May 24th will be the last date of our nursery. I am retiring and closing the nursery permanently. Oikos Tree Crops has been in existence since the early 1980’s. As a result a few important questions have come up concerning inventory, orders, etc.
The website will remain up for a few months before a new website will replace it. More will be posted on that later. If you subscribe to our newsletter, updates will be made available as well as offers of some type from my farm. I would recommend you sign up now as there is much to be excited about in this new incarnation of tree crops. Going forward this will be the way I will share my discoveries as well as a way for you to get involved with the development of new edible food plants.
If you are a customer and have placed orders recently we will still make corrections to problems experienced during shipping or other issues throughout the next two weeks. Before the office is closed permanently I recommend you email us as soon as possible. Shortly, there will be no way to contact customer service. Email and phone service will be closed.
You will still have access to your account for a while. If you use that for a record, I recommend you download to a PDF or other suitable file so you can print it out as a record of what you have planted. Your information is safe with us, we will not sell or distribute it.
On the farm: I will still manage to work at my farm sell the fruit I grow to processors and continue to build a germplasm repository of edible plants. As a result, I plan to make this available to others in some manner or form. But of course it will not be another nursery. I will continue with my research with plants as the need to create, find and distribute the types of plants I grow is even more useful than it was 40 years ago. I will doing a lot more writing and will be publishing my finds either in newsletter, book or articles. One of my goals is to create large public plantings with edible plants that would not only be a place to collect fruits but also a means to develop fruits free of insects and diseases. These would be both public repositories as well as orchards or mini forests that represent the worlds flora of what we call food as well as the cultures of the world. This easily can be done as long as we stay away from the often misaligned native philosophy that so xenophobic to ‘foreign’ plants. I plan to use my farm to educate younger people who wish to work in agriculture or horticulture to find and refine new food crops. I love showing people around my plantings and exchanging ideas. I want to do that again.
Thank you for letting me share with you the discoveries of nature often overlooked as sources of unique flavors and nutrition. I gave it my all so to speak. Hope to hear from you all in the future.
If you have questions or comments direct them to customerservice@oikostreecrops.com or us the link in the front of the website under contact. Enjoy. Ken Asmus
