New Roots Nursery | 2026 Plan & Updates

Hi everyone - this is Matt with New Roots Nursery and if you're new here; thanks for checking out our blog.

I love to write and plan to continue to post here on a regular basis throughout 2026 with updates to our backyard nursery! We've grown a LOT in two years since we started and the goal here is to share our plant availability, what we're doing in the garden over winter and much more!

First things first: How are you and your plants doing this winter? The colder months can offer a lot of peace in terms of less stress over an active garden; however, if you're like me, you have an unusual number of houseplants which, in the wintertime, require a whole lot of extra care for them to survive/thrive. Since we operate our small nursery out of the house, it's important that we provide our plants with the absolute best care possible during winter. That includes grow lights, humidifiers, and watering on a pretty consistent basis (especially if your heat has been cranking during our colder days). My advice to you for wintertime is to not stress about a yellowing leaf, a struggling plant, or a torn leaf. Allow yourself (and your plants) some space to breathe and enjoy a quieter time. They will bounce back with love/care (also means fertilizer) in springtime without fail. Lastly, enjoy the time with your plants inside and appreciate them for what they are: tropical plants growing wildly outside their normal climate preferences). It's quite fascinating that we're able to grow super unique plants outside of ideal circumstances all around the world. It teaches us about our environment and however despite living beyond their preferred climate, we can adapt our space and microclimates to help them thrive, even during the winter months.

Towards the end of 2025 we've been focusing primarily on our property and landscape plans for 2026. This includes adding 8 new galvanized metal raised beds to our property which are 8'x4'x2' and we couldn't be more excited. The vegetable garden got a HUGE upgrade! We filled these metal beds using the Hügelkultur method - this means using rotted logs, sticks, and larger debris at the bottom since they are so deep. We filled roughly 60-70% of the bed with logs, sticks, and then topped with old soil, semi-broken-down compost, and lots of leaves/browns from our backyard. Oh - don't forget about our Nursery investment in a new truck! This old truck has helped us finally be able to adequately acquire bulk loads of compost and potting soil so that makes things MUCH easier on everyone who helps us out! We used the truck to get LOTS of compost and filled the top 6-10 inches of each raised bed with fresh compost. 2 of these beds have already been planted and the others we are planning out with a lot of excitement for the 2026 garden!

Many of you ask us if we sell vegetable plants and our plan for 2026 is to offer a couple varieties and continually up-pot any excess we grow to offer for sale. This hasn't been 100% decided but you can guarantee at least one of those will be tomatoes!

Many of our neighbors have wondered what we'd be planting in the front bed we're building. This has been done with cardboard, garden scraps as browns/greens, and lots of fresh compost (see top left image above). For the in-ground planting area, our plan is to have a section be for asparagus and then as many other veggies as we can fit in; especially climbers to grow along the fencing of the entire bed. As an in-ground bed, I expect more problems, however after layering everything down heavily with compost, in 2 months we will be planting and I have a feeling this bed is going to do better than we ever imagined!

The greenhouse is FULL of plants - lots of new inventories sourced from my work travel across the country over the winter and thankfully transplanting in December hasn't shocked them TOO bad. Besides the Colocasia/alocasia - they get home and lose every leaf basically immediately. My hope for them is that they're not rotting beneath the soil. We shall see!

Lastly, we've got lots of small trees, shrubs, and more that can be great for your landscape and many of which that can be grown as Bonsai. This is an artform of growing plants I'm actively working to expand, especially for some uniquely beautiful trees like Larch, Redwood, and lots more.

We're grown a lot and learned even more in 2025. I expect (and certainly hope) that 2026 will continue to teach us more about providing plants and people what they need to thrive. And of course, for their gardens to thrive!

See you in the early Spring and we can't wait for our first sale!