Right on time

Behind the house Kirk Cekada grew up in, there is a beautifully-landscaped gazebo.

“My love of growing started right here,” Kirk says. “It used to be called ‘Kirk’s Clinic’ and it used to be a garden.”

The five-year-old Kirk would care for his plants in the “clinic” while his father, Mario Cekada grew and sold the trees at his fledgling nursery. Mario named it Rusty Oak Nursery for the orange fall foliage of the pin oaks that lined the driveway of the Valley City, Ohio home.

The house Mario and Karen Cekada raised their sons in is next to the finishing yard where trucks deliver shipments and are loaded to deliver Rusty Oak’s trees and shrubs from Medina County to wherever the customer may be. One of the business’ goals is providing what the customer needs when they need it.

Controlling the chaos

One thing Rusty Oak is known for is speed, Kirk says.

The landscape pickup yard is meticulously organized. Around 2 p.m. they start loading trucks with deliveries for the following day. The afternoons are a blur of tagging plants, pulling orders and loading trucks. It happens quickly by necessity.

“Most landscapers aren’t really well-planned, and maybe it’s not their fault, but you know they’re going to say ‘I’m going to be at this job tomorrow’ and we would prefer to deliver them than have them come here for a lot of reasons, one of them being that they need to be working. That’s how we get more trees in the ground, when they’re working.”

Nursery Management visited the nursery in early May, the only time of year you can see palm trees in the pickup yard. One section of the landscape pickup yard was devoted to about 150 Florida palm trees.

“It’s a very aggressive business,” Kirk says. “Pools, bars, beaches, there’s a lot of demand for it.”

The palms sell quickly, and won’t travel far. Most will be shipped within a 45-minutes radius of the nursery to wealthy customers who don’t mind dropping $300-$500 on an annual.

One of the crown jewels in the yard was a 35-year-old, 3,000-pound coconut palm tree for a special customer. Rusty Oak Nursery moves most of its large caliper trees with skid loaders. However, it does have a wheel loader that can handle trees up to 10,000 pounds.

Jesse Mechler works under Tomas Rivera, finishing yard foreman. Tomas has been with Rusty Oak for more than 20 years. All orders funnel through him and he spreads them out to the others, including Jesse.

“I try to control this chaos here,” Jesse says. “Organizing and loading up customers and getting them sent on their way, keeping things rolling.”

Kirk says new blood like Jesse is needed at the nursery. He has a lot of workers like Tomas, with 15-20 years under their belt. That amount of experience as a machine operator helps tremendously with all the work around the nursery and finishing yard. It’s not necessarily that they can’t do the physical work anymore, but that knowledge needs to be passed down to the next generation.

“If you have a good operator, it lightens the physical load for everyone else,” Kirk says.

Jesse is in his third year at Rusty Oak, and he’s learned a lot, especially from Tomas. He watches how Tomas approaches a task and has picked up a few tricks to work smarter.

“I’ve noticed doing the right thing the first time saves you a lot of headaches in the long run,” he says.

The finishing yard is more than a standard landscape pickup yard. Irrigation, fertilization and spraying happens there, so the plants continue growing there through the season. Next to the finishing yard is the container growing operation.

Charlie Bailey is container supervisor at Rusty Oak Nursery. He’s in charge of growing and pricing all the container material at Rusty Oak. Charlie was a childhood friend of Chad and Kirk who grew up with them on the farm. After a stint in the Army, he wanted a change and asked if he could come back to work at the nursery.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

“My dad always taught us that you can try anything you want,” he says. “Just see it through. It doesn’t always have to work, plenty of our stuff hasn’t worked.”

Kirk enjoys trying to figure out a better way to maximize the nursery’s space. One of Kirk’s experiments is interplanting slow-growing trees and fast-growing shrubs.

About four years ago he started interplanting viburnum, which finish in about one and a half years, between a slower-growing tree like Ginkgo that “doesn’t get a big head.”

Canopy size is an important factor in this plan. Although land is at a premium, Kirk doesn’t want to plant his trees too closely together. He believes the benefits of fitting more trees in a row don’t outweigh the negatives of the trees’ canopies suffering from tight spacing. So by planting a viburnum in between each tree, he creates effective spacing.

“That allows the shade tree to be in the ground a bit longer with a bigger canopy before it touches its neighbor,” he says. “The shrubs take up the base and the trees take up the top. It seems like a perfect union to me.”

He’s experimented with other shrubs in between as well. He has several rows of Green Giant arborvitae in between shade trees.

It’s a calculated risk. Most of the interplanted shrubs are lower-cost plants. The shade tree liners are $25-$30 each and require a lot of time and money before they’re sold. The Green Giants cost him about $2 per plant and are able to be sold much faster. If they end up getting in the way of the more expensive trees they share a row with, they’ll be harvested and sold.

A few rows over, Kirk is interplanting Taxus with trees, but in that case all of the trees will be dug before the Taxus.

“People are back into Taxus again, but they want big ones – 4-5 feet,” he says.

That will take time. It will be five, six, maybe seven years from now when they are ready. The trees interspersed in the rows with them will all be harvested and sold by then.

There are drawbacks, as well. Having two different plants with different needs in the same row mixes up the nursery’s spray schedule.

A fertilizer alternative

Most farms Rusty Oak’s size would use thousands of tons of fertilizer each year, or at least thousands of pounds, Kirk says. But he uses 20-30 tons, almost entirely in Charlie’s container production.

In the field growing, Kirk tries to use as little fertilizer as possible. Instead, he brings in leaves, grass and manure. It’s common to see several 20-foot high and wide piles in the field. They are turned every two weeks, and break down into a compost that spreads easily. By incorporating manure into the field, he’s able to replenish the nutrients that leave with every root ball dug and shipped out of Rusty Oak Nursery.

“Every year when you dig, you take out more ground and topsoil,” Kirk says.

Kirk remembers listening to Tim Brotzman, owner of Brotzman’s Nursery in Madison, Ohio, talk about the importance of organic matter in the soil. Kirk was about 18 years old and the nursery was in no position to make that move, but the idea piqued his interest.

It was years later when the opportunity came to try it himself. Rusty Oak Nursery had just purchased a large parcel of land adjacent to its original field and was readying it for production when Kirk received a call from a horse farm manager who needed to get rid of a massive pile of manure. After checking it out, Kirk had multiple semi trucks cycle back and forth between the farms, delivering in the manure. Kirk spread it out throughout the new nursery, and mirrored a two-year-old planting from the original farm. Even though those trees had a two-year head start, the trees from the manure-fortified field were ready to dig sooner.

“It changed my entire view of how to do this, fertilizer, synthetics,” Kirk says.

There are a lot of horse farms near Rusty Oak with nowhere to dump their manure. Although it’s a little work for both sides, it’s a win-win. The horse farms get to clear their waste product and Kirk gets manure that helps his plants grow faster and have a strong, spongy root system. Kirk estimates he receives 150 semi-truck loads of manure per year.

Conventional wisdom in field growing says to let the ground rest in between digging and planting cycles.

“I don’t have the ground to let rest or the patience,” Kirk says. “So what I do is I pile the manure and I let that rest.”

While the manure sits in its pile, it breaks down. By putting the organic matter right into a field after it’s been dug, Kirk is essentially planting a field that’s rested.

Many growers use a cycle of cover crops to refresh their fields. Kirk does, as well, but the cycles are shorter. At Rusty Oak, he plants radishes and turnips in August. He says if they’re planted in an area with manure on the ground, they do an excellent job of breaking the hardpan with their deep taproots growing straight down. Then once winter comes and kills them off, the plant decomposes leaving a funnel through the hardplan and the manure. This essentially drills a pilot hole for the next round of trees to be planted.

From Abies to Zelkova

Tons of trees, from large specimen options to small caliper trees just getting started, all grow well with the manure and organic matter Kirk uses to fertilize the fields at Rusty Oak Nursery. Customers looking for an instant landscape can find it in Rusty Oak’s fields. The nursery has a 72-inch tree spade that is capable of moving a 5,000-pound root ball.

Kirk says evergreens are a big part of the business, including Green Giants, Norway spruce and Douglas fir.

“People love evergreens… anything that basically blocks their neighbors,” he says.

He also sells a lot of Acer rubrum, particularly the J. Frank Schmidt & Son Co. cultivars Red Sunset and October Glory. He says Autumn Blaze, an A. x freemani, is another standout.

He’s been selling a lot of crabapples this year, he says, including one Rusty Oak Nursery is hoping will replace the Callery pear.

Starting in Jan. 2023, the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) is illegal to sell, grow or plant in Ohio. Two of most popular cultivars of the Asian native were ‘Bradford’ and ‘Cleveland Select.’ It was a big seller for Rusty Oak Nursery, in addition to nurseries across the Midwest. But its fast growth and dense branching structure led to branch breakage. Also, though bred to be sterile, numerous cultivars were able to cross-pollinate with each other, and the tree proliferated, developing a reputation as invasive.

Customers are looking for a tree to fill the same niche of the Callery pear, which was a favorite of landscapers for its adaptability and flowering. Rusty Oak Nursery is growing Starlite crabapple, which Kirk thinks could be an excellent substitute for the banned tree. Starlite offers white flowers, a similar growth and habit to Callery pear, even a similar leaf.

Rusty Oak does grow some trees and shrubs in containers. Kirk says wind is a problem but he uses a post and cable system to keep them from blowing over. He also has irrigation and fertilizer lines on the cables, and both are automated. The trees only stay in the pot for 18 months. If they aren’t sold by then, he’ll move them into the field.

“Compared to Willoway or any of those large nurseries, we’re small potatoes,” Kirk says. “But that’s fine. I don’t need to be the biggest guy on the block. We’re not looking for that. We’re just doing what we do, supplying our customers what they’re looking for.”

For more: www.rustyoak.com