Engel's Nursery is no dinosaur

Seedling nurseries are probably the most traditional nurseries in the world. You plant a seed in the ground and, over some period of time, you harvest a plant from that spot.

The concept seems so simple that a caveman could do it. But seedling nurseries in this country have about gone the way of the Neanderthals.

It’s labor intensive and in many cases the success of your crop is up to the will of Mother Nature. Modern container production and vegetative plant propagation take away much of the instability inherent with traditional field seedling production.

Plus, in many ways, the nursery market has gotten away from bare-root seedling transplants. Clonally produced cultivars offer uniformity and container-grown liners can be transplanted year round.

Engel’s Nursery Inc. in Fennville, Mich. bucks this trend. The company has carved out a market of difficult-to-grow varieties. It has also found core groups of buyers who still rely on bare-root seedlings for transplant material and rootstock.

Never a dull day

Growing dozens of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs from seed has its challenges, said owner Jim Engel.

“Our specialty is the deciduous material, so we don’t have one solid field of anything. It’s six beds of this and two of that and each has its own pH, water and nutrition needs,” Jim said. “That’s the fascinating part for me. I get bored easily. I never had a job for more than three years before I started the nursery.”

His past experience includes landscaping, running a charter boat, a sporting goods store and working at Vans Pines Nursery, an evergreen liner producer in nearby West Olive, Mich. Jim left Van Pines to start his own nursery in 1991.

“Working at Vans Pines I knew we needed cash flow, so we started with deciduous crops that gave us a one-year turnover. But we found out pretty quickly that there wasn’t much supply in this market,” Jim said. “We decided that we could grow things that other people couldn’t grow or didn’t want to grow or couldn’t grow for a profit.”

To date, Jim considers his biggest accomplishment being able to develop a seedling nursery when others were “falling apart or dwindling away.”

He now operates the nursery with his daughter Becky and son Matt. His wife Mary has also recently retired from teaching and is spending more time working at the nursery.

Weather dictates some success

This year was a perfect example of what a seedling nursery has to go through. Weather took a serious toll on Engel’s crops.

The Easter freeze that hit most of the East dropped temperatures to 16°F or 18°F for seven or eight straight days at Engel’s Nursery. This was after many plants had germinated and emerged from the soil.

“One night with temperatures that low isn’t bad. But night after night that cold just accumulates,” Jim said.

All things considered, Jim thinks they made it through the cold fairly well.

“We only had two items that experienced 100-percent loss,” he said. “But our inventory is down for sure. We have several items that are down from about 100,000 [units] to 30,000.”

Then this summer was one of the driest the nursery had seen.

“We got clobbered by the dry,” he said. “We had dry weather, low humidity and bright sun. That’s a combination that’s just deadly to surface-germinated stuff like birch and redwoods. You can put out water but you can’t stop the sun and wind and you can’t change the humidity.”

Experimentation rules

Succeeding with hard-to-grow species has required a great deal of trial and error. But becoming known as one of the few sources for some plants has been a key to success.

“Germinating birch isn’t easy, and we’ve mastered that,” Jim said. “Amelanchiers have disease problems. We haven’t completely overcome that, but we’re close.”

The company has multiple production sites and they vary in soil composition. The primary site is mostly a low-lying bog. Another site is higher with both sandy and clay soils. This allows the company to plant seed in optimum conditions.

Of course acquiring seed is also a key to success.

“If you’re in the seed business and you don’t have any seed, you’re not in business,” Jim said.

The company has seed orchards planted on site. The staff also collects seed from stands of native trees and shrubs.

“We try to collect all the seed ourselves. We don’t want to have to rely on others,” Jim said.

The number of seeds collected is astounding. For oaks alone, Engel’s Nursery collects 9,000-10,000 pounds of acorns per year.

The percentage of salable liners these acorns produce varies from species to species. For white oak, Jim estimates there are about 100 seeds per pound. For those that make it through the winter and germinate, probably half become salable liners.

For red oaks, the company shoots for 75 salable trees per pound of seed collected.

Managing the fields

The future of the business lies in how Engel’s Nursery maintains its fields. The nature of the soils change as the nursery continues to produce crops. The company is constantly adjusting water, mulch and fertilizer.

“That’s a constant battle,” Jim said. “If it’s not the weather it’s something we’ve done. The pH in the low-lying fields was 5.2-5.3 when we started. Now it’s 6.7-7.8. Calcium nitrate fertilizers affect this, and the pond water we use to irrigate with has a pH of 8.0. Plus just the addition to organic matter to the fields will raise pH.”

But an action of the government could have the biggest impact on the nursery. The U.S. EPA phased out the use of methyl bromide and allows its use only through Critical-Use Exemptions. The product has been identified as an ozone depleter.

Engel’s Nursery is allowed to use the product to sterilize seed beds through permits it receives with help from Michigan Nursery & Landscape Association and Michigan State University. Not knowing how long the company will be allowed to use methyl bromide, the Engels have experimented with alternatives.

“There are some things that have been touted as being as good as methyl bromide, but really nothing is as safe or as good as methyl bromide,” Jim said.

He wishes the EPA would re-evaluate the use of the fumigant. He said MB is the only naturally occurring atmospheric compound banned because it depletes the ozone layer. New research shows that only 1 percent of the MB in the atmosphere is manmade. The rest comes from natural processes, like evaporating ocean water, Jim said.

Since the product has been phased out in countries across the globe, the amount of atmospheric MB has not changed. But despite these facts, Jim knows a re-evaluation is not likely.

“Once it’s gone, it’s gone” Jim said.

The nursery conducted a 3-acre experiment producing seedlings on unfumigated land. Seven species were used and produced the same way crops are produced on fumigated soil.

“We found out you can raise seedlings in unfumigated land, but you get a third the yield and half the growth,” Jim said. “I wish we could have tracked the performance of the liners after they left our nursery, but we didn’t. I suspect the unfumigated liners didn’t perform as well.”

What the future holds

It will be easier to produce large-seeded crops like oaks and walnuts in unfumigated soil. But anything with a seed smaller than a cherry pit will be extremely difficult, Jim said.

The Engels are experimenting with germinating some crops indoors in containers, then transplanting them into the field. They have consulted and visited seedling nurseries as far away as the West Coast and Canada to research new production techniques.

“But the moment you move the crops inside, you increase the cost of a seedling from $.40 to $1.40, and I don’t know if our customers are ready to make that jump. We’re going to continue to do things as economically as possible,” Jim said.

For more: Engel’s Nursery, (269) 543-4123; www.engelsnursery.com.

Finding buyers of bare-root seedlings

Jim Engel can identify six key types of customers for Engel’s Nursery product:

1. Soil conservation districts.

2. Mail-order nurseries.

3. Ornamental plant growers.

4. Tree budders (Engel’s product is used as rootstock).

5. Reforestation specialists.

6. Guys who just want to plant a tree.

“Reforestation has gotten really big. That’s a growing area for us,” Jim said. “Those people buy in blocks of 100 or 1,000.”

But probably the biggest growth market is native plants. The demand for native species for use in landscapes is skyrocketing. This means liners of these species are in demand from nurseries across the country.

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“Some of our customers will have upwards of 40 percent of their can yards in native shrubs,” Becky Engel said. “They are still growing and supplying all of the cultivars, but also carrying a large quantity of natives as well.”

- Todd Davis

Founded: 1992 in Fennville, Mich.

Acres: 175 total acres, about half in production.

Products: Deciduous and conifer tree and shrub seedlings and transplants. The company has about 80 or 90 varieties in stock.

Employees: Six full time, increasing to 16 or 20 seasonally.

Shipping area: The United States from coast to coast, and Canada. Less than 10 percent of the product is sold in the home state of Michigan.