Beaverkill Nursery Newsletter March 2, 2026

Hello from Beaverkill Nursery! This is our very first newsletter. Our plan is to send these out every couple of weeks to update on what we’ve been working on and what we have to offer for sale.

First, I wanted to note that our website is live, and you can pre-order spring bare root trees, which can be picked up locally or shipped. These will be ready in mid to late April depending on the weather. We have a limited number of chestnuts, hazelnuts, elms, and hickories. 

This past month, we’ve been designing our annual crop plan. Ultimately our goal with annuals is to offer a diverse selection of staple crops that are easy for home gardeners and small scale farmers to grow in our region. 

Shown Above: Last year's annual crop trials. We grew wheat, barley, oats, rye, flint corn, flax, and a mix of cover crops. The flint corn, flax, oats, and wheat did well. Our cover crops were mixed. 

Over the last several hundred years, crop diversity has declined significantly. As agriculture developed into its modern industrial form, heirloom and heritage forms of crops were lost, because mechanization prefers crop uniformity. As a result, we have far fewer varieties of all crops than we did in the past. 

Plus, modern varieties are bred to grow close together with lots of fertilizers and pesticides. 

This is a huge contrast to traditional farming, which generally involved growing things further apart with less fertilizer and no pesticides. Modern industrial farming techniques are also harder for gardeners to replicate compared to traditional methods.

In the past, every farming region in the world had a collection of crops that they passed down from generation to generation. Each region had unique growing methods and unique crop genetics. Crops might even look different from one valley to the next. This resulted in a unique cuisine and food flavor that was specific to each region. 

The crop varieties themselves were also very diverse. Rather than being bred to look exactly the same, crops were open pollinated and had a good deal of variation. These diverse varieties were much more resilient. For example, a bad drought might kill some plants, but because there was diversity in the variety, some would live and do well. Crop variety diversity acted as insurance for seasonal variation. Diverse varieties of domesticated crops are called “landraces”. Joseph Lofthouse has a good book on this subject called “Landrace Gardening”.

Given all of that, we at Beaverkill Nursery want to help reverse the trend towards uniformity, by offering diverse varieties of plants that are well adapted to the Catskills. We are focusing our efforts on staple crops: grains like corn and wheat, legumes like dry beans and soybeans, oilseeds like sunflower and pumpkin seed, and storable roots and veggies like potatoes and squash. These types of crops were the backbone of regional cuisine.

In order to have diverse, “landrace” crop varieties, we have to start with a good baseline. Luckily, there are people and institutions who have dedicated lots of work towards maintaining crop diversity. 

One of these institutions is the Sandhill Preservation Center in Iowa (https://www.sandhillpreservation.com/). It is responsible for the preservation of 2500 varieties of crops and poultry, including 675 that may have gone extinct otherwise. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was some sort of publicly funded non-profit or government program, but it is in fact just a 40 acre family farm. We were able to source 12 varieties of corn (flint type), 20 varieties of tomatoes (all short season), and a bunch of sorghum and beans from them. 

Another small seed farm is Wright’s Heirlooms in Tennessee (https://www.wrightsdaylily.com/). They specialize in beans, and have over 70 varieties mainly originating from Appalachia. Most dry beans sold in the grocery store are bush beans, meaning they grow low to the ground and are easy to mechanically harvest. In the Eastern U.S., pole beans do much better and are adapted to the high rainfall and humidity. Traditionally, pole beans were grown for dry beans; green beans; and shell beans, which are cooked like dry beans but harvested earlier in the season when they are softer and sweeter. Heirloom beans come in all sorts of colors, including black and white, red, cream, and even pink. From here we got about 20 bean varieties.

Shown Above: Pink beans from Wright's Heirlooms. 

Both of these small farms are reputable and have very reasonable prices for what they offer.

The largest seed source we pulled from is the USDA Germplasm Resources Information Network, also called GRIN (https://www.ars-grin.gov/). The GRIN is a network of all of the national seed banks in the country. This network of the seed banks contains over 600,000 varieties, which have been collected over the past 80 or so years from all over the world. For example, we were able to request sorghum varieties from Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sudan, China, Japan, and Russia. These seeds were collected from those regions over the years, and now live in a seed-bank in the U.S. Each regional seed bank specializes in different crops. All sorghum varieties live at the Plant Genetic Resources Conservation Unit in Georgia, whereas most corn varieties are at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Iowa. 

I first learned about the GRIN from a podcast with Shane Simonsen (Recombination Nation Podcast) and Nate Kleineman (Experimental Farm Network, another great seed company), where they also mention the limited capacity of the GRIN. The GRIN seedbank is only for use by plant breeders and seed companies, but if you meet that criteria, it is actually very straightforward to get seed, and that seed is free. However, unlike seed companies, the GRIN cannot actively maintain all of the seeds they hold. For example, I was able to speak on the phone with one of the seed banks, and they are in charge of over 10,000 varieties but can only grow out 180 of them each year. By that math, it would mean that each variety only gets grown to seed and replenished every 60 or so years, if they give every variety equal priority.

While seeds can last a long time in proper storage, they don’t all keep equally well, and it is clear that GRIN is not up to the task of maintaining every variety over the long term. It is also true that not all 600,000 varieties they hold will be equally useful. As plant breeders, the best thing we can do is grow these seeds out and incorporate them into our farms and gardens. Ultimately, crop diversity can only be properly maintained through active growing, not long term passive storage. 

All in all, we ended up with 14 types of flint corn, 29 types of sorghum, 37 types of bean, and a whole lot of other fun things to from this year. Our goal is trial a range of varieties and offer the best performing ones for sale, all while crossing varieties together to form new varieties that do especially well for us here in the Catskills.

Stay tuned for more Nursery updates.