You and Your Sandcherry Empire

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

Have you ever gone for a hike and discovered some interesting fruit along a trail somewhere? It’s a common experience. Such is the case for Prunus pumila or sandcherry found on the dunes of the Great Lakes. The trails that wind their way through the dunes often have large colonies of this plant growing in pure sand hanging out with bearberry and juniper. They self root as they go along and tolerate being unearthed by wind and water as the roots become stems and vice versa. It is a tough little cherry. Most people do not eat the sandcherry fresh and when they do, they find it is too astringent and difficult to snack on like a normal cherry. It creates a very dry feeling in your mouth. Vast amounts of sugar will calm that down and people do make jelly from it. There is one recent selection of it in the landscape trade today used as a native groundcover. Fruit production is not considered a priority so ornamental selections are based on growth habits. Over the years my mission was to find other colors of fruit within this species as well as cultivate it as a fruit crop. Despite my extensive trail wandering on Lake Michigan, Huron and Superior I did not find new colors or types of fruit. But I did make plantings of it at my farm and found it was easy to cultivate and bring it into fruiting from seed. I even made jelly from the fruit too. It created a deep purple jelly with a very strong flavor. I still have a couple of plants at my farm today. At one point I had over thousand plants in several seed beds. Another planting was done using larger upright shrub forms I found along Lake Superior. They had a heavy fruit set and good quality fruit but still with that tang of tartness barely edible in the fresh state. The two species pumila and susquehanae are the ones found in the botanical literature. To me they are very difficult to separate botanically and look identical.

This individual plant was on the shoreline of northern Lake Michigan near Rogers City, Michigan. The remants of a sailboat rudder highlights the rocky shoreline as the perfect place for the sandcherry and not so much for the sailboat.

When I first ran into this plant in abundance and began looking more closely, I began to notice the different forms as well as the fruit quality. The forms went from flat 6 inch tall plants to shrubs to 3 foot tall. The fruit flavor was similar between the many plants I samples yet dramatically improves as the fruit ripens. It must very ripe on the shrub if you want the flavor with the lowest astringency and tartness. Under cultivation at my farm I was met with several surprises. The plants grew very fast up to 5 feet in one year and had heavy production of fruit in the second year.  There was no need to make selections based on individual plants as the species was super heavy in production with very uniform fruiting between all the different plants.  All of the fruit was of good quality under cultivation. The astringency diminished under cultivation with water and fertilizer. This paves the way for cultivation as a species without need for cultivars.

This form was found on Lake Superior and was over 3 foot tall.

The cost of this precocity was the plants were short lived rarely growing past 3 years old. The fruiting stems in particular fail quickly before needing replacement. It is a one and done type of survival on the dunes. It reminded me of raspberries in many ways. This production scenario has been influenced by conditions set in stone on an ecological stage in the dune environment.  You do not have to breed that out. You can harness that power by managing the root systems and generate new plants quickly from seed.  I am sure the yields could be done commercially for jelly and syrup. Despite its short life, it would be easy to grow in a vineyard type fashion. The question remains who would eat this and why? This is where the research should lie in terms of its culinary possibilities. This species is similar in some ways to the higher elevation sour cherries, Prunus cerasus where the fruit size is very tiny and super tart. I grew that for a while and found it had more stone than pulp.

I like the sand cherry. It is a healthy plant growing in barren sand in dry, hot and windy conditions. Few woody plants can survive the dune environment to begin with. A nursery I worked at early in my career had a huge field of its cousin the Western sand cherry, Prunus besseyi. It suffered tremendously from mildew. Within that gene pool were yellow, red and orange fruited plants. Some of my fellow employees would go out during lunch and snack on them while trying to find the best flavored ones. The rumor was the yellow ones were quite good. The owner of the nursery had planted several thousand plants. They were originally grown by huge state-owned wholesalers which called them Improved Hansens bush cherry used in the conservation trade. It still is used a little for rootstock.

It will take you and an empire of sandcherry lovers to establish this Michigan plant for future fruit growers. Having cultured your love of the plant along with your ability to share it with others will make this a reality. No dunes required.

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

Sandcherries are self fertile. In my first cultivated planting, the yields were huge compared to the wild plants I have seen on the beach. Having genetically different plants was a great benefit. The pollinators include honeybees, bumblebees and hoover flies.

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Small Potato in a Big Universe

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment


I’ve always been fascinated by the potato plant. Every year on vacation while driving to the upper peninsula in Michigan with my family we took a route that happened to be surrounded by potatoes in full flower on both sides of the road. “Look kids, potatoes” Silence. No one said anything. I have shared my experiences with complete strangers about my love of potatoes. It is not a great opener. I remember at one point just prior to speaking about some of my plants at a farm show, several people got up and walked out just prior to when I began. One was a research scientist. This highlights several problems both in understanding crop biodiversity and ways to capture that essence outside of the modern breeding paradigm free from restrictions and protocols. I find it exciting and dynamic. It’s hard to convey and even harder to explain. The potato is not thought of as a glamorous vegetable. To have ‘nature’ do the breeding is my goal. Today there is no shortage of potato varieties and potato breeding. That is why there is silence and apathy in many ways. May I also add it is quite possible I have yet to find a way to convey this importance in a more exhuberant way. I mean you can’t blame the potato for this.

Fruits of the potato from the variety ‘Purple Ease’, a reliable fruiter.


It is a joy to grow potato seedlings from true seeds extracted from the poisonous fruit. I just don’t understand why the marketplace is so impossible to go into and release new varieties. I am out of the loop. It turns out that the universe of the potato is sharply defined and rarely changes. Only people ‘in the know’ accept a new potato variety. You can spew out new spuds like no tomorrow; you just can’t expect people to acknowledge your contribution. They are very busy, bending to the commercial demands of an industry well entrenched with expert breeders. It is a one per 100,000 shot at stardom from numbered seedlings to named variety. Huge resources are needed to make this a reality and even then the highway of potato development is littered with the cultivars of yesteryear. However, this is also a perfect place to be in terms of discoveries because everyone else is focused on only what will please the potato industry. The plant breeders themselves are also highly defined and regimented, limiting choices even further. It is from this platform you can redefine the value of this most widespread food plant. That is the contribution you can make. You might feel like a small potato in a big universe. It is not left to chance. It is left to your creative energies and a way to find the expressions adapted to your environment. This is your universe redefined and made to be shared to others creating health in its wake.

My solution was simple. I read nothing. I know nothing. I am nothing. I want pure subjective experience not objective knowledge of the potato, Solanum tuberosus. When I start, I am not really looking for a specific outcome. I want to look at all the wonderful treasures of diversity when I get there. So whether it is teeny or a pound each, dark purple or white, it does not matter much. I am not going to pick the brightest or biggest jewel and run off with my find. I am trying to create a population not a variety. If one comes along, that is fine but it is less important to me. Last year, I relinquished and released one I named Tranquility. Tranquility had the trait of incredibly dense root hairs as well as high yields and short season prior to virus infection. It takes a population that expands and flourish over time free of disease, insects and virus in a less than perfect potato world where spray is not used to buffer the countless things that also love the potato plant. Only a population can do that. In this way, generations get stronger over time by creating progeny that expand the potato’s adaptation to your environment. For me the population is the individual. It is potato consciousness reflecting the full range of the potato.

Here is an example of different seedling potatoes grown from true seed. The down side of this if you decide to continue by growing from tubers is the inflication of virus which carries over from year to year to the point where the plants become too weak to produce any sort of yield. That in itself whittles down the population greatly reducing the number of true seed bearing plants.

Just prior to the pandemic, I was trying to find a greenhouse in my area that would grow upwards to 50,000 seedling plants in blow molded trays just like marigolds. The idea was I could make available in bulk the seedling potatoes I developed as Perennial Perpetual Diversity Potato. You grow and sell it from true seed in a similar way slips of sweet potatoes are sold. To do this I contacted several greenhouse operators. I did find one smaller producer that would grow them given enough lead time. Because of the premium greenhouse space for other crops like pansy’s and petunias it was difficult to get my foot in the door. The potato seed would be best pelletized because it is so small. Most greenhouse companies in my area near Kalamazoo, Michigan are massive bedding plant operations and locked into one or two seed companies. They view my seed as potentially hazardous in that it has never been tested or used to any degree. It would be better to have another seed company set it up as pelletized and screened for virus. This was not an easy row to hoe.

Park Seed company offered Clancy and won an All American Vegetable in 2019. They also offered Zolushka, a true seed potato, that produced massive tubers in my plantings in one year. A company called Cultivariable has some of the most diverse seed and tuber offerings I have ever seen. I think he grew out the whole USDA potato seed repository! I grew the indigenous North American species called Four Corners potato. It was not adapted in Michigan. This was a common occurrence to me. The numerous related species potatoes did not survive long. I thought it was a good idea but eventually went back to my old standby diploids from the heritage blue potatoes. From what people have told me is that all modern potatoes are male sterile and no longer reproduce this way. Hence the bottleneck of crop biodiversity.

When potatoes fly is the only way to see the root strength and structure found within the soil. ‘Purple Ease’ has this structure which has held up over a decade of growing outdoors in many locations throughout my farm.

Healthy foliage is a must under heat, drought, virus and insect resistance. This is Purple Ease potato this spring.
Fertile flowers help in producing fruit and this one did not set. Bumblebees love these flowers. It appears they are the primary pollinators. Other species of perennial horse nettle in the Solanaceum family also flower at the same time and are used by bumblebees.
A bouquet of flowers from the Feral variety. From all these flowers only one fruit will set. Yet one fruit can contain hundreds of tiny seeds. So one is good.

The potato still has a story to tell and will continue long after I am gone. It is a lot more exciting than it lets on. The universe it lives in is huge and filled with wonderful diversity. I may have appointed myself as its reluctant spokesperson and proponent for now. Soon others will follow. They too will find themselves as a small potato in a big universe. I guess you could say humility breeds potatoes.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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A Canvas and Some Paint

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

A Story of Creative Forestry and “Sweeta” Wild Black Cherry-Prunus serotina

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A wildlife camera captures fawns is late April at the highest point on my farm.

It is very interesting to learn about the relationships people have with nature. I love hearing stories from people who farm and discover plants and animals. Some of the ideas people employ are very structured and defined depending on what they feel is important. When people visit my farm, they sometimes offer me advice. I am forever a student so I love to listen. Most everyone is open to new ideas about the world of edible plants. It is their recreation or as I like to say re-creation. If you look at the surrounding land next to my farm, it has changed over time based on who owned the land as well as what they wanted to do. I have one neighbor that is a commercial grape grower. Two neighbors have created huge yards of several acres of grass. One of the grassy neighbors built a stream and waterfall in his yard. One neighbor has a scrap yard filled with metal, old boats and abandoned cars. Another has a small lawn and has done essentially nothing other than plant some of the conservation district plants over fifty years ago. One neighbor has created a gun range amidst an ever expanding sassafras colony. I would say the landscape that has changed the least is the grape vineyard. There every vine and row is uniform and precise. Nothing has a chance there. The trade off is Concord grapes for Welches. Its delicious.

I am a bit surprised when I look out past my fence line because my farm is so radically different in vegetation than the surrounding homes and farms. Initially my farm was wide open grass and pasture. It was managed as a hayfield prior to me purchasing it and planting trees. Even today, it is still a good canvas for my plantings as I add to it. I do as little as possible and to gain the greatest amount in terms of yields of fruit and knowledge of future crops for use on a broader scale. It is one solution of many that could be applied to help future generations in the rough and tumble world of climate change by making resilient crops and orchards. It can be replicated and more importantly it can provide income with minimal resources while providing healthy crops to create healthy humans. The canvas can do miracles.

Early 1990’s nursery and field with tree tubes filled with chestnut and oak trees. The nursery soil has a hint of grape look to it because I used the grape pulp delivered to me from the Welches grape juice factory 3 miles away. The sawdust mulch I purchased came from nearby millls south of me from many different Amish wood mills and pallet factories.

Land use revolves around what the owner desires. Some have ideas but no plans. That was me more or less. I have no idea why someone needs a massive lawn but it does not matter. The owners like it clipped and manicured to various degrees. Recently one of my neighbors has begun to mow in a huge sweeping robust fashion. He has dropped the deck of his mower as low as it goes scalping the soil as he goes into his mow state of mind. hummmmm. I know at one point he fell into the trap of the burn mentality. This put him in the hospital due to smoke inhalation of which he stills suffers from today. It brought in the local fire department and destroyed over fifty persimmon trees on my farm along the border. It killed most of the trees and melted the tree tubes into a pile of goo. He had this idea of creating biodiversity in its wake. Instead it brought him sickness. Biodiversity did not arrive so he is now in the world of mow.. I keep thinking that this canvas he created by mega mowing is magnificently clean. It’s a nice canvas but no subject matter has yet appeared. It will likely remain blank until a future owner would likely see some possibilities and add to it. When he eventually stops, a huge array of plants will now have the chance to seed in and grow like crazy. Nature will go now, now, now with huge brushstrokes using all available seed resources within the soil and the plants surrounding his yard. Some of my plants could grow there. I noticed some of his viburnums growing under my walnuts. He has a large hedge of arrowwood viburnum, Viburnum dilatatum, so his landscape is contributing to mine. Some of his paint got on my canvas.

Tree tubes with hazels and chestnuts. Birch resistant to borers and hickory with thin shells.

Many times the existing landscape contains some great jewels you might not be aware of. Such is the case of the wild black cherries, Prunus serotina. It is the paint that drops from the sky as birds often carry the pits in their beaks as they strip off the fruit. It is one of the most common understory plants at my farm and is by far the tree that spreads the greatest of any single plant I have ever grown. Early in 1980, my pasture contained four nicely established black cherry trees. I limbed them upwards as they grew. They were in the middle of the fields on the hills isolated from one another. As time went on I could no longer climb or prune them. I put owl and kestrel boxes in them at first. After talking with another tree friend down the road, he commented that many of the black cherries in the area had fantastic strong upright growth habits with excellent branching. He too was using pole pruners and eliminating the often found narrow crotch angles so common with this species. He had found some of them had strong apical dominance and were easy to guide upwards. He kept those and removed weaker trees competing with his new idea of a black cherry woodlot. None of the trees he planted. They were growing in an abandoned vineyard. This inspired me. As a result, I began to take notice of one tree in particular and found the fruit to be delicious and non-astringent to the point it was possible to eat fresh off the tree without wincing. Eventually I made a delicious jam which tasted like a black cherry concentrate. Because of my voracious pruning, it became difficult to pick the fruit so now I have a way to shake certain branches to drop the fruit when it is ripe. Once I grew the South American subspecies of black cherry called “Capuli” . Winter froze them to the ground every year. They looked like peach trees. The Mexico origin plants have very large fruit and are harvested specifically for fresh eating and preserves. This particular subspecies has hybrids which could make for an entirely new orchard crop and combine with a high value lumber crop available from seed without making cultivars.

“Sweetaa” Wild Black Cherry=Selected specifically for its non-astringent fruit and straight growth habit.
“Sweetaa” Wild Black Cherry=Fruit size is slightly larger with higher fruit-seed ratio. Selected seedlings can be done from this individual as well for vigorous growth for timber production. Some seedlings from this group show great vigor in the two year first generation trees. This is the beginning of creating an ‘improved’ seed source all from this one tree.

There is a certain twist in the story and picture of the native black cherry. Prunus serotina is called a stable tetraploid. It shouldn’t exist and shouldn’t be able to reproduce. This is a problem in terms of explaining it in a scientific way with its genetic background. It is thought to be a natural hybrid of two unknown cherries but they two are non-existent and lost to evolutionary time. This tetraploid sticks out like a sore thumb in the ‘naturalness’ of the Prunus world. No one has been able to replicate it through the cross breeding of species and to top it off, it is native from South America all the way to Maine. When I consume the fruit off my “Sweeta” tree, I have the thought that maybe in the evolutionary past the cultivated sweet cherry we enjoy today as Prunus avium crossed with another widespread species the chokecherry, Prunus virginiana. It has the flavor of both species. This shows us a path to creating a healthy sweet cherry orchards in the future and answer the question of its genetic make up while providing a no-spray healthy fruit.

We can paint like nature and add to the portrait of this wonderfully diverse world we live in. Those plant resources no matter their origin add to the landscape in a way that far exceeds our ability to understand the connections plants make to themselves and the animals that live around them. Nothing in nature is hard core in a belief system stiffling creativity. That cherry shouldn’t exist the same way the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly. It can be whatever you want it to be. You can follow the course of adding plant resources in the form of paint. All else will follow your path. Good, not good or indifferent. You are the artist.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

Once a field, now a forest.
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Asparagii of Unknown Origins

Posted on May 28, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

For many years I was on the hunt for wild asparagus seeds for my nursery. I needed asparagii but only from seed. Not far from my nursery was a real life asparagus nursery which was 100 percent clonal. The asparagus industry is very specific in its varietal selections. Seed production is the opposite as only male plants are cloned. My idea was completely out of the loop. I was on the horn making calls and writing letters that required stamps. Asparagus seeds were hard to come by. In the meantime, I went Euell Gibbons “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” and collected wild seed in my area. I didn’t have to look far because I live in an area that produces commercial quantities of asparagus Because of this you will find wild asparagus along the roadsides the same way you would find wild sweet cherries. I had several very nice bird plantings of it at my farm. I grew the plants from seed and sold them as the ‘Very Wild’ asparagus. One of my farmer friends down the road brought me some beautiful five foot tall stalks filled with the bright red berries. The plants are either male or female and finding female plants with heavy berry set was not as easy as you might think. There was a fairly large bird dropped repository near a highway off ramp that I was eyeing but the plants were mowed and sprayed several times so I gave up that location. I heard a story of a truck driver getting a ticket for stopping along this same highway to pick wild asparagus. He too went Euell Gibbons and paid a price for his love of asparagus. Picking asparagus is not an emergency on a major highway and you can’t just stop because you found free vegetables. It was a sad day for stalking the wild asparagus.

Meditteranean Asparagus-Well known species asparagus

What I did find was that people around the world harvest wild asparagus. The exact species may vary a little depending on the location. It is widely appreciated and used for both medicine and food. It was the international global usage that attracted me to the plant as I began to investigate many other species and wild strains of the common asparagus. Here were a few:

Meditteranean Asparagus – Asparagus acutifolius

This evergreen species is one of the original wild selections known for its strong and desirable flavor. In Michigan it was not quite hardy enough to make it past a minus 20F winter. The Bulgarian seed source appeared to be the best. It needs a dry location and the polyhouse was not good for me despite being one zone warmer. A few plants did make it through the winter though. If I had a bigger population, I might try again. The problem lies in regulatory of which asparagus seed is forbidden to import. (It might of changed since I last checked into this 20 years ago.)

Asparageyser Asparagus – U.C. Hybrids Asparagus officinalis

These are numbered California selections and now widely available. They are grown from seed said to be disease and drought resistant. To me they were no more vigorous than my Michigan seed sources however I did not get them past fruiting age. I am currently replanting two of the numbered selections to try again. I am also planting it with other asparagus to try to make more vigorous crosses.

Death Valley Asparagus– Asparagus officinalis

This was a seed lot from J.L. Hudson, Seedsman found as wild plants in old homesteads in and around Death Valley, California. These wild populations were essentially let go to reproduce and spread. Some are over 100 years old. This type of population contains huge genetic resources for farmers today who grow asparagus commercially. I see nothing but good from these wild plants which are in the same camp as the I-94 truck driver plants in Michigan. This is a means of using valuable resources right in front of our faces where the weed becomes our salvation.

Vining Asparagus- Asparagus verticullatus

This particular species from Siberia did not like the heat in Michigan and kept going dormany early. This eventually weakened the plant to the point of no return. It was short lived at my farm. It is said to grow 15 feet tall. It too prefers a dry soil and would likely thrive in cold dry climates. I would try this again partly because of its immense size. I would love a 20 foot asparagus plant. Who wouldn’t?

Purple Dutch Asparagus officinalis

Overall this particular seed strain was very good. However, eventually some viral infection reduced it to rubble dramatically making it look like it was hit with herbicide. I’ve seen this before. Asparagus can be tricky to grow. One year you are swimming in spears and next year it is time to replant. This strain was not entirely purple. It has purple stripes in the lower portion of the cutting. It was a seed strain with potential due to its vigor and dark green healthy foliage.

Like any wild plant under cultivation, it takes several seed sources to really narrow the focus on what works best. The best way to accomplish this is to have larger volumes of seeds to create the future populations of this delicious and well known food plant. You could also create new varieties in the process but it takes a long time to find the sweet spot of cultivation, heavy yields, flavor and persistence in the field despite all the other insect and viral problems.

Asparagus has always been part of my pasture. Planting trees near it is difficult due to the thick stringy roots. This plant is at least 30 years old now part of one of my chestnut plantings. Shading of the trees dimishes the vigor.
Siberian Asparagus

Asparagus schoberioides or Siberian asparagus is found in Japan and Korea. There it is harvested as a wild perennial green and used pretty much like all of the asparagus kingdom. It the clumpiest plant I have ever grown. I hit it a few times with my tiller. The tiller went air born like I had hit a long forgotten oak stump. It only produced seeds once. Since growing it, I have attempted to grow out seedlings in a way that would allow me to harvest and eat the plant as well as look at all the natural variation found in its population. I also plant seeds of Mary Washington and Seed Savers Ott selection within the planting clusters I am doing this spring. The big surprise of this species is the beauty of its dark green stems. The density of the thick dark green foliage indicate a nutritious vegetable rich in nutrition. We need to tap into this wild food as a wild food under cultivation too.

The smaller stems of the many wild selections and the variability is an asset. We could expand the asparagus as a perennial pasture green. Like sorrel, you would grow it in dense beds in a way that it could be cut or mowed like salad greens. It would be a fresh green used the same way as arugula. This would increase its usage and reduce the labor force needed to hand harvest it. Siberian asparagus is resistant to all insects, virus and disease compared to the cultivated asparagus. It also is highly competitive in the soil and could easily create a long lived perennial vegetable. I wonder if it would make a nutritious green drink as well. I will know until I have larger amounts to worth with in some culinary way.

To find, create and develop the asparagus plant, we need to look in places of unknown origins and reproduce those wild populations in mass as a self sustaining wild food in a cultivated setting. Then we could create the medicinal and the nutritious perennial green we see hiding in the grass.

Asparagii is good.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

It is hiding in plain sight.
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The Jerusalem Artichoke Goes the Distance

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

It’s a root. It’s a tuber. It’s Super Sunflower.

One of the great joys of growing plants is when you find a unique plant with characteristics in what would be considered impossible odds from a sea of uniformity. Because it’s the Jerusalem artichoke, the value would be determined in a wavering, undefined application as a potential food source used in novel ways. Few people eat artichokes and there is no large scale plantings used in commercial agriculture.

Supernova Sunchoke-Discovered as a seedling in a grow out of from seed plants.

This is the case of the Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus. For many years I attempted to collect seeds from the variety Stampede with the attempt to create new selections. At the time there were only three varieties in the gardening industry. Stampede was one such variety from New York available from Johnny’s Seeds in Maine. The result of my seed harvest produced a lot of blanks rarely creating fertile seeds. The first time I produced ten plants from a half a grocery bag full of seed heads. As time went on, I added many other selections from all over the world. The sunchoke had made great strides in many countries searching for potato substitutes, flour and fermented products. There were hundreds of varieties all of which were originally selected from seedlings that people have discovered since the 1700’s.

The polypropylene bags and weed mat allow you to grow individual varities without having them mix or spread into other nearby areas. It’s an easy plant to harness its power without being overwhelmed with delicious food.

The result of me growing thirty varieties in one teeny 50 by 50 spot (see above) all within bee and butterfly distance was that some selections produced almost full heads of seeds. What is even more interesting is that both the annual sunflower and the sunchoke can cross pollinate and create fertile seeds. In stark contrast, the online information proclaims sterility and growing such a seedling if you could is futile. In real world scenarios, the history of sunchoke says the complete opposite. The artichoke has gone the distance before and it will do it again.

Stampede Jerusalem Artichoke-Helianthus tuberosus-Johnny’s Selected Seeds variety.

Just before I quit growing and selling sunchokes in the nursery, I was fortunate to obtain seeds of this perennial and annual cross as well as other Russian seed strains some of which were hybrids with the sunflower, Helianthus annus. The USDA maintains a repository of seeds obtained from different Russian research projects from Leningrad. I noticed that the seedlings that I grew out were not the normal smooth tuber selections that people grow to eat. Many had long stringy tubers with massive root systems which quickly outgrew the pots I had them in. It was akin to a dense sod of sunflower roots. This was a Eureka moment for me. This discovery was not like everything else I was growing. I began the process of weighing the highest yielding selections and found one seedling that produced nearly ten times the weight of all the others. The roots were like white string beans in size with omnidirectional branching. After closing the nursery, the Russian sunchokes sat in one of polyhouses with no irrigation for two years.  A few squeaked through by existing on the air moisture in the house. Last year after removing the poly and the nearby polyhouses, I began the process of setting up a more formal growing environment where they can thrive in the wide-open world minus the deer munching on them. The most productive plants were also the survivors.

What Value is This?

Now onto seed production. Using seeds for a tuber crop versus an easily degradable and bulky tuber makes seeds a preferred method in both annual and perennial systems. It can be combined with other seeds and used as seedlings of increasing complexity along with a means to generate new varieties in the process. A population can generate a greater range of plants which in turn can further expand the use of the plant and its adaptation to a wide range of environmental conditions. You can even create new selections of it specifically tailored to your soil and climate. A sunflower deserves no less. This is what the Russians saw within the plant the same way they developed black oil sunflowers. Today a few sunchoke genes are naturally found within some sunflower varieties. Everything is now highly bred but few have tread into the perennial sod sunflower breeding only because there is no need for it. The value of the sunflower overshadows everything else.

The value is to create a new perennial forage plant along with the tuber crop. You end up creating a type of “perennial sod” forage sunflower. The density of the plant and its ability to compete with its intensive root system and healthy foliage makes this a possibility. Just add honeylocust, hop trefoil, alfalfa and other perennial forage plants creates a more permanent tree crop agriculture that brings balance to the animals that consume it and improves the soil biology requiring no outside fertilizer imports.

I found this type of root system several times before when I began growing and naming sunchoke seedling selections. I first grew them from seeds into peat pots in one of the polyhouses. The peat pots exploded with tubers. A few had very long and narrow roots that looked like horizontal carrots. Some were delicious too. When I put them into large grow bags, it looked like a root whirlpool. These same varieties also produced a lot of viable seeds.  I called them “ White Diversity”. The tuber flavor was more like eating a pine cone infused with cardboard. This is perfect because it was less attractive to small mammals. It was edible but not desirable. The flower production was the highest of all sunchokes with very good seed set. They were early flowering almost a month ahead of the other selections. If you ever see goldfinches eating your seed heads you know you have successfully achieved fertile seeds. We had to bag them prior to harvest. Think mint but with starchy sunflower roots. The roots are easily reproduced by cuttings but the future lies in its seeds and not clonal because of the difficulty of maintaining root quality in storage. It is not like the potato or daffodil industry.

The impossible odds have narrowed to a point. It is hard to know what a sunchoke thinks and harder to know what action it will take in the future. The flexible nature of the sunchoke reveals many possibilities still as it goes the distance. Can we keep up?

I knew this guy that used to watch his garden grow. I worked at his home for a while before I farmed full time. He had a chair in the sun just past the white pine forest he planted. He would sit there and close his eyes facing the garden. What was he thinking?  Sometimes the chair was empty when I came to work in the morning. The impulse sprinkler kept time as it made its semi-circular rounds. Sometimes we would talk and laugh at random things while he sat in front of his garden and I toiled away. Once his wife asked me why Ted was laughing so much when we were together? I did not know. We would only talk. Then it would be quiet and he would close his eyes again. What was he thinking?

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

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Taco Bebbs Oak: Increasing Diversity

Posted on May 9, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

Bebbs Oak  Quercus x bebbiana  Quercus macrocarpa x alba Bur-White Hybrid Oak

When I first started my oak collection, I found myself wheeling and dealing in acorns. It was like poker but with acorns. Everyone wins. Diversity increases.

“Hit me.”  

It was the only way to get small samples of fresh acorns of diverse trees. I found myself surrounded by a small group of people which was strictly defined by the love of oak trees. Everyone in this exchange group was totally jacked on sending samples for propagation. It was super reliable and accurate right down to the location. Communication was mail. USPS.

During this time, I had heard about a hybrid bur and white oak called Taco. It was near a dumpster in the back parking lot of a taco restaurant in Springfield, Illinois.  Past president and one of the founders of the International Oak Society, Guy Sternberg had made the discovery.  I was visiting Illinois on another seedy mission, and he took me over to visit the tree. There is something about a green dumpster that accentuates a tree’s growth patterns. Surrounded by old school railroad ties dipped in creosote, the tree was not letting up in the hybrid vigor department. “Taco” had large clean foliage and a strong central leader growth. I was familiar with the Bebbs oak. I found one tree here in southwestern Michigan along a road on a bicycle ride that seemed to be intermediate between white and bur oak and grew seedlings from it.  What I found was that the seedlings grown under average soil conditions made very fast-growing trees with one plant that flowered and set acorns in three years from seed. This type of precocity along with fast growth is a win-win in finding faster growing oaks which could be used for both food and lumber.  Keep in mind this is a growth rate nearly double or triple a normal white oak tree and precocity clocking in under 25 percent of a normal white oak. I found other Bebb’s oaks in my seedling beds of bur oak. It was rare from my collection of acorns in park trees. I was averaging one tree per one thousand seedlings. I would move them to my plantings out back thinking I had found a diamond in the rough.

Taco Bebbs Oak acorn-bur oak bark

Bebb’s oak can be produced from 2nd and 3rd generation seed. The vigor is also found in the progeny. I made a few plantings around my farm most of which was in the missing trees of well-established American persimmon hedge along a fence line. The ability to accurately measure fast growth is best done over two decades while measuring height, trunk diameter and density of the crown. When growing them you do not want nursery conditions with sprinkler systems pumped with urea.  It must be reproducible from acorns in below average soils.

Taco bebbs oak seedling within American persimmon and hican hedgerow. The tree sticking out from the base of the trunk is an American persimmon I planted years earlier. This particular hybrid oak seedling is one of the largest caliper trunks at my farm.

This is the joy of growing oaks. J. Russel Smith author of Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture thought the oaks should sue the poets for proclaiming that oaks are slow growing. People see a large oak tree and think it is kind of an immortal being growing beyond several human lifetimes averaging one inch a year. This view creates a kind of self-defeating role in how we think about oaks and their importance for wood and growing them for food in an orchard for acorns. Someday 2 by 4’s will be made out of solid oak not yellow pine. Houses will not blow down or wash away. Gluten free will include super nutritious acorn flour.

It will take new germplasm like the Taco bebbs oak to jack up our the white oak compontent of our forests. We removed the most vigorous trees several times now. To generate that sort of vigor out of a population like oak becomes increasingly difficult. It is like a played out gold vein. There are many of these crosses found throughout North America but you have to bring them forward out in the public domain otherwise they remain hidden as an untapped resource. Some are in collections like mine and others sit in parking lots and woodlots here and there. This same type of fast growth rate was also found within a population of park trees. It only takes a few thousand trees to see it amidst the progeny. To me it often feels like raising your hand in a crowded auditorium. Only those near you who share similar interests see it.

I know an avid grower and selector of plants who has permission to walk the commercial seedling beds of a nursery and tag trees during the growing season. He looks over thousands of seedlings looking at growth rate, leaf and tree structure and bud formation. He has a great track record of finding excellent trees. I wonder at times if he uses a form of plant communication. He tags them and then comes back in the fall to dig and plants them on his land. We can harness this young and evolving genus by bringing them into production for acorn and hardwood production. My hand is up.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Biodiversity in Fruits: 250 Year Old Pear Leads the Way

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment
Stacy Pear Before

Diversity Expands In Novel Ecological Ways

If you look at all the different systems of growing food, the plants used in human designed systems cannot regenerate on their own and go in what could be called creative directions outside what the original human intentions were. There is no improvisation allowed. You stick to the script of rows and uniformity. Unfortunately, the “you just can’t let everything go roughshod over your land” philosophy is alive and well. Once in a while I’ll tell people to run away from this. Few listen and collisions occur as people follow the ecologically misguided. I’m here to say that not only can you let everything go roughshod, you can help let everything go roughshod in a way that also benefits your objectives. You do this by being a facilitator not a destroyer while improving the agricultural crops you feel most passionate about. Let me show you an example at my farm. I promise to improvise.

When I first started my farm, there were several established ten-foot-tall black oak trees surrounded by a thick grass pasture. As time went on, I removed the lower limbs of the pasture oaks to allow more light to penetrate the canopy and make the tree grow taller and have a clean branch free trunk for the first 24 feet of height.  Eventually I added a screech owl box attached to the first branch. Below is the crotch I had the box attached to.

Black oak-Quercus velutina

In the early 90’s, I planted a grafted pear cultivar called Stacy pear about 60 feet away from this tree.  This pear selection from Stacyville, Maine was a 250-year-old tree known for its fruit quality and hardiness. It was a mammoth pear tree reaching 60 foot tall in a full zone 3 hardiness. It had been through some tough winters which is not far from Mt. Katahdin.   I purchased it from St. Lawrence Nursery. Today it is available from Fedco Seeds in Maine called the Stacyville European pear. The tree grew well and fruited lightly a few times before several blistering days over 100 F made fire blight very active. More than half of the crown was destroyed. Apparently this is a common weakness with this selection as well many other European pears.

Stacy Pear After. Spring 2026.

I really liked the history of this tree and felt it was important to continue the legacy but this time through its diverse germplasm from seed.  I began the process of collecting the seeds and growing their seedlings. Funnily enough, this same ‘idea’ was happening without my knowledge under the black oak tree. It became a favorite place for squirrels to haul pears up the trunk and consume the seeds of the fruit. They occasionally eject full seeds with the fruit which then gets covered by deer stepping on them pushing them into the soil and covered by leaf litter. It also appeared the fruit was getting moved by raccoons. Everyone loved Stacy pear! Eventually, I was able to produce a couple of dozen seedling trees in my greenhouse and selected the most vigorous trees for my planting. During the winter months while doing pruning I limbed the black oak pears upwards to prevent deer browsing.  Today they all exist as 30-40 foot tall timber like trees as a component in a mixture of pawpaw, bitternut hickory, Montana yellow fruited American cranberrybush and hybrid chinkapin and swamp white oaks. The pears’ characteristics combine immunity to fireblight, fast growth rate and heavy fruit production. There is no practical way you can spray them as the fruit crop is high in the canopy. The idea was they could also double as specialty wood producing trees for musical instruments if the planting is thinned or when the trees die as well as delicious fruit. Grafted cultivars could exist for timber and fruit production. This wavy line of fruit versus wood is more apparent in some seedlings and has yet to be evaluated and selected.  I’m just happy I was able to take part in the Stacyville legacy which took me only 30 years. Things went roughshod very nicely.  

Stacy pear seedling and black oak

The last step of this tree crop biodiversity equation is preservation through dissemination. It does no good to be locked into a collection or a botanical garden where it is “look but do not eat”.  After 250 years, it is time to move on outside of todays orchard environments. Stacy leads the way. I’m a big follower. Join me.

Enjoy. Ken Asmus

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The Inbetweeners

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

Hybrid American Chestnuts: Castanea dentata x mollissima

When I first started my nursery, I was always trying to find new seed sources to grow trees. A lot of my early sources were people known to me by reading Organic Gardening Magazine and Mother Earth News. I read these periodicals at the library in the magazine section.  (I’m old.) I also joined many fruit and nut growing organizations. One of these discoveries was a source for American hybrid chestnut seed called the ‘Douglas’ hybrids. This was a seedling discovery found by late Earl Douglas in New York who had planted the Manchurian and American chestnuts within wind pollinating distance of each other. He soon noticed the in-between progeny of the Manchurian chestnut and American chestnut and then let them fruit. His American trees eventually died, and his hybrid trees continued onward showing resistance to chestnut blight. Chestnut blight is not controllable. Nothing is left standing using the all-American chestnut, so I was very excited to find this seed source. Here is his pamphlet reproduced here. (Still searching for it. Sorry for the delay.)

For many years like clockwork, I grew the Douglas hybrid chestnuts all from this one source from two separate growers. Along with two cultivars called “1” and “1A” that were a generation or two away from the originals, I could produce enough trees for my nursery. I found a few other seed sources that people discovered called the “Simpson” and “Gellatly” hybrids. These were a great blend of three species including the European chestnut. I was able to grow a thousand trees every year. Eventually I made selections from the seed beds to plant in my outback as I continued selling the hybrid seedlings in the nursery trade. I had the idea of creating a seed orchard of hybrid chestnuts hoping for the ‘new and improved’ version to grow at my farm. I chose trees based on fast growth and good branch structure with strong central leaders. The sales of the in-betweeners was a challenge. It was consistent putting it in the top ten plants sold at my farm. People did wonder, “Is it one thing or another?” and “Does it matter if they are all mixed up?”  Today it is a different retail environment, and the hybrid is understood and desired as many other seed strains are available for orchard cultivation. Along with that is also the pure and illustrious thinking of the holy species where people shun the crosses because they have a species bias. This falls into the native only camp. Each species cross is different. Most are for nut production which uses specific Chinese cultivars. I focused on a taller timber tree much like the American chestnut that is blight free. I was not a fan of intensive selection so I did what is done in the oak world and created hybrid swarms. In this scenario, you keep what you think is the healthiest plants from an open pollinated population with the fastest growing and apically dominant forms. Nut production is unknown at this time.

         

Ken’s Select Chestnut grown and selected from the Douglas Hybrid American Chestnuts

The mini repository of all things Castanea that I was planting allowed me to see this great diversity with the in-between hybrid populations. I knew I needed the healthy vascular system like the Chinese chestnuts. Over the years, I found many unique attributes to growing the inbetweeners. There were plants in my seed beds barely two months old with seed burs on top of the plant. There were highly vigorous trees some of which grew 6 feet tall in one year. One tree produced an average of 9 nuts per burr. This wide variation was a hint of the very fluid nature of the hybrid chestnuts. What I didn’t understand at the time was the remarkable chestnut blight disease and its great destructive power. Because it was not found on my farm due to my treeless isolation, I was living a dream chestnut life free of disease. Eventually the blight blew in and found the perfect host tree: my hybrid American chestnuts. Trying to navigate it or prevent it was impossible.  I gave up. I was overwhelmed and so were my inbetweeners. Most of the mature trees died within a 2-4 year time frame. I began new plantings using specific seedlings within the blight filled areas at my farm. It was my ‘Hail Mary’ moment.

BELOW IMAGE: This super laden hybrid American chestnut pictured below with artichokes in the foreground was a causality. After this massive crop, the tree died completely.

 

Douglas Hybrid American Chestnut Selection with very high yields. Clearwater Jerusalem Artichokes

With the help of a neighboring farmer’s brother who owned a mill, I began harvesting the wood and had much of it milled into fine lumber. I let everything go and encouraged natural seeding from both the new and old trees in the plantings. The seedling trees left had a much faster turn around rate. From infection to death was increasingly apparent on smaller caliper trees. This quick turn around improved the selection process dramatically and allowed me to manage the planting in a more streamlined and effective way without huge loss.

Letting go is the solution not intensive breeding.The population smooths out over time and a portion of the immunity remains in its wake. The inbetweeners become new species. New seed sources are discovered along with the addition of greater biodiversity of other food plants that grow in the shade of these tall upright trees. Directional pruning along with the addition of intentionally planted trees like honeylocust, plums and mulberries helped with the design initiatives of my farm fulfilling the missions of ecology, conservation, agriculture through J.Russel Smith’s Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture. This happened all because of a tiny little fungal disease improving the resilience of my farm and the plants that inhabit it.

Call it whatever you want. Castanea iluvumanii.

Douglas Hybrid American Chestnut

I didn’t mow or remove brush or fallen limbs. Many blackberries grew in those locations as the grass faded away and the birds used the dead limbs for roosting. Soon you could see seedlings of apples, pears, cornelian cherries, walnuts, multiflora rose and shellbark hickories seeding in these areas with the fading chestnuts. Once I did that, the inbetween solution came forward in ever greater numbers of strong growing, highly resistant trees with very vigorous strong timber like growth while at the same time increasing the biodiversity of my plantings. Many of the trees that are now gracing my farm are the result of this population expansion into the hybrid swarm that produces an intermediate “species”. This resistance becomes apparent in successive generations and skips through the long wait time needed in the past. The disease becomes weaker with time and the trees stronger. The blight also morphs into a weaker form of blight, and the trees find a way around it through callus formation. The callus formation makes it possible for the trees to continue their life into maturity and fruit continuously even after infection. It is not zero but nothing in the world is for plants. The disease provides an avenue for increased health and vigor of the new species.

The inbetweeners are a powerful message of tree salvation amidst real world problems.

Douglas Hybrid American Chestnut in flower

The inbetweeners find new ecological avenues for expression in a world of division where everything is one or the other. Now one is two blended as a whole.

Douglas Hybrid American Chestnut and employees at the Oikos Tree Crops farm

Agroforestry, Pollarding and Coppice Production:

Pollarding the trunk is a great agroforestry idea. If you cut down a hybrid chestnut, a dense head of branches will follow as sprouts soon fill the trunk area. The sprouts grow up to eight feet in a single year. The results vary dramatically from tree to tree. I noticed many heavy sprouters were damaged by chestnut blight barely making it past a second cutting. Eventually the main root system faded entirely with nothing to feed it. That was a big problem and quite common at my farm where the whole system would collapse. It produced completely unusable coppice for furniture making and wood working. Chestnut wood is very soft and has a hardness of basswood. The fast growth rate in the sprouts in the beginning is amazing yet the chestnut is not the willow in this management system.

“Pollard One” Excellent pollard selection defined by strong sprouting and strong resistance to chestnut blight. Combines fast growth, numerous sprouts at the base of the tree and long life due to disease resistance. Selected from a group of Douglas hybrid chestnuts, Pollard One is very precocious in flowering with a strong upright growth habit with minimal branching. Originally four seedlings were planted in this area that showed heavy flowering at an early age. Nut production has not been evaluated at this time. The root collar is very prone to sprouting all of which make it past 5 year mark completely without blight infection. “Pollard One” would have to be rooted to reproduce this characteristic for use in coppice production. The soil in this area is almost pure sand and stone yet the vigor is apparent in the plant without fertilizer or management in some way to speed the growth rate.

“Pollard One” American Hybrid Chestnut is one of a very few seedlings that show both great sprouting ability and high resistance to chestnut blight. A portion of the sprouts will be harvested in the dormant stage, dried and used in furniture making. The dead trunk in the middle will be removed in the process which will increase the straightness of the sprouts. The sprouts are dense enough to prevent branch formation and long enough to get 2-3 poles per cutting. This is the ideal method for my use and may be different depending on what the grower is trying to achieve.

Hybrid American Chestnut lumber milled from the Douglas Hybrid Chestnuts
Viva American Hybrid Chestnut seedling selected from a hybrid American population. This one produced incredibly vigorous seedlings but low yields of nuts.
Douglas Hybrid American Chestnut Pyramidal seed source used at the nursery.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Returning to the Wild is Not That Wild

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

The above image is my ongoing wild potato release program for the feral potato. I’m trying to create a mini-potato oasis in the middle of a field. Eventually you have to let them go back to the wild. As you know having potatoes around the house can be dangerous if you keep them too long. I’ve done this type of planting many times before over the last couple of decades. Every now and then I proclaim I have figured it out and landed in the potato fields of gold. Yet I no longer give the individual selections proper names because I don’t know long they will stick around.  Now I use the impersonal alphabetic method and call them all “Quantum” borrowed out of a physics 101 textbook. That way I don’t feel so bad if “Bob” or his potato friends die. (Which by the way they frequently do.)  I just tell them they are returning to infinity where nothing is lost. We go along with it for now. The alphabet like a neutron star will likely be around for a while. Bob… not so much. This year I went from A to M each of which was grown from true seed, produced by a fruit and is genetically different. “Bob” comes from a long line of healthy potatoes completely cut off from commercialization. He is super productive, yet I hear he is searching for new real estate to reestablish his roots. This is what he told me so far.  

“The definition humans use as wild is not that wild. My home is were you plant me. This is my nativeness.”

There is no breeding back or back-breeding to wild. There is no back door to creating wild through extreme domestication by crossing wild potatoes. This already exists in the potato. It keeps its genetic background “quietly active” until new conditions present themselves. This is where you will see things that have remained dormant for centuries. That is a super power besides feeding billions of people as it quietly rests as we all move along this evolutionary trajectory we are on together.

A wild potato called “M”

It finally dawned on me that I needed to expand the range of the species in different soils and locations throughout my farm to allow the plants to flex their genome. I create my cute little mini-potato oasis in the midst of grass, dewberry and trees. The colony is now 15 selections all genetically different growing under oaks, walnuts, hickories. This is the wild today. It’s not that wild yet wild enough to be called wild defined by once planted, it is left alone for at least two years. There is no weeding or spray but I have been known to pitch chicken manure on them in the early spring the second year. The idea is to create conditions favorable to the plants yet not too luxurious. You want to see what selections will fruit and what selections will remain alive and thriving as a perennial potato in a cold climate similar to the Jerusalem artichoke. The goal is to have self-reproducing colonies able to grow amidst other plants and left to go as a source of future potatoes. Some could join the greater commercial potato industry but that is not a priority. This time the potatoes much like the feral honeybees resistant to varroa mites found in southern California are able to fend off insects and virus in a way no domestication program would ever work. It is effortless and does it without the plant breeder. Home free. It’s wild out there. 

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

A little more formal of a planting for Bob and his friends in the old greenhouse pad. Inter planted with Devour orchard grass. Under a bit of shade from butternuts and black walnut trees.
Crown vetch flowers and wild potato planted in my mom’s flower garden. “We’re moving on. Follow if you can.” Bob. He says hi by the way.
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Chinquapin Chestnut: It’s Natural

Posted on April 10, 2026 by Biologicalenrichment

A New Chinquapin Variety-“Resilient”

One of the first oaks I grew at my farm was the Turkey Oak, Quercus cerris. The tree has a huge range in Europe and grows to massive sizes. I used a wide variety of seed sources including arboretum and overseas germplasm. Each tree was radically different with leaves that had huge variations from cut leaf to sawtooth in shape. I made seedling selections based on winter hardiness and fast growth rate. The trees were planted at the top of my hills where it was windy and dry.  After a couple of decades, I noticed there were callus-like expansions on the trunk occurring near the soil line. It looked like the trunk exploded. I thought I had failed on the hardiness part of my selection process when a forester who was familiar with the tree in its native range told me, “That is natural. Even trees in the wild have that.”  Oh, it’s natural.  Thank goodness it’s natural.  The pressure was off. How do you spell relief? N -A -T- U- R- A- L 

Quercus cerris grown from seed and whitetailed deer.

The ‘it’s natural’ view of nature has helped me understand the chinquapin chestnut. The chinquapin chestnut has a huge range and like the turkey oak it’s a survivor in some of the toughest soil and climatic conditions.  The teeny pea sized nuts are delicious fresh off the shrub. The yields are incredibly high and the nuts just fall out of the husks with a light shaking. Yet the plant itself does struggle with chestnut blight. For the chinquapin with its multiple canes, this is not the end of the universe. Like a blueberry bush, the young canes will fruit in great abundance as they skip through the meadow of inflictions. It does weaken the canes and probably shortens their fruiting age but the nut production continues for years after blight. It is thought that it is both genetic resistance and a physiological response from the younger stems of which blight is unable to stick to it and grow. It’s natural. The pressure is off. Not to worry!

In the early nineties, I planted 10 chinquapin shrubs in one-gallon containers from the Greg Miller nursery in Ohio. He had grown the plant longer than anyone I had known. Today I have four of the original plants along with several seedlings produced by my plants. Chinquapin rarely hybridizes on its own because the flowering times do not overlap with other chestnut trees.  This natural selection process of good and non-good is based on what plants continue to produce nuts with minimal damage caused by chestnut blight. It is based on how fast and how long the plant can survive in the natural world of chestnut blight. You can make selections on the low amount of damage and increased resistance to blight. It may not be zero at first but over time your population will move away from the negative effects of chestnut blight. My best guess is that the break away is at ten percent of the population. Those 10 percent could easily create an industry from the chinquapin. I see it as flour on a bush with an ease of mechanical harvest and plenty of creative ideas using the nuts as the ultimate gluten free flour easily grown using only organic methods. It also doesn’t require some sort of massive breeding program to make it happen. Anyone can do it and do it right now not decades later.

“Resilient” Chinquapin Chestnut

“Resilient” Chinquapin Chestnut

Resilient is the most vigorous selection of chinquapin chestnut showing natural immunity to chestnut blight even on the largest of canes. It tends towards producing larger canes free of chestnut blight having nearly the double the caliper of other nearby seedlings. Chestnut blight is much less likely to attack the stems and weaken the plant. Resilient chinquapin is not a hybrid and is more tree like than other seedlings. Its bark is smooth. No blight has been found on the trunk for over 25 years. The branches of Resilient are rarely damaged and appear not to shed due to over yielding like some seedlings do.  This shedding is done as the tree matures which forces more growth into the dominant limbs. Although not entirely immune to chestnut blight, it appears this is one of the most resistant seedlings from the groupings I have at my farm. One of its seedlings also has this same growth habit and good resistance to blight for over a decade despite having blight in many nearby American hybrid chestnuts. This variety can be grown from grafting. Grafts onto Chinese chestnut is the best rootstock to use. Seedlings from it may also show excellent resistance but not enough is known on a population level yet. Small nuts ripen starting in mid August. Seeds need to be planted immediately for propagation. Roots emerge without dormancy. Yields are heavy. Cross pollination is needed with another chinquapin chestnut otherwise no nuts will form. Any seedling chinquapin will work for cross pollination but not another species. Tree can be managed as a shrub while replacing diseased canes with new sprouts near the base similar to a lilac bush. Removing old canes improves the yields of the plants over time as the root system grows. Natural seeding occurs with this species. It happens surrounding the shrubs when the nuts hit the ground and are pushed into the soil by deer or humans harvesting. That too is natural.

Resilient Chinquapin Chestnut. Strong excellent branching. Background is American hybrid chestnut with a lot of dead wood.
This cane made it past the 12 year mark which is typical for the species. (At least for my farm in southwestern Michigan.) Yields begin in 3-4 years and will continue for a decade prior to removal.
Pruning improves vigor and yield of older shrubs and is necessary if you want good nut production. Castanea pumila seedling.
Chestnut blight will form on young branches once in a while however it appears to have only a minor effect. Here you can see the damage being done along with the normal callus of a woody shrub trying to close up the wound.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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