***We are now sold out of  Wolf River, Virginia Beauty, Golden Pippin, Liberty, Pumpkin Sweet, Old Fashioned Winesap and Spitzenburg Apples***

N.C. Cooperative Extension – Watauga County Center will once again be holding its spring fruit plant sale. We will begin accepting orders on Feb. 1st. All orders will be prepaid to be picked up on April 19th and 20th. Details on ordering are also on the Plant Sale order form below.

2024-Fruit-Plant-Sale-order-form-UPDATED 3-25-24

2024 Fruit Plant descriptions

2024 Apple Chart

Printed Order Forms are available at our office at 971 W. King St.

All orders must be prepaid with either a check made out to Watauga County or cash brought in person.

• If paying with cash, please have correct change as we do not have access to cash. We’re sorry we can’t take credit cards. As a state institution it is still difficult and expensive. Once we receive the payment for your order it will be processed by a Master Gardener, who will email you a confirmation.

Options for getting your order to us:

• Mail your order to: Watauga Extension Service 971 W. King St. Boone NC 28607.
• Drop off at our office: Please drop orders in the box marked “Fruit Plant Sale” in our front office, a Master Gardener will enter the orders as they are received and paid for, and then will email you a confirmation and a receipt along with a scanned copy of your order.
• Email order form: wataugamastergardener@gmail.com This is really to help people who don’t have printers and want to email their order after hours. You will still need to mail or drop off your check. Your order will not be entered and confirmed until we receive your payment. Make sure the check has the same name as the form you emailed so we know which order it goes with.

Order Confirmation:

• Receipt and a copy of order will be emailed to confirm your order has been received and processed.
• Availability of plants: Once we sell out of an apple variety we can’t get more. We sometimes need to make substitutions, especially towards the end of the sale. Before mailing a check, please look at our website where we will list items we have sold out of (sometimes many orders arrive the same day so we still can run out even though the website says we still have an apple, we process them in the order they came in and so the best we can!). We do try to contact you if we feel like we don’t have a substitute that is very similar. If you aren’t willing to take a substitute, please be sure to check “no substitutes” on your order form.

Pricing:  We are sorry to have to go up on some our prices but shipping costs have increased, as well as the quantities we need to purchase. Labor costs for nurseries has increased in recent years, where the least expensive agricultural labor is $13.50 and hour as well as housing and transportation costs. We think you will still find that our prices should be less than other online sales, and there are not many local vendors who are selling the same products we are selling. All proceeds go back into our horticulture program allowing us to make programs we offer free to the public. We also do many community service projects and fund youth programming. Thanks for supporting our sale.

For More information on growing these plants or to watch online recorded classes, use this link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14VDevZRqBNCL9vggxBKFBGXS_Pp3lobf/view?usp=sharing

Please email any questions to wataugamastergardener@gmail.com

More detailed descriptions are on the link above but in case you can’t open it, here is a summary of the info:

The semi-dwarf heirloom apples we are selling this year were custom grafted for us the summer of 2022. The top is 1.5 year old and the bottom is 2.5 years old. They will be all be toped at about 4ft tall. (this encourages the first set of branches). We are selling them for $24. The varieties will be:

Other offerings will be 3 varieties of thornless blackberries to include 2 floricane and 1 primocane cultivar for the longest season and most flexibility. They will be $9 per greenhouse grown plant. The plants have gone through a process that removes viruses, something which balckberries often carry. Greenhouse grown blackberries are less likely to have soil borne pathogens than plants raised in the ground. They will be $9, and will look like the photo below, but dormant (no leaves) The Black raspberry will come this same way and is a variety called ‘Niwot’ that has minimal thorns and can be cut the the ground for a late summer/fall crop or can be trained to produce an earlier summer crop.

There will be 2 varieties of strawberry, “Sparkle’ a junebearing variety, and ‘San Andreas’ a day neutral variety. They will come in bundles of 25 bare root (no soil) for $13. We will have 2 cultivars of red primocane raspberry that will offer the longest season of fruit production. (Primoccane varieties are the easiest to be successful with, as they can be cut to the ground each fall for late summer/fall fruit production. A more advanced technique would be to overwinter canes and prune in a way that allows for a summer crop, so you can be successful either way) We will not sell yellow cultivars this year due to increasing quantities we need to order to get reasonable pricing. They will be $7 for a bare root plant that can produce some limited fruit the first year. There will be 4 cultivars of high bush blueberries sold in 1 gal pots. They will be about 1-2 ft. tall and will be $10. We will have ‘Mars’ grape, a seedless slipskin (pulp separates from skin) cultivar that offers disease resistance and high levels of production for the home gardener. They will be 2 year old plants that are bare root for $9.00. Last but not least why not consider planting asparagus, one of the few perennial vegetables. We will sell 12, 2 year old crowns, bare root for $16 per bundle.