspace that I I'm I feel comfortable in and I find it pretty here the first part that you see those big wooden boxes are air pruning beds so the way they work is that I don't know if you can see but under it there is a an airflow and there's like a grillage so there's a wire mesh so when the tap root of the plant is going to reach this air mass it will gently prune air prune and instead of having like a big tap root they will have a more ramified root system so they will transplant easier and also in each of the box I have between 50 and 150 plants in a two by three feet box so they are very densely planted it's way easier you don't have to uproot a two feet long tap roots you can just uproot a one 10 10 inch tap root so and the root system is going to be well developed and as it's air prune it's not like you're cutting it is it will regrow the next year and what we're seeing there are the trees that you're bringing to market yeah those trees I've potted them in spring and I am being I sell them at farmer's market so usually I do between five and ten farmer's market during the spring and then four or five in autumn so those one will go I will sell them at the farmer's market in autumn or if I'm not able to sell them all I'll just overwinter them there I'll just cover them with wood chips and sell them in next spring wow this is amazing so everything's in it's in crates that you can move like this one in this there is like nine nine plants that I sell twenty dollars each and they come in pots like this so they're tall pots instead of large and wide and they are square also that's that's the beauty of it so in this crate I have 180 dollars of plants so that's it's it's and it's really easy like just you take your crate you pack your truck you take it you put it on the table it's so easy like it before it was a lot of more a lot more work but with this technique in milk crates and with tall pots like you save a lot of effort and a lot of so what I guess what we're seeing Mathieu here is like I don't want to say the end result but it's like like if we were together in in the spring or in the winter when you're grafting yeah then it would be more more technical yeah more more like how to do the graft and how to connect the plants and and there's a lot of that I guess there's a lot of techniques that you have to learn in order to make good quality plants and also like each plant has a better technique to to propagate so you have to learn the technique and it's it's not hard like the grafting is not hard it's just you have to be precise yeah you have to have the good timing good quality uh uh sign wood or cuttings cuttings it's quite easy but still there is a lot of little things that you have to to be very that you have to to know your things because with summer cutting if it's too dry or too wet you might lose your production well I think we'll leave it at this I have to say like I'm like really really impressed like this is the third time that I visit and every time like we were here was it like it was more in the spring things were in June yeah it wasn't as so established really feels wonderful it looks nice this is amazing it's great it's a lot of fun like I I love what I'm doing and I love propagation so I'm having a great time here well thank you for sharing it man it's nice and if people want to learn more they can check out your website and check out what you're doing but this is cool and I wish we could do more together and perhaps you could show us how to do this but like for me like I see the opportunity here I'm like wow this is exciting this is very exciting yep I have the chance to visit so many projects in the last 10 15 years but this one ranks right up there and amazingly it's right around the corner from where I live it's amazing if you guys want to learn more about this you can check out this video and that video write us a comment I hope you guys are digging this I am I'll see you next time JM out