Huckleberry Hives to Silver Creek Nursery: What's the Connection?
If you follow either of our businesses on social media, you may have noticed that Huckleberry Hives often mentions Silver Creek Nursery and vice versa, but perhaps you haven't heard the backstory of our relationship. Here it is:
When I first began working with bees, my sister (left in photo, myself right) was busy working with trees over at Silver Creek Nursery. She ended up purchasing the business from our cousin, Ken, and expanding it to include a has since expanded it to include a selection of additional orchard and permaculture friendly plants. She continues to operate SCN today with her husband, Zack, and a team of amazing humans who help with everything from grafting the fruit trees to packing up orders for spring shipping and customer service.
Over the past two years I have moved forward with transitioning my own business to a smaller scale and thus fewer beehives to care for, providing me time to take on part-time work at Silver Creek Nursery. I help out with the spring season at the nursery, mostly packing tree orders and helping bench grafting the new crop of grafted apple trees, along with some customer service and social media work.
I'm also taking on some hours helping my dad grow his seedling trees for Silver Creek's expanded selection of nut trees and native trees and shrubs + berry bushes, which means increasing numbers of pollinator friendly plants all over the main home of my beehives! Not only do Silver Creek's plants populate the home farm; I maintain several hives at Silver Creek Nursery in the test orchard to help pollinate the orchard trees and produce bountiful fruit crops, and depending on the season I have small orchard honey crops to harvest and bottle up for sale to local honey aficionados.
Finally, back in the beginning of my candle-making, I created molds from a Lady apple and a Bonne Louise de Jersey pear from Silver Creek Nursery's test orchards! I've also created a unique apple twig taper candle, made from apple scion (dormant pieces of apple trees that are used for bench grafting) that I'm still working on finessing. The twig tapers are very fragile due to their slim profile. Once I can determine the best way to ship it I'll be offering it too!
If you haven't yet, you can follow along with both of our businesses on our socials via instagram or facebook, just search for @huckleberryhives or @silvercreeknursery respectively. If you want to shop for fruit trees, berry bushes and other pollinator friendly plants, please do visit Silver Creek Nursery's website! We look forward to continuing to work together as we grow our small farm businesses and thank you for your ongoing support of all local businesses!