Honey Badger Nursery is busy re-establishing itself in eastern Tennessee!
A brief origin story of Honey Badger Nursery ~
My name is Casey Pfeifer, and I first began propagating and growing plants in earnest back in 2012. By 2015 I was living and working full time at Casitas Valley Growers in Carpinteria, CA growing hi-rotation annual vegetables, mushrooms and microgreens for the local restaurant industry. During this time I began propagating perennials to help plant out and establish the larger Casitas Valley Farm, of which our vegetable operation was a small part.
I started with a simple misting bed for propagating herbaceous and softwood cuttings, and then began to experiment with air pruning beds for growing well-structured root systems from seed. I loved the application of air pruning as it seemed an effective way to leverage the natural growth responses already found in nature to create highly-branched, non-circling root systems on yearling trees and shrubs grown from seed that would allow them to establish rapidly and thrive in challenging conditions. If you haven’t heard of air pruning before, I’d highly recommend looking into the work of air pruning pioneer Dr. Carl Whitcomb – this video is a great place to start.
It was at this time that the idea of growing “honey badgers” was born – very much inspired by the early internet gem below.
As we began to get more and more property design requests from visitors to the market garden and Casitas Valley Farm, we saw an unfilled need for climate-adapted, well-formed healthy plant stock of the varietals that we found ourselves frequently recommending and specifying in our designs. So we began growing mostly hardy pioneer trees from seed and selling them to our clients when it came time to put roots in the ground on their properties. And so, Honey Badger Nursery was born 🙂
I left Casitas Valley Farm in early 2018 and began designing and implementing regenerative landscapes full time as 7th Generation Design in Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo, CA. All the while, I kept growing trees and experimenting with new techniques and methods for growing lots of trees and plants in small footprints, minimizing costs, creating potting soil in-house and so forth – anything that could help our clients be more self-sufficient with their growing systems.
In April of 2023, we heeded the many nudges that had been building over the years and made the move east to Tennessee, in search of our own patch of earth to call home.
2024 will be our first full growing season in a completely new bioregion, and I am very excited to grow many trees and plants that just weren’t on the menu out west. If you’d like to be notified when we have stock ready to order, please subscribe to our nursery inventory mailing list below.
Get notified when new stock is available!
If Honey Badger Nursery or it’s sibling enterprise Sovereign Homestead Design can help you build more resilience, create more beauty and carve out a little more sovereignty for yourself on your land, we’d be honored to do our part.
Onward,
– Casey