Rusty Mangrum Nursery preparing to celebrate 40 years in business
When Rusty Mangrum recently built a new house, he wanted to plant shade trees in the yard – magnolia, serviceberry, ‘Autumn Blaze’ red maple. To find the trees, he didn’t have to go far. He picked them right out of his own nursery.
Mangrum has been growing bare root fruit and shade trees in McMinnville, TN, since the late 1980s. He grew up in a farming family and during high school worked at area nurseries. He was still in high school when he started his business, rooting trees in sand beds. He was a high school senior when he built his first greenhouse, 17-by-96 feet.
“That first summer after high school, my girlfriend, Janice – who later became my wife – and her best friend helped me stick cuttings in the greenhouse,” Mangrum recalled.
“The following year we started propagating plants out in the field. Since then we have always grown a two-year-old grafted plant out in the field.”
Today Mangrum grows several hundred thousand fruit and shade trees on 100 acres of nursery land, spread over several noncontiguous, non-irrigated parcels. He is a first-generation nurseryman, starting from humble roots and growing slowly, with the help of Janice and what today is a team of 11 full-time employees, including eight seasonal H-2A workers.
Maintaining a reliable workforce is the biggest challenge Mangrum faces. This past autumn his seasonal H-2A workers, who normally arrive in November, arrived three weeks late due to the government shutdown.
The inventory mix at Mangrum’s nursery is about 70% fruit trees and 30% shade trees. He grows apples, apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, persimmons and many other fruit tree varieties. For his own consumption, he favors Asian persimmons, particularly when they are air-dried into a product called hoshigaki, a flavorful, chewy treat with a white natural sugar coating.
The shade trees he grows include oaks, redbuds, magnolias, maples, zelkovas and many more. For a complete inventory check his website at www.rustymangrumnursery.com. Buyers come from all over the country but primarily east of the Mississippi, and include garden centers, nurseries, orchards and individual buyers.
Most propagation is chip bud (performed by a local contract operation) onto rootstock purchased from Oregon and Washington growers. Mangrum uses a lot of M106 and M111 rootstock for his fruit trees. He maintains a scionwood orchard on his farm for propagation.
Shipping occurs from November through March, with product going first to buyers in the south, to match their climate. (The late arrival of his H-2A workers this year definitely was a challenge.)
In recent years Mangrum has seen a trend of retail nurseries buying bare root trees, containerizing them and then selling them the following autumn or spring. In the shade tree industry, he’s also seen an uptick in demand for upright and columnar trees which will fit on smaller building lots. Fruit tree buyers prefer varieties which are disease resistant.
Over the decades Mangrum has seen increased demand for shade tree when the economy is good. When the economy is down, there’s stronger demand for fruit trees.
Jim Mitchell, of Mitchell’s Nursery & Greenhouse in Pinnacle, NC, said about Mangrum’s trees, “We like the quality of his trees. They do well for us.”
by Karl H. Kazaks
