Shady Oaks Info
Shady Oaks Farm is located between Huntington and Charleston West Virginia just outside of the town of Poca. The farm was started in 1997 by Chris and Leslie Burdette and was originally a ginseng and native plant farm. After 3 years of planting ginseng we decided to expand into growing red raspberries and blueberries along with some apples, peaches, and a few grapes. A couple of years later we started getting into the blueberry propagation to make it more cost effective to expand our field of blueberry bushes. We now have quality nursery grown 1 and 2 year blueberry plants and rooted cuttings for sale. We now produce several thousand quality blueberry bushes annually.
Down the road a few more years we got the idea to get into the heirloom daffodil business and over the last 6 years we have been rescuing heirloom bulbs from old abandoned home sites and replanting them into our beds here on the farm. It's pretty exciting to see the bulbs grow and multiply. Some of these have not been able to bloom in decades because of the locations they were in. Some of these clumps have been around these old sites for over a hundred years and now they finally get the chance to bloom again. We have transplanted 10's of thousands of them and we are now able to offer some of them for sale. I guess you could call us the Flower Pickers of daffodil bulbs.
We started getting into the low tunnel vegetable growing and we are continuing to expand that this year with the hopes of starting our season earlier in the spring and to be able to grow later in the fall. We are also adding additional greenhouses to expand the blueberry propagation and cold season crops.
We are getting back into the mushroom growing business this spring and hope to be able to offer fresh Shittaki mushrooms once again in the fall of 2014 or early spring 2015.
In 2011 Shady Oaks Blueberry Farm was awarded the Conservation Farm award for Putnam County in recognition of our efforts to conserve natural resources and manage runoff from our farm.
We are currently on our third year of preparation for organic certification which we hope to be getting this year sometime. The organic certification is somewhat of a job but when we are finally through the process and certified we will be able to offer top quality certified organic blueberry bushes for sale. I will have to say it is nice getting rid of all the chemical fertilizers and weed killers. We were never real big on the weed killers it's just good to not have to worry about that type of stuff around our products any more. One of the drawbacks to it all is the weeds like not having anything on them too. They truly do grow like weeds now.
We have taken this opportunity to go ahead and retool a bit. We have been removing old blueberry bushes and replacing them with different varieties of blueberry plants that are better suited for our farm. We replaced nearly 450 blueberry bushes in 2013 and expect to replace another 450 blueberry bushes again in 2014. We expect to have most of our blueberry bushes replanted and expanded by 2016 and hope to once again offer u-pick in 2015.
Down the road a few more years we got the idea to get into the heirloom daffodil business and over the last 6 years we have been rescuing heirloom bulbs from old abandoned home sites and replanting them into our beds here on the farm. It's pretty exciting to see the bulbs grow and multiply. Some of these have not been able to bloom in decades because of the locations they were in. Some of these clumps have been around these old sites for over a hundred years and now they finally get the chance to bloom again. We have transplanted 10's of thousands of them and we are now able to offer some of them for sale. I guess you could call us the Flower Pickers of daffodil bulbs.
We started getting into the low tunnel vegetable growing and we are continuing to expand that this year with the hopes of starting our season earlier in the spring and to be able to grow later in the fall. We are also adding additional greenhouses to expand the blueberry propagation and cold season crops.
We are getting back into the mushroom growing business this spring and hope to be able to offer fresh Shittaki mushrooms once again in the fall of 2014 or early spring 2015.
In 2011 Shady Oaks Blueberry Farm was awarded the Conservation Farm award for Putnam County in recognition of our efforts to conserve natural resources and manage runoff from our farm.
We are currently on our third year of preparation for organic certification which we hope to be getting this year sometime. The organic certification is somewhat of a job but when we are finally through the process and certified we will be able to offer top quality certified organic blueberry bushes for sale. I will have to say it is nice getting rid of all the chemical fertilizers and weed killers. We were never real big on the weed killers it's just good to not have to worry about that type of stuff around our products any more. One of the drawbacks to it all is the weeds like not having anything on them too. They truly do grow like weeds now.
We have taken this opportunity to go ahead and retool a bit. We have been removing old blueberry bushes and replacing them with different varieties of blueberry plants that are better suited for our farm. We replaced nearly 450 blueberry bushes in 2013 and expect to replace another 450 blueberry bushes again in 2014. We expect to have most of our blueberry bushes replanted and expanded by 2016 and hope to once again offer u-pick in 2015.
