Watauga County Cooperative Extension will once again be holding its spring fruit plant sale. All orders should be prepaid by March 28th, to be picked up on April 11th and 12th. Details on ordering are also on the Plant Sale order form below.

2025 Fruit Plant Sale order form fillable

2025 Fruit Plant descriptions final

2025 Apple Chart 2025 Fruit Plant descriptions final

• Printed Order Forms are available at our office at 971 W. King St.

Placing Your Order:

• All orders must be prepaid with either a check made out to Watauga County or cash brought in person.
• If paying with cash, please have correct change as we do not have access to cash. We’re sorry we can’t take credit cards. As a state institution it is still difficult and expensive. Once we receive the payment for your order it will be processed by a Master Gardener, who will email you a confirmation.

• Mail your order to: Watauga Extension Service 971 W. King St. Boone NC 28607 or
• Drop off at our office: Please drop orders in the box marked “Fruit Plant Sale” in our front office, a Master Gardener will enter the orders as they are received and paid for, and then will email you a confirmation and a receipt along with a scanned copy of your order.
• Email order form: wataugamastergardener@gmail.com This is really to help people who don’t have printers and want to email their order after hours. You will still need to mail or drop off your check. Your order will not be entered and confirmed until we receive your payment. Make sure the check has the same name as the form you emailed so we know which order it goes with.

Order Confirmation:

• Receipt and a copy of order will be emailed to confirm your order has been received and processed.
• Availability of plants: Once we sell out of an apple variety we can’t get more. We sometimes need to make substitutions, especially towards the end of the sale. Before mailing a check, please look at our website where we will list items we have sold out of (sometimes many orders arrive the same day so we still can run out even though the website says we still have an apple, we process them in the order they came in and so the best we can!). We do try to contact you if we feel like we don’t have a substitute that is very similar. If you aren’t willing to take a substitute, please be sure to check “no substitutes” on your order form.

**Note we are selling 3 gal blueberries due to hurricane related nursery losses of 1 gal plants. The plants are nice and we think that we are selling them for a reasonable cost. As a bonus you should have blueberries sooner! Our costs from our suppliers have gone up but we kept most prices the same for this year. All proceeds go back into our horticulture program, allowing most programs we offer to be free to the public. We also do many community service projects and fund youth programming. Thanks for supporting our sale.

More information on growing these plants or to watch online recorded classes

Please email any questions to wataugamastergardener@gmail.com

More detailed descriptions are on the link above but in case you can’t open it, here is a summary of the info:

The semi-dwarf heirloom apples we are selling this year were custom-grafted for us in the summer of 2023. The top is 1.5 year old and the bottom is 2.5 years old. They will be all be toped at about 4ft tall. (this encourages the first set of branches). We are selling them for $24. The varieties will be:

Other offerings will be:

• 2 varieties of thornless blackberries to include 1 floricane and 1 primocane cultivar for the longest season and most flexibility. They will be $9 per greenhouse grown plant. The plants have gone through a process that removes viruses, something which balckberries often carry. Greenhouse grown blackberries are less likely to have soil borne pathogens than plants raised in the ground. They will be $9, and will look like the photo below, but dormant (no leaves)

The Black raspberry will also come this same way and is a variety called ‘Niwot’ that has minimal thorns and can be cut the the ground for a late summer/fall crop or can be trained to produce an earlier summer crop.

•  2 varieties of strawberry, in bundles of 25 bare root. “Sparkle’ a junebearing variety, ($13) and ‘San Andreas’ a day neutral variety. 
• 2 cultivars of red primocane raspberry that will offer the longest season of fruit production. (Primoccane varieties are the easiest to be successful with, as they can be cut to the ground each fall for late summer/fall fruit production. A more advanced technique would be to overwinter canes and prune in a way that allows for a summer crop, so you can be successful either way. We will not sell yellow cultivars this year due to increasing quantities we need to order to get reasonable pricing. They will be $7 for a bare root plant that can produce some limited fruit the first year. 
• 4 cultivars of high bush blueberries sold in 3 gal pots. They will be about 2 -3  ft. tall and will be $20. 
•  ‘Thomcord’ grape, a seedless cultivar that offers disease resistance to high levels of disease. While they taste like Concord only more mellow and also feature and edible skin rather than a skin that must be discarded. They will be 2 year old plants that are bare root for $9.00. Last but not least why not consider planting
• Asparagus, one of the few perennial vegetables. We will sell 12, 2 year old crowns, bare root for $16 per bundle.