Burnt Ridge Nursery – Farm Walk, September 22, 2014

Unique Fruits, Nuts, & Marketing of a Diversified Organic Nursery

Attendees stand amongst some of the 70 chestnut varieties Burnt Ridge grows. (PC Angela Anegon)There couldn’t have been a more appropriate way to usher in the first official day of autumn than with a farm walk at Burnt Ridge Nursery & Orchards in Onalaska. With a beautiful view of Mount St. Helens, Michael and Carolyn Dolan amazed thirty farmers, orchardists, and community members with their knowledge of all the unique fruit and nut species they grow organically. On a little over 20 acres, Burnt Ridge produces a wide variety of nursery stock, fresh fruit, and value-added products – with a majority of their sales coming from a successful mail-order business. Three hours was simply not enough time to absorb all the amazing knowledge held by over 25 years of growing and marketing experience.

Chestnut burrs still on the tree. (PC Angela Anegon)Michael purchased the 21 acres in 1980 as logged over forest land. He removed all the stumps left from its logging history (a long process) and began planting his fruit and nut orchards. The soil of the land is a silty volcanic soil and the slight slope of the land received less hard frosts – an advantage for spring blossoming plants. While Michael works the most with the plants and experimenting with new varieties, Carolyn manages mail-order and online sales. Each year they put out a nursery catalog that gets mailed to 50,000 people! Their mail-order sales account for 85% of nursery stock sales. Michael and Carolyn manage ten employees that help with fulfilling orders and managing the production of the orchards. During peak season they ship between 80 and 100 tree orders a day. Carolyn advised that for any type of online or mail-order sales it is a good idea to invest in high-quality computer software to track sales and shipments.

Hardy kiwi vines and chestnut trees - two of Burnt Ridges most succesfull plant species. (PC Angela Anegon)A major focus of the farm walk was two of Burnt Ridge’s most unique and most popular crops – chestnut and hardy kiwi. Michael went into great detail about the different species he grows, their characteristics, and their adaptability within Western Washington. He mostly sells the chestnuts for eating. Michael also sells 5000 grafted chestnut trees per year – that’s a lot of grafts! He shared that chestnuts have a delayed grafting incompatibility so he advised using the same species for the seedling rootstock as for the scion wood.

Both the fuzzy and hardy kiwi varieties will keep long term in cold storage. Michael also shared that they are easy to grow organically as they have no pest or disease pressure to speak of.

Michael speaks about his nursery stock production. (PC Angela Anegon)Michael performs most of the nursery grafting himself from March through July. He’ll harvest one year old scion wood from trees around the orchard in the fall/winter and keep it in cold storage until he is ready to graft. Grafted plants are kept outside in decomposed alder sawdust through the summer, then dug in the fall and kept in cold storage as bare roots to be sold through the following spring. He doesn’t sell much of his nursery stock as potted plants mostly because of the cost involved between pots and irrigation, as well as the amount of space required to keep potted plants.

Other plant species Michael spoke in depth about were hazelnut, Korean nut pine, elderberry, mulberry, Asian pear, various apple varieties, walnut, grape, pecan, peach, serviceberry, goumi, persimmon, paw-paw, cherry, Chilean nut, and autumn olive. All these different fruits and nuts are grown at Burnt Ridge for their fresh product (some of which is used in value-added processing) and/or for nursery stock.

Attendees were able to taste some of the unique varieties of fruit grown at Burnt Ridge. They also sampled some of the jam Burnt Ridge produces in their commercial kitchen including kiwi, mulberry, and red currant. Burnt Ridge produce and value-added products can be found at the Olympia Farmer’s Market and Olympia Food Co-op.

Burnt Ridge Nursery Farm Walk Booklet


USDASpecialtyCropBlockGrantProgramLogoFunding for this farm walk is funded in part by the WSDA Specialty Crop Block Grant Program and by the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA, Grant # 2012-49400-19575. For more resources and programs for beginning farmers and ranchers please visit www.Start2Farm.gov.