Notes

”I have seen the future, and the future is now”

These notes are roughly in order of importance and practicality and impact on the bottom line. Some are easy. Some are hard. Some cheap, others expensive. A few are interdependent.

Low Hanging Fruit

Seedling Sales Easy to ramp up. Good return on your time. Biggest challenge: Marketing. Look at working with counties that are trying to replace Shelterbelt program.

Shelterbelt Production Easy to ramp up. Pushing limits as to what we can water with present well.

Edible Landscaping Slow to ramp up. Mostly dependent on becoming accepted as a source in the local fruit crowd, and permaculture crowd. Lots of learning to do. We need to do our own grafting for better selection. This requires longer lead times (2-3 years for root stocks, and 2-3 more years for a ready to sell tree.

Buying for Resale Easy to ramp up. Biggest challenge: marketing again.

Government Contracts You need to love filling out paperwork. Can be quite lucretive.

Installations Fairly easy. Means larger staff, and some that you trust to work independently.

Longer Range

Native Trees & Shrubs Growing interest. Need more info on web site.

Wild Crafting Can be a tail that wags the dog. Possible way to become a hub, teaching centre, destination.

Workshops Different spin and broader tack on wild crafting.

Plugs Hard. Requires a separate area, weed control, irrigation. Probably some sort of screened mist house would be best. To do well, you need more equipment, which in turn requires electrical power on site, and a building for the equipment. Benefit: Larger variety.

Caliper trees Easy to do. Long lead time (6-10 years) Need bigger water supply.

Edible Landscaping Depends mostly on interacting with the local fruit and nut crowd and permeculture crowds, as well as general brand recognition and marketing.

Branding Lots of little things. Hard to measure. Just what is the bottom line benefit of any given activity?

Christmas Trees Good potential both financially and raising brand awareness.

Installations Fairly easy. Means larger staff, and some that you trust to work independently.

Field Trees Easy to start. Field trees -- either harvested at a medium scale with a potting spade, or harvested as larger trees with a tree spade -- is an entirely different market. It will require a skidsteer (bobcat) and a tree spade. Requires a different workforce. Bobcat operators are not usually high school students. If you are going to install larger trees, you need a combination of vehicles to haul the trees and the bobcat, and remove the dirt from the hole you dug. The big advantage of field trees: don't have to water them. It may be possible to create an intermediate tree using grow bags.

Hard to do / Much Longer term.

A Better Swedish Aspen Requires substantial preliminary research, but then is fairly easy, even if long term.

Field Trees Is an entirely new direction, with a whole different mindset needed.

Carbon Farming Government Bureaucracy. Defining terms.

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Sherwood's Forests is located about 75 km southwest of Edmonton, Alberta. Please refer to the map on our Contact page for directions.

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