Radical Roots Nursery

Hardy plants and organically grown fruits

The store is now closed for bare-root tree orders! If you haven’t already picked up your order, please reach out 🙂

NOW AVAILABLE: Heirloom, cold-hardy apple trees, golden Anne raspberries, Sparkle strawberries, Ohio Spiderwort plants. Stop by the nursery, or come see us at the Hampden Farmer’s Market, from 2-5 at across the street from Hannaford’s in Hampden.

The full list of apple varieties available is on the shop page, linked below!

Shop here

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Container plants:
Available Mid-April – Fall

Update: This season you can find us every Friday at the Hampden Farmer’s Market (starting in May) across from the Hannaford. We’ll have a stall with some of our fruit trees in fabric root bags as well as a selection of native perennials and shrubs.

Strawberries

Sparkle– A New England favorite! Late-blooming and late-ripening make this a perfect fit for homesteads, backyard gardens, hanging baskets, and U-Pick operations. It is cold hardy in all parts of the northeast including The County. An exceptional choice for fresh-eating, freezing, and preserves. The fruit is oblong and large but lacking in uniformity. It is resistant to the most common strawberry diseases and pests including red stele and leaf spot. Available now for a limited time. Local pick-up only.

Anne Raspberry

Add some edible shrubs to your landscape with these perennial golden raspberries. They produce an abundance of large berries that are sweet and firm–perfect for fresh eating, desserts, or freeze them for smoothies and other treats. Cold-hardy and heat-tolerant.

Native Species

Enhance your landscape with some Northeast natives: birch, maple, viburnum, sassafras, dogwoods, beach plums, willow, and so much more. These plants are a great long-term source of food, beauty, habitat, shade, medicine, and so much more.

Check out the Shop page for a native species list in containers coming in Spring/Summer 2024

Fruit & Nut Trees

A great selection of apples, pears, plums, cherries, black walnut, butternut, hardy pecan, hickory, hazelnut, red mulberry, pawpaw, and peaches. Our trees include diverse, heirloom varieties that are hardy for cold, Maine winters. If you’d like some personal recommendations from us, send us an email, and we’ll be happy to help you find what you need.

Comfrey and other perennials

One of our favorite orchard companion plants!

Comfrey uses its deep taproot to bring up important minerals like potassium and calcium from the sub-soil and makes them available to fruit trees. Its lovely flowers provide nectar for pollinators, and it can be used as living mulch to suppress grass and add nutrients to the soil. Not to mention, it’s a wonderful medicinal for healing cuts and burns.

This year we’ll have comfrey as well as many other smaller perennials like wild geranium, praire smoke, columbine, and more.

Pruning Services

Trees need love too!
Annual pruning is important for structural shaping of trees, optimizing sunlight and air flow, managing tree size, removing deadwood, and stimulating fruit growth. Winter dormancy is the perfect time to prune, before your trees start growing again.

Keep your trees healthy and productive– schedule a day for us to come out and take care of your winter pruning for you.

Fill out a form to schedule your pruning. We are available Friday-Sunday, and our fee is $75 for the first hour and then $45/hr after that. Total time depends on the size of your trees.

Select your preferred day(s):(required)

Once you submit your request, we’ll get back to you with our next available dates and confirm your appointment.

The farm dog/aspiring model has reclaimed her throne on our soil pile! 👸🏽 hard to blame her with these glorious sunny days and this luxurious soil - full of organic matter, local microbes, and the occasional lobster claw leftover from compost. This is where all the magic starts 🌱✨️ Spring has sprung earlier than usual - be sure to get your bare-root tree orders in soon! Peaches are just about sold out, and we've got some delicious apple varieties left - Northern Spy, Florina, September Ruby, Honeycrisp, and more. Apricots and pears 🍐 Also northeast natives like bayberry, pagoda dogwood, highbush cranberry, sugar maples, butternuts, tulip poplars, and black walnuts. You can order on the website for shipping or local pickup! 🌳radicalrootsnursery.com Rainy Day Fasciation fascination 🤓 I thought this was an abnormal pussy willow (sometimes those fused stems - aka fasciation - are caused by a bacteria) but it turns out it's a special variety called Japanese fantail willow. Prized for their twisty aesthetic in flower arrangements ✨️ looking forward to adding some more native willows to our landscape and inventory this year - salix nigra and salix discolor! Happy to see we're not the only ones planting seeds around here 😁🐿🌲 today there were dozens of these little squirrel feast scrap piles - mostly new ones since our forest walk yesterday... dunno what the occasion was, but good for them! The other good news is that we are emerging from hibernation, prepping for spring, and starting our native plant seeds as well! Our online store (radicalrootsnursery.com) is now open for Spring bare-root orders. Putting my freshly woven willow basket to good use harvesting beach plums (Prunus maritima). These lovely plants used to be abundant all along the sandy coasts from the mid-Atlantic up to the Canadian Maritimes. Once a striking feature of the landscape, it's now considered rare in Maine, especially in the wild. But we're bringing em back, planning to turn these into tasty jam and sow the seeds which will germinate in the spring! Ours took a beating from the Japanese beetles this year, but they still provided plenty of fruit for us and the rest of the creatures around here. Behold! Misumena vatia, the golden-rod crab spider, perfectly camouflaged on this elderberry flower cluster 😍 these baddies can change their color from white to yellow, depending on what kind of flower they're on. Such a beauty. Love seeing this color spectrum as the black raspberries ripen! (The fruits look blackberry-like, but they're just a neat raspberry cultivar). And they're so delicious, with a really unique flavor-- citrusy, floral, and sweet, not as tart as the red ones. Still searching for blue raspberries to make slushies with 😜 New England favorite 😍 Sparkle is cold-hardy, disease-resistant, and late-blooming. It has superior flavor, making it ideal for Northern gardens and U-Pick operations. Ripening late It provides a delicious encore to strawberry season. They're on sale now and ready to plant!

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