Why Us?
Our Company Mission Statement:
It is our company’s mission as a nursery to be a trustworthy and reliable source of high quality plants, superior plant material, seeds and other products while offering excellent customer service, accurate information and an exceptionally positive retail experience.
Why buy your fruiting plants and trees from us?
To start with, we are a hard-working American family-owned and operated Naturally Grown farm and nursery specializing in fruit trees and fruiting/edible perennials. This is what we do. We grow, trial, research and test over 100 varieties of fruits and over 25 species of edible plants on our productive farm. When you buy your trees and plants from us, you are not only buying the plant. We in turn provide high-quality, trustworthy information and timely, effective customer service. Via this website, we provide free, in-depth and accurate, trustworthy information on the plants and species we sell that you cannot easily just find browsing random websites on the Internet. Our accurate information will help you decide which fruit trees and plants make the most sense for you.
Now you have an internet mail-order nursery you can TRUST.
We aim to be not only reliable and trustworthy but to deliver healthy, true to type plants that will succeed in your planting. There’s just simply too many unscrupulous and low-quality internet mail order nurseries out there, and it’s really frustrating. Who wants to trust a business, pay your hard-earned money for a promising plant or tree, and in return receive something half-dead, not true to type or damaged, and then get no response from the nursery when you reach out? We don’t do this, EVER.
Buying fruit trees at big box stores, random nurseries and Internet sites? Seriously?
If you buy your fruit trees from one of the big box stores or another nursery that “just happens to also sell fruit trees,”then you never know what you’re getting. Try asking any of their employees for information on a particular fruit tree variety or species and see what happens. At the big corporate stores we’ve also seen numerous misidentified or regionally-inappropriate fruit trees and plants for sale that would have no chance of thriving (or sometimes even surviving one winter) where they were being sold to unaware customers. But don’t worry, they have a 1 year guarantee!
Guaranteed to FAIL
We’ve also heard nightmare stories of people who bought $1000.00+ in fruit trees from unscrupulous online scam nurseries and everything was dead on arrival to their door. Then, no one ever answers when calling or emailing their “customer service.” Or, once planted out they found out they received the wrong species altogether, with no hope of getting a refund or exchange because there is zero customer service or even communication after your money is in their hands!
That will never happen with us.
We take great care to make sure all of our fruit trees and plants are high-quality, correctly labeled and living, viable specimens. We are familiar with each plant’s growth habit and cultural requirements and we provide that information accurately.
Our niche is your edible backyard or small farm
Our fruit nursery is designed primarily to meet the needs of people looking to grow fruit organically or with very low spraying. Ascertaining what exactly to offer the public in this regard has taken us over a decade of serious research, experimentation, traveling to farms, and initiating trial plantings. Blake has been working with fruit growing, trialing different varieties, experimenting with species and trying new strategies for close to 20 years. That extensive knowledge and experience benefits you every time you choose to buy our plants and trees- they’ve been very carefully selected. Whether you’re a backyard grower or a small market farmer, we’re here for you.
Every plant we sell is grown in the USA, many by us here at our nursery. Every plant we sell is guaranteed 100% GMO free!
Our aim is your success and satisfaction
Our aim is to help YOU turn your backyard, homestead or farm into a productive, healthy, happy, sacred place of peace and abundance. We want you to succeed and our strategy is to supply you with superior plants, better information and personal, meaningful, real customer service as well as follow-through. If something goes wrong along the way, we step up and make it right.
Excellent, honest and timely customer service with accurate and timely follow-through is our approach to doing business with you.
Beautiful, healthy and productive plants from our hands to yours is our mission.
Allow us to help you create your own Peaceful Heritage and edible backyard paradise. Thank you for trusting us with your planting.
Blake Cothron is the owner and creator behind Peaceful Heritage Nursery LLC.
He is also the host for the Bluegrass Permaculture Guild, where free online and in-person classes and meetups are held. You can also find him on Instagram.
Blake’s 2024 Speaking Schedule:
January 25th OAK Conference workshops
Our Story
(in short!)
We are passionate about organic fruit growing, organic farming, helping heal our planet and assisting communities grow food through providing education, quality resources and superior plants for organic farming and gardening.
We are a small, 100% family-owned and operated, Naturally Grown, permaculture-oriented plant nursery located in Stanford, Kentucky, USA. We are a small, organic family farm, Limited Liability business. The owner, Blake has been gardening since the late 1990s when he started as a boy growing on his parent’s large suburban lot, and has been directly working with fruit trees for over 20 years. He is a native of Kentucky and has traveled to many distant places learning techniques and practicing agriculture and horticulture.
Blake had a dream for many years to start an organic farm. In the beginning he worked menial urban jobs and saved every penny, in order that a foundation could be laid down. All the while small steps were being made to start a the farm.
The dream became a reality in early summer of 2014 when he found a small property available. We soon moved to the foothills of Appalachia to set down roots on a mountainside and subsequently carved a farm and nursery out of it. It was extremely challenging work but we stayed positive, slowly starting earning money, and kept with it.
Since then, through many years of extremely hard work and dedication we have, taken this business from a backyard enterprise to a serious nursery servicing thousands of people all over the country and even internationally.
Blake has published a few books on organic agriculture (available here) He also creates free videos and educational materials on the topics of sustainable agriculture and growing organic fruit crops and has a youtube channel under the nursery name. Blake is frequently asked to speak at conferences and also gives classes and live lectures, including for Cornell University and Kentucky State University.
In March 2017 we relocated our farm and nursery from rugged and mountainous Appalachian Kentucky to a nearby fertile valley with much flatter, more amicable land. Our farm is now located in the peaceful, fertile hills of Stanford, KY. This new site is allowing us to expand our orchards, nursery, and plantings to provide more and better products to you. The soil is a deeper silt-loam, ideal for orchards and nursery operations. We have cleaned the site up and continue to plant many hundreds of orchard and native trees, fruits, perennials and berries. We have experimented with diverse farming and gardening techniques as well as new farm technology.
We are also in the early stages of establishing a pawpaw orchard to provide material for our nursery as well as chemical-free, delicious, fresh pawpaw fruit. In 2019-2022 we added around 200 new pawpaw trees to the orchard and now have pawpaws setting fruit. Also in 2020 we initiated our chemical-free honeybee apiary to provide raw organic honey, organic bee products and services. In 2020-2022 we started our new fig and mulberry variety trials to find superior mulberry and fig cultivars for the upper southeast USA.
We continue to innovate, identify, and create new opportunities for growers and families wanting to produce organic food.
Our Nursery Promise
Our Promise is that we will only sell the very best personally hand-selected fruit trees and berry plants possible, of the very best cultivars we have access to. We never intentionally ship out diseased, distressed, stunted, damaged, or half-dead plants like, (unfortunately), many other online nurseries routinely do. Thousands of hours of book and internet research, over a decade of trial and error, on-site grow trials, conversations with other growers and university publication study goes into selecting what plants and cultivars we offer and why. We personally hand-pack and ship every order ourselves and aim to provide excellent customer service and follow-through, every time.
Fruit trees are what we do! Blake has worked with and extensively studied fruit trees and orchards for over 17 years. He has been employed in 3 different plant nurseries across the US, two of which specialized in fruit trees. He has worked for entire seasons managing organic orchards (sometimes of many acres) in Kentucky, California, tropical Hawai’i, Missouri, Mississippi, and also has experience working with fruit trees and plantings in Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, and Indiana. He has spent thousands of hours studying stacks of books on orchards, fruit trees and organic agriculture, and countless hours doing internet research studying University materials and other reliable sources of information. He knows fruit trees extremely well, and brings that experience to this nursery as the co-owner/operator! All that to say, you can take calm confidence in our products and our expertise with fruit trees.
We specialize in finding, propagating and selling superior fruiting plants including heirloom fruit trees, selected superior and grafted pawpaw trees, hardy fruiting shrubs, berry vines, and perennial plants that perform exceptionally well in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and warmer parts of the Mid-Western USA. Our nursery focuses on these areas and outside these areas our selections may not be the best choices for you.
Our plants also will thrive in many other areas, but our focus is on this little-served and sometimes challenging fruit-growing region of the Southeastern USA.
OUR I.T. TEAM
Our website has been skillfully built and managed by 4site Advantage. They have been great to work with. Derrick Thomas is the owner and does a great job!
If you are looking for reliable website building, I.T help, website security or hosting click the link below.
Why Support Our Nursery:
Unlike the big-box tree nurseries that fumigate hundreds of acres of soil with deadly, toxic chemicals, utilize underpaid migrant labor, employ neonictinoids (bee-killing chemicals), and destroy soil ecology with giant machinery, we do not do any of those things. See our Environmental Commitment here : https://peacefulheritage.com/our-environmental-commitment/
When you support our family farm business you are helping to secure, de-centralize and diversify your own local food supply, increase your quality of life as well as provide a living wage income to our nursery company. You are also bringing in wealth and goodness to Lincoln County, KY, an economically depressed area of Central KY with many social problems which small diversified family farming, permaculture farming and organic agriculture could help alleviate. We are putting your dollars into achieving these local goals.
Pictured above is an extremely rare, locally fruting English/Carpathian walnut tree we discovered in 2016 in Danville, KY. These types of trees do not usually produce nuts in our entire region. We saved this tree by taking cuttings and propagating it. The mother tree pictured here was destroyed in 2018 and is now gone forever. That’s an example of the kind of work our nursery undertakes.
While we are far from perfect, it is our aim to serve you with exceptionally high-quality plants, trees and excellent customer service. We thank you for your kind support and hope we can abundantly serve your garden, orchard and small farm needs for many years to come.
Please Note:
WE RESPECTFULLY REQUEST THAT YOU DO NOT ATTEMPT TO “DROP-IN” OR VISIT OUR HOME AND FARM UNANNOUNCED. WE ARE A FULL-TIME, WORKING, FAMILY FARM AND NURSERY AND WE CANNOT STOP TO GIVE UNSCHEDULED TOURS. Thanks for your interest, but that is simply not practical for us!
PLEASE UNDERSTAND, WE ALSO DO NOT HAVE A STOREFRONT. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PICKING UP NURSERY PLANTS OR PRODUCE PLEASE CALL US TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT SEVERAL DAYS IN ADVANCE. WE WILL BE VERY HAPPY TO SCHEDULE YOU IN FOR PICKUPS OR PRODUCE SALES. THANKS!