Yes, we have plants for 2012

We ARE currently taking orders for 2012 shipment of plants; as a rule we will take orders up to one year in advance of first desired ship date.

We expect more bare-root dormant tubeling hazel and chestnut material than usual this year, and possibly some hickory-pecan as well.

We also have excellent availability for nearly all classes of standard tubelings, except for some select and XL hazels which may be sold out, depending on how the early growing season goes here.

We will be updating our pricing within the next month, BUT YOU CAN LOCK IN TODAY'S PRICES BY PLACING YOUR ORDER NOW!

Along with the pricing update will come some new plant types, including the first-available-anywhere MACHINE PICKED seed. Highly experimental, of course.

Since our plant catalog threatens to become even more complex, we may also add a "just send me some hazel plants" option.

Hopefully I will be able to put some very basic updates on the main website as well.

Soon to come: an official announcement for this year's Short Course, to be held March 30-April 1 with farm tour on April 2.

Announcing: Badgersett Research Farm 20th Annual Field Day

(click on photo for bigger views)

Badgersett Research Farm 20th Annual Field Day:

Saturday, August 20th

If you want to learn about growing hazelnuts in the Midwest; it makes sense to go and see where it's been done the longest. That would be us, we're at 32 years, and counting. No other grower or researcher has production rows like ours.

We're making a concerted effort to expand our Field Day event this year; we're inviting quite a few other folks to bring what they have to show and sell, and set up booths in the chestnut rows, where we can guarantee good shade. Stay tuned to this blog, where we'll be announcing the specifics as we have them. We're inviting hazel growers, graziers, wool spinners, wood carvers- anyone who makes a living, or wants to, from sustainable farming and integrated woody crops. And our Amish neighbors will be here, of course.

Plus- in a change from the past few years, we WILL have plants available for sale this Field Day; hazel, chestnut, and hickory-pecan tubelings will be available for purchase. (In "moderate" numbers... we probably couldn't sell you 5,000 plants right then, for example.)

The major guided tours will start at 10 AM, and will run throughout the day until 4 PM. Lots of folks wind up staying and talking until 5:30 and 6.

This year's Field Day will have 4 special focus aspects:

1: On-Farm Hazel Cloning.

Dr. Sue Wiegrefe, Badgersett Research Associate, will be running tours to see both our new field plantings of our cloned hazels, and "division parent clones" in the greenhouse. We are now outplanting divisions of some 20 different clonal hazels; from several varying processes, including direct in-field divisions.

NOTE: At these tours, we will be making public the division processes we have up to now kept proprietary.

Dr. Wiegrefe has taken our years of work on the division process, and brought the techniques ahead to a state of success where it is now time to publish so other researchers can add to it. Following the Field Day, we will be publishing the divisions research details online, as part of our peer-reviewed Badgersett Research Bulletins series.

2: Integrating Animals In Woody Crops.

Tours will look at our "chicken/guinea tractors", sheep, and horses. All of these animals contribute to grass/weed control in our crops; and all can produce farm income. We're in the very early phases of learning how to manage them profitably; but any hazel grower with more than a few years of growing knows by now that grass control is critical to any hope of a profitable hazel crop. Simple machine mowing, in the long run, will not be a competitive practice.

3: The Sins Of Not Fertilizing.

Hazels, and all woody crops, have highly complex responses to fertilizer. Fertilizer applied in the current year will have measurable, and visible, affects at least 4 years down the road. Since our goal from the outset has been agricultural style food production, all Badgersett hazels have been selected for production when supported by additional fertilizer. Leaving them unfertilized will have the same effect as if you put your herd of registered Holstein cows out to graze on poor pasture, with no feed. They will produce milk until they get sick; and you will be making no money next year. Various efforts to grow and select hazels that "can produce without fertilizer" will result in selecting for "wild-type" genetics. Bison may survive on poor range- but they won't be producing big dairy crops - or meat - for you.

Ultimately, all concepts of avoiding fertilizing are fantasy, by very simple reference to the science of physics. If you are harvesting x tons of food/acre; you are necessarily removing x amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and minors. That's a fact. If the productivity of the land is to be maintained; nutrients removed must be replaced. There is no escaping that law. The bigger the crop you are removing; the more nutrients must be replaced.

Tours will show multiple aspects of fertilized and unfertilized hazels (of course we maintain unfertilized control plants; this year they are exceptionally educational.)

4. Off-Grid Earth Sheltered Greenhouse; 18 years of Operation.

Interest in alternative energy continues to grow. Our earth sheltered, solar heated, and photo-voltaic powered greenhouse is thought to be the oldest such business in Minnesota. Tours will focus on the energy dynamics of the building, and the interplay with the needs of the greenhouse crops we grow.

We'll be posting details here on the blog continuously, as we develop them. Check back often, and plan on coming!

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Notice: If you would like to have a booth for our Field Day; please email us as soon as possible, at info@badgersett.com with your details. For this first year, there will be no charge for space. If you want to bring animals, to show or sell, please let us know, and we'll try to be sure appropriate space is arranged.

Notice: Harvest Volunteers - are going to be needed more than ever. While we're trying very hard to arrange some machine harvest this year, there are still many bushes that must be harvested by hand, in order to maintain the identity of seed, and to keep research data secure. We can't emphasize the importance of this enough. For those who help out, we do provide hourly pay in the form of credit that can be used to buy tubelings in future years- a great way to learn, and earn plants. If you think you can help, please email us at info@badgersett.com and let us know what dates you may be available. Any dates from Aug 15 to Sept 20 may be helpful.

We have plants!

In this picture you can see some of the over 20,000 plants we have started in the main, solar-heated greenhouse (starting on February 2; this picture taken Feb. 28). Each of those tags is in one frame = 98 plants! This is more than we produced all last year, but we are already sold out of some classes. Below is a copy of the email I just sent out to our catalog list; send an email to orders@badgersett.com if you didn't get that email, and want to be on the list.

These availability numbers are of course estimates, because of variability in seed germination, the growing season, and customers' cancellation or postponement of outstanding orders. If you want plants that are "sold out", you can still send in your order to save your spot in line for when they do become available, and if you specify "ship when ready" for a ship date, we may be able to get you plants earlier than we expected. As always, your order is more likely to be filled if you specify that you WILL take substitutions.

PLEASE NOTE: We have reduced our minimum order to $50, but this has not yet been changed on the website.

REGARDING EXPERIMENTAL HAZELS: These are rated "Experimental" because they either have a teeny bit of Eastern Filbert Blight on them, or we don't have enough years of crop records in the database. A substantial number of these plants will end up being upgraded to "Guaranteed" as we process the backlog of data from the past several harvests. In long-term planting planning, we would be very comfortable planting 50% Experimental. Higher percentage experimental at higher densities will have marginally higher initial costs, but are likely to produce a substantially better final stand.

HAZELS:
http://www.badgersett.com/plants/orderhazels.html
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BARE ROOT: Sold out except for:
Medium/Experimental Medium: about 100 available
Medium-Nut Wildlife/ Experimental MNW: about 100 available
Wildlife/ Wildlife-Select: about 30 available

STANDARD:
Select parents definitely sold out through 2011, and we may be reaching "sold out" for 2012 shipment.
All others sold out until 2012, except for standard tubelings of the following classes:

Guaranteed Wildlife and Wildlife-Select: Limited; may be sold out.
Experimental Medium-Nut Wildlife: Thousands available.
Experimental Medium: Thousands available.
Experimental Large: Thousands available.
Experimental Extra-Large: Limited, may be sold out.

Chestnuts:
http://www.badgersett.com/plants/orderchestnuts.html
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BARE ROOT:
All-Purpose: about 100 available
Nut type: about 300 available
Tree type: sold out

STANDARD:
All-Purpose: Thousands available.
Nut type: Thousands available.
Tree type: Limited, not yet sold out.

Hickories:
http://www.badgersett.com/plants/orderhickories.html
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BARE ROOT:
About 100 available.

STANDARD:
Availability is excellent. Please note that this is the first year we're really shipping these, and we have not fully evaluated our standard establishment practices for the hickories. Therefore, mortality may be higher. They are still covered by our standard survival guarantee, which allows for a graded discount on replacement plants depending on your mortality rate.

Butternuts:
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Extremely limited supply of coppiced (top cut off) 6-0 bare-root nursery stock. Notify us if you're interested; we will let those interested know when availability and timing are clear. Special pricing and ship date restrictions apply.

Hazel Tubelings: Shipping, and Sold Out

The good news: we start shipping this week, at the beginning of the order/shipping/pick-up queue. We've got some hazels ready to go, and chestnuts not far behind. Keep in mind that this does not mean that we are ready to ship all of our outstanding orders; many of the plants for our currently outstanding orders will not be ready until July.

The less good news: we're sold out of hazel plants for the year. If your order has already been received and processed, there is a good chance that we will be able to fulfill even the most recent orders; however new orders and email orders not yet processed will most likely not be able to ship until next year.
We are particularly low on Large-select and Xtra Large-select material; I'm afraid that there's a good chance that some of the orders we've already taken for these classes of plants may not be filled this year. For those of you in this boat, you will have the option to convert your order to another class with higher availability, postpone it until next year, or take a refund.

We are essentially sold out of Chestnuts as well, but there may be a little wiggle-room for All-Purpose and Nut-type trees. Due to less stringent germination requirements, outstanding chestnut orders will likely all be ready to ship by late June/ early July.

Why are we sold out? Mostly, it boils down to: insufficient hazel harvest labor, extraordinarily bad weather for chestnut harvest, and the compounding effect those had on the timely processing of the hazel seed harvest.

This picture is of Philip harvesting chestnuts at 9 PM on October 10; we scrambled that day to get all we could in before the freeze that night. I was able to keep harvesting until about 2:30 AM, when the crop remaining had frozen; the greenhouse thermometer said it got down to 17.8° F that night. Harvest had already been slowed substantially by a poorly timed windstorm and wet weather; this very early freeze claimed more than 95% of the overall chestnut harvest. We did, nevertheless, manage to get enough in to cover the orders we've currently got in the database.

We don't like being sold out this early in the season, and we apologize– but that's the way it is. Orders can still be placed for next season, and this will effectively mark the beginning of the delivery queue for the 2011 planting season. This means: if you want plants for next May-June delivery, it might be a good idea to place those orders now. We do expect availability to be very substantially improved, as it has already been this year compared to last.

Regarding the timing of shipping, this year the hazel pipeline is a little slow, but the plants we'll be delivering are very strong and healthy. Badgersett is a sustainability-first business; heat and power in the greenhouses comes from the sun, and that's it. This means that nearly all stages of plant production, including post-harvest processing, stratification, germination and actual plant growth, depend on the weather. We do what we can to get plants ready as quickly as possible, but the bottom line is that the plants are ready when they are ready, and not before. We will only ship plants worthy of our guarantees, and often this means that they will ship later than your requested ship date.

It should also be kept in mind that we have a long queue of orders; currently we have some orders made in 2008 that are ready for completion of shipping this year. Orders made in January are likely to ship before mid-July, and possibly even in June. Most orders made in April of this year won't come to the head of the queue until our second flush of plants is ready in July.

This information has been available in a shorter, less specific form in our FAQ, which does state that you can contact us for your order status and get a fairly short turn-around. That is unfortunately not the case right now. We are more focussed on the quality of the tubelings than on responding to order inquiries right now. We're sorry that we have been slow in responding, but we are convinced that plants of the highest quality will make everybody much happier in the long run. We sincerely appreciate your patience!

Plant Shipping Status and Work this Weekend

We have not yet shipped any standard tubelings this season, and do not expect to do so for another week or so. We've had a lot of delays with this year's planting season, some of which can be traced to two deaths in the family last December, and Meg's January foot injury, which is still slowing her down. Most recently, we've had a couple of weeks of colder weather which slows down the finishing stage substantially.We do, however, have a lot of strong tubelings in the pipeline– the closest fully-leafed-out hazels in the finishing house shown above have been decapitated and are nearly ready to ship; we will get them to you as soon as we can. Remember, tubelings can be planted throughout the growing season! Most of our planting at Badgersett happens in June, July and August.

For those of you still placing orders for planting this year, I apologize that our order handling has been slowed down for the past couple of weeks. At this point it's possible that we are sold out of some classes of tubelings, and we will have a better idea of where we stand when we process some greenhouse inventory numbers within the next couple of days.

Farm work this weekend: final hazel coppice of the year, and chestnut field maintenance (mostly consisting of pruning & tree removal). Saturday only this weekend, starting at 10 AM. Bring gloves!

NEW! Greenhouse Office, and some status.

I'm writing this from the main greenhouse here at Badgersett– we had the DSL hooked up today. Now, we should be able to do more office-related work out here, rather than having to do all of it either at home or at the local elementary school. This should really help a lot, since this way I can be at "the office" and managing the new part-time greenhouse help more or less at the same time.

As I've said before, and will most likely say again– things are picking up, but we still have a long way to go. Today we should be getting to some of the order handling that has been postponed for the past couple of weeks.

The hazel and chestnut tubelings in the greenhouses look great; we've started decapitation and are hoping to get the first hazel tubeling orders of the season shipped within two weeks. Chestnuts are a little behind, but healthy and in the pipeline. Due largely to the October 10 freeze last fall (we were out gathering nuts until about 2:30 AM), we are short on Tree and All-Purpose type chestnuts, but have plenty of Nut type left. If you've got an order for Tree or AP, we may be contacting you about substitutions.

I'd better stop now, otherwise I'll start writing a book. But later on I'll try to tell you about the butternut and hazel transplanting we did last week, our increased work on hickory tubeling production (we might actually ship some this year...), the very wet weather we're having, and all the birds singing outside now (saw a yellow warbler this morning, and the bobolinks are back).

But instead, it's time for me to take care of a few orders and information requests. There are still hundreds in my inbox, and I'm sorry that we still won't get to most of them this month. But we're working on it.