A Home-Based Organic Nursery

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Hand-watering is still Donn's preferred method.
Hand-watering is still Donn's preferred method.
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Donn Tickner ponders a customer's question.
Donn Tickner ponders a customer's question.
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The Tickner's old Oliver tractor enabled Donn to put in artichokes.
The Tickner's old Oliver tractor enabled Donn to put in artichokes.
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The thriving Tickner garden.
The thriving Tickner garden.

Two years ago this spring—with no money, no publicity and virtually no plants—Donn and Rachel Tickner started a retail organic nursery. All they really had going for them was a healthy stock of reverence, know-how and determination.

Today, the Tickners’ Organic Home Nursery is a showplace of the natural movement and Donn and Rachel’s business is doing well enough to put ample food on their table and allow them the luxury of stopping occasionally to savor their rewarding way of life, proving once again that people of good faith can build the life they want if they try.

The Organic Home Nursery began and remains at the Tickners’ home outside Santa Cruz, California, where the couple rents a family-of-three sized cottage and 2 1/2 fertile acres for only $100 a month. Doom-and-gloom people originally prophesied failure for the Tickners’ new business because of its semi-remote location, but of course that prediction turned out to be wrong. The nursery has flourished. Donn now says, “We would have been out of business long ago if we were in town. I figure we save $200 a month in this location since in-town rental for nursery space runs a minimum of $300.”

In several ways, Donn and Rachel’s natural nursery—the only one in the Bay area—is perfectly located. For one thing, it’s not that far from “civilization:” only 12 miles south of Santa Cruz (in a countryside rich with counter-culture folks) and within outing distance of San Francisco. For another, the thermal belt along the coastal range in northern California has excellent “grow weather.” Tickner’s plants thrive on both summer morning ocean winds that roll in light fog to bathe the foliage, and the relatively frost-free “inland” California winters.

When the Tickners decided to turn their homestead into a nursery, the only stock they had on hand was 15 ivy clippings that Rachel had rooted. They obviously needed many more plants, sets, and seedlings than that to launch the business, but which ones? And how many? And most important of all, how would they pay for that original stock since they had hardly any money at all? It was a large problem … which they solved quite handily by scouting out greens to propagate from homes and school yards.

  • Published on Mar 1, 1972
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