***NOTE: We are open for visits by appointment only***
Native Plants That You Can Eat!
Native Foods Nursery specializes in rare, native edible plants for the Sustainable Gardener. Our resilient perennials have been carefully chosen for greatest edibility and landscape beauty, as well as natural low-maintenance and ease of care. We are an Oregon mail-order nursery with additional services in edible home-landscape design and install.
Our vision is to team up with Western gardeners to re-grow a truly sustainable regional landscape. We believe gardening with native, edible plants will help transform our region’s cities and suburbs into resilient, life-sustaining ecosystems - ones that provide nutritious food, clean air and water, a stable climate, and a home for our wildlife.
Our mission is to grow and share the plants we’ll need - easy to grow edible perennials, native to our region - while reconnecting people to Nature through education and consultation in native gardening and native food uses. We believe that together we can repair the Earth and nourish ourselves - one yard at a time.
As gardeners, it's time to realize that we're playing a critical role in climate change, native plant and wildlife survival, national food security, and the resiliency of our communities. Our choices on how to steward our small pieces of land make massive differences in our collective future - so, feel empowered!
You can now increase native biodiversity in your own backyard AND get a satisfying harvest too! Join the movement by bringing nature home to your backyard - order a native, edible plant today!
Our Plants
We offer over 70 different species of native, edible plants in 5 different sizes. Each of them is well-cared for using organic methods at our nursery site and nature sanctuary in Dexter, Oregon. When you order and receive a plant from our online store (in our biodegradable packaging), your plant will arrive in one of the biodegradable Eco-Pots shown below. Plant the whole pot - it fertilizes your plant and reduces stress on roots.
Our Nursery Owner
Native Foods Nursery is a team effort that’s way bigger than us. It’s a strand in a vibrant web of native ecologies, adventurous gardeners, passionate educators, skilled wildcrafters and nurserymen, and a swelling grassroots movement towards true sustainability and resiliency in the Northwest. We are honored to be part of the new paradigm of sustainable gardening!
Justin Michelson
Justin Michelson is a Northwest native, deeply inspired by the region’s plants and ecosystems. He weaves this foundational connection to Nature through his work as a horticulturist, educator, non-profit director, wildcrafter, and meditation teacher. For Justin, Native Foods Nursery is, at it’s root, a celebration of our collective belonging to the natural world and our ancestral heritage of living in balance with the Earth. He envisions that gardening with native edibles will return our region’s cities and suburbs to rich and resilient, life-sustaining ecosystems once again. He is humbled and honored to be stewarding and sharing these native plants that have been crucial partners in creating sustainable human culture for thousands of years. Justin is the founder of Native Foods Nursery, Nature's Heart Retreats, and was the Land Steward at Lost Valley Education and Event Center in Dexter, OR for many years.
Land Acknowledgement:
We are humbled and honored to dwell and operate on the ancestral lands of the Nations whose current lands we call Oregon including the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw, the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians, the Coquille Indian Tribe, and the Klamath Tribes.
Honoring the Native American Peoples of this region
We humbly acknowledge the great debt that we have to the Native American peoples of this region. Across the region, there are dozens of unique tribes, whose collective history in this landscape is thousands of years old. These peoples, both present and past, have developed intimate relationships with all of these native plants, and have great knowledge of their uses and benefits. We have drawn upon some of this knowledge in our plant descriptions, and in building our relationship with these plants. For this, we are deeply humbled and grateful.
These wise peoples are not gone. They are still present, and their cultures and wisdom live on actively throughout the Northwest, even amidst great and enduring hardship. They have undergone centuries of systematic cultural genocide, dislocation, and various forms of physical, mental, and social abuse, and yet remain. We have spoken with several members of tribes within the region. Those members have expressed their consent for us to display some indigenous knowledge about these plants.
Our nursery does not assume to represent or speak for native peoples or their experience, or wish to appropriate or profit from their cultures. We intend to share the beauty and magic of these native plants with more and more people, so that we may all begin to feel our authentic connection with this Earth and this region, and begin to care for it better - as Native Americans have and continue to do. We take inspiration from their connection to these plants and places, and hope to pay it forward.
On behalf of the tragic confusion of our white ancestry, we ask for forgiveness for the harms that have been done, and for those that continue to this day. We pray for the restoration of Indigenous cultures and their wisdom that is so greatly needed at this time on this Earth. May these peoples be listened to, honored, and supported. As a native plant nursery, we are choosing to donate 1% of our proceeds to support local tribal restoration efforts, as part of a necessary reparation process. We invite you to do the same.
Native Hope is a national 501c3 organization that work to repair and restore Native American communities
https://pages.nativehope.org/donate
We at the nursery continue to forge our own unique relationships with these plants and this beautiful region we also now call home. We devote ourselves to learning to return to our interconnectedness to Nature again and again through the practice of working with these special and sacred plants. We ask that you, as truly sustainable gardeners and customers, do the same.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
With humility and respect,
Native Foods Nursery