About Us and Our Trees

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For over 20 years we've been working with engineers and architects on projects ranging from wetland mitigation projects in Louisiana to wetland plantings on residential homes after soil-compacting construction.  We've always brought an organic approach to every project, even large scale plantings and landscaping layouts.  We've pioneered using earth worm castings, chicken manure, and grass seed for new lawns.  We've worked on a carbon-sequestering process that makes municipal waste into soil pellets, without any forever chemicals.  We have seen how different trees handle annual weather fluctuations and tested their ability to withstand harsh weather or stabilize banks naturally.  We know soil and we know trees.

Our designer and nursery manager won a "Project of the Year" award in the Town of Guilderland for his designs on a 15 acre apartment community with a senior center and pool including edible landscaping, and organic grass seeding and management.  He has also designed wetland landscaping and an edible food forest on a site in Latham, New York, which we still harvest our pawpaw fruit and seeds from annually.  The lower areas of the site are regularly flooded in spring, yet the hazelnuts, pawpaws, and mulberries have thrived and grown for over 7 years, yielding hundreds of pounds of fruit on less than 1 acre with significant shading from larger trees.

Our love of fruit is what drives our cultivation and propagation.  This came into the fore as our family multiplied and organic fruit prices soared.  One home we lived in had an odd tree with purple fruit on it, so we did our homework and found it to be a 100+ year old mulberry in the Albany, New York area.  We ate quart after quart and made many mulberry-mint pies.  Our curiosity with unique fruits led us to the local co-op and to a realization that we may have tasted 1% of the fruit flavors and nutrient offerings nature provides.  That is where the focus changed to wonderment and humility, so we became students of nature.

For over a decade, we foraged for mushrooms as a family, harvested wild apples for cider or eating, and gathered autumn olives for a delicious fall treat regularly.  You can't identify mushrooms if you don't know trees, and you shouldn't eat from nature unless you've done your due diligence and used a proper guide initially.  We did, and we learned much and have eaten over 30 different wild mushrooms and cultivate shiitakes, oyster, and wine cap mushrooms every year.  This all comes into play when you start tasting what you've missed on the menu and the love of trees, mushrooms, and fruit all coalesce into an appreciation of how little we know and how much there is to learn and experience and taste.

Pawpaws were the impossible fruit to taste.  We tried.  We looked.  We decided to grow them in 2017.  We grew known cultivars and the fruit we tasted as early as 2 years after planting was indescribably delicious.  What we read fell short of the experience, as will these words.  The size of the fruit, the texture, the tropical taste, and late fall harvest really rounds out the fruit season with a true dessert experience.  American Persimmons fit the same bill and cannot be sourced to even taste them.  You must grow them.  They ripen a bit later than pawpaws, but are cold-hardy up to Canada for some varieties.  These can be preserved in alcohol or eaten ripe (soft).  Their flavor is like a date and an orange without the acid, and a candy sweetness that makes it tastes like it was dipped in sugar.  Timing is everything with persimmon harvest, yet we've learned how to ripen 90% of all picked fruit in the Adirondacks.

Pawpaws and American persimmons are some of the best trees that America offers and we've forgotten about them, so we at Old World Tree Farm ascribe them to the "Old World Trees" category.  The best part of this "forgetting" is that they have been modified and manipulated so little that the genetics are still "raw" and anyone who wants to plant seedlings can develop the next unique flavor in the pawpaw or persimmon world.  We encourage it!  Plant seedlings (not grafted) along with known varietals (grafted) to pollinate and create unique seeds.  We developed a mulberry this way with a random seedling from a pool of many, which fruited at a younger age than any seedlings we had and was sweeter than any of the others we've tasted to date (Purple Cloud).    

Our pawpaw and persimmon seedlings come from known varieties such as Sunflower pawpaw, Prolific pawpaw, Wells pawpaw, Penn Golden pawpaw.  This means your seedlings will have large fruits, large leaves, be tasty, and they will have slightly unique traits due to the crossing of these superior varieties.  They have also survived cold winters outdoors in pots or unheated greenhouses.  They are tough trees, even in Zone 4.  Our grafted pawpaws and persimmons take several years before they can be sold than apples, pears, plums, etc., to ensure they are properly sized.  We will have many types available for spring 2026. 

We have many other stories to share along the journey that caused us to focus on healthy food, from Lyme disease to other ailments and healing efforts. So, please watch some of our youtube videos as we create content to share and help others grow and experiment.  Taste the best nature has to offer and learn to grow trees to feed you and your family for decades to come.  Our goal is to empower you to grow trees with ease.

We harvested this amount twice a week with tarps on a mature tree for over 4 weeks each year.  There was never an "off" year.  Mulberries are an incredibly delicious fruit, with the darker types having a more dynamic flavor than the sweeter white ones.  Many cultures make tea with the leaves, dry them for seasoning, or simply eat them in salads.  What a unique trees!  Try Illinois Everbearing in the store to taste a rich mulberry flavor.

Have you ever heard of pink applesauce or an apple that is red on the inside?  Cold-hardy and superior in antioxidant levels to other apples, these are a tasty treat with a surprise.  We are growing several varieties of these on our orchard and will be offering them in the nursery for Spring of 2026 on some early-bearing and good-anchoring rootstock.

This seedling of ours is a cross between a white mulberry and a red mulberry.  It seems the white mulberry parentage has given it tremendous cold-hardy capabilities.  Some mulberries from seed can take up to 10 years to fruit, this one did it at year 4...not only that, but the fruit is outstandingly sweet and tasty.  The kids approve.  We are growing this one from cuttings, so they will all be true to type and exactly the same fruit you see above.  Available 2026.

How about a kiwi that you don't have to peel, is tastier, and has about 10x the vitamin C of an orange (and much more than the fuzzy kiwis)?  These vines can produce over 100 lbs/year in Zone 4/5.  They can be grown on trellis systems or they can be trained up trees, like honey locust.  We use our N-Fixing trees as grape and kiwi scaffolds and pollard the trees when young to stimulate lower branching to carry the fruit load.

So much has been said about where you can and can't plant.  When you buy a property for location and amenities, you don't always consider the clay content or aerobic activity in your soil.  You rarely consider these things, yet in a few years you may want to plant a fruit or nut tree.  You read that you can't grow fruit or nut trees where it's wet.  This site now produces hundreds of pounds of fruit annually and still gets flooded.  We offer trees that produce fruit in clay or wet areas, and will help you with instructions.