The Plant Nursery
The Online Plant Nursery is now located here
Some important notes before you place an
order:
- I’m primarily offering three sizes of plants through the native plant store. The large, $5 size have been growing in 2” x 5” plug trays. The medium, $3 size have been growing in 2” x 3” plug trays and the small $1.50 size has been growing in 1” x 3” plug trays. The photo above shows examples of the sizing. Other sizes are offered on occasion and are described and priced directly in the post.
- These are being sold without containers and come with hand written labels. I will be removing them from their trays and wrapping them in paper for pickup. They will need to be planted within a couple of days.
- Because these are small, young, delicate plants, their survival depends entirely on the care they receive in the days, weeks and months after you take them home. They do not come with a warranty.
- Please be sure to have a planting space ready for these when you bring them home, even if it is just a container to pop them into for a few weeks until their permanent home is ready. If you aren't planting them right away, keep them in the shade and keep their paper wrapping damp.
- These plants are pickup only, by appointment.
- Pickup locations include Vanier, Blackburn Hamlet and Perth Ontario. I've also started offering Kanata and Carleton Place pickups on every fourth Saturday. I’ll be preparing each order as per your scheduled pickup time to minimize the amount of time they have to wait to be replanted. Pickup times will be available on weekdays and weekday evenings. I do not offer shipping.
- Unless otherwise noted, all of these plants are native to Ontario according to the Database of Vascular Plants of Canada (VASCAN).
- Please don’t order more plants than you have space for. This is hard, I know. 😊
- Please respect the growing requirements of the plants. They are living beings, well adapted to the conditions that they have evolved to thrive in, but they have limitations as well.
- Plants grow in communities, please don't neglect the groundcover, grass or sedge layer when planning which species to add to a space. If planning a complex native plant community is new to you, please check out this presentation, which includes step-by-step instructions for planning out your planting spaces.
- The seeds came to me as gifts from the plants, from people who gathered them from the plants they care for, through the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library and from seeds I purchased from Prairie Moon Nursery.
- What I am charging for as I sell these plants is the materials and time that I put into their care and the work associated with maintaining this website and filling orders.
How does ordering work?
- I run the sales on two-week cycles. Every second Tuesday I update the inventory with the species that are ready to go and open the store for orders that evening.
- You can place an order and select from a few pickup days and times from late that week and through the following week.
- I close the store to orders the day before the last pickup option on the second week (usually Wednesday or Thursday) and then consolidate the partially emptied trays, move any seedlings that are getting crowded up to larger size trays and transplant more young seedlings into plug trays.
- Once that is done, I update the inventory with whatever plants are still available, or that have matured enough over the last two weeks to be ready to go before and start the cycle again.
- While not every species is available all season, I try to keep a pretty wide selection available from mid May to mid October. The first sale in May is sometimes a bit shorter on offerings but by the second round there are generally well over 100 species ready to go (probably more this year).
- Each individual round of sales is first-come first-served for the available plants but there are often more coming along since I start some early and leave others to germinate outdoors.
- I’ve (mostly) standardized the pickup options for each 2-week round of sales for this season. For the next while the cycle will be:
- The store opens for orders on Tuesday evening
- There is a 5:00 to 6:00 pickup option at the Just Food Farm that Friday
- The following week there are pickups at the farm at Noon to 1:00 on Tuesday, 5:00 to 6:00 on Wednesday evening and on Friday morning from 9:00 until 10:00. (You can also order trees, vegetable seedlings and farm stand produce for pickup on Wednesday evenings through the Just Food Farm Stand website)
- There is also a pickup option of between 6:30 and 7:30 in Vanier on Thursday of the second week of each sale cycle.
- Some weeks there will be Saturday afternoon self-serve pickup options in Kanata, Carleton Place and west of Perth.
Why isn’t the nursery itself open to the public?
- Safety and security; I don’t have to worry about creating wide, accessible pathways that are always kept free of obstructing pots or trays and there isn’t any question about whether anyone else should be moving, or removing, any of the trays of plants.
- Schedule flexibility; I don’t need to be present specific hours so I can fit this work around other commitments and the weather.
- Uninterrupted transplanting time; transplanting fills a great deal of my time and is critical to continuing availability of plants.
- Business model viability; providing in-person plant selection support would be a nearly full-time job in and of itself. By offering the plants online, with photos and information about them right in their profiles, most of the questions that people have can be answered by the website, rather than in-person (you can find even more helpful info on my videos page). This is a big piece of the viability puzzle for the business model that I’m working on.
What is the business model?
- I’m working on the practical and logistical aspects of offering a wide range of native plant species with the least possible ecological extraction and without exploitative labour practices, while also keeping the plants affordable so more people can plant more, and denser, native plant communities on the land they tend.
- My goal is to develop and document the business model so that it can be replicated by others in their own communities.