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
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 today
I really liked the history of this tree and felt it was important to continue the legacy but this time through its diverse germplasm. I began the process of collecting the seeds and growing their seedlings. Funnily enough, this same ‘idea’ was happening 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 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.
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 ChestnutsViva 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.
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. I’ve done this type of planting many times before over the last couple of decades. 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.
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
Crown vetch flowers and wild potato. “We’re moving on. Follow if you can.” Bob. He says hi by the way.
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.
“Hip to be or not to be. That is the question.” Philosopher Rosa Pomeifera
The idea of cultivating roses for their fruit is a funny thing. If you think about it, uncultivated wild roses often produce hips in great numbers. Why bother? You immediately see the value of wild seedling species. On the other side of the rose selection model, you have the modern floral roses. They are like racehorses or wine grapes. They are highly selected and created by those with botanical intellects the size of planet earth. They are patented and ‘released’ by Conglomo Nursery. Whereas seedling hip roses are pure emotion and love. They are ‘released’ over the landscape by birds containing a starter fertilizer along with prepping the seed via scarification in their intestinal tract. Those released seeds often create rose bushes like the multiflora rose which become mini-nurseries for other fruiting plants for the birds. It’s a gratuitous act of kindness and not entirely as random as you might think.
When I plant rose seeds at my farm, I head off to my barn and have a cuppa organic green tea and burn sandalwood incense. Within the floral world, Conglomo Nursery is hammering down Sanka and sweating over their labor force in the hot Texas sun. Conglomo worries about what celebrity will endorse their creations while blessing them with metal indentification tags that will be good for 10,000 years. This difference tells the story of how we feel about roses and their ability to heal the landscape as well as grace our gardens. For me, it was a mission and pursuit of fruit roses specifically grown for their vitamin rich hips. I grew over 40 different species and hybrids in the course of three decades. I grew everything from seed. For a while I collected hips wherever I went. Nature has the best methods. You need real world experience captured in a seed. You let disease and insects come. You love the rose chafer. You crave black spot. You hope for cane borers. These Rosa nightmares for most growers are the strengthening agents for my plants. You have to find strong and flourishing plants in the midst of rose hell. There are no categories and with it no limitations. You let the climate refine and destroy your crop. Finally, you will have a fruit rose rich in vitamins and flavor. The seeds I produce now do not require the same trials and tribulations but refinements can always be done. Don’t pay a lot of attention to the unknown market or practical application on a larger scale for your fruiting rose creations here in the United States. Now it becomes a personal mission to spread the seeds like my bird friends but without scarification and the starter fertilizer.
The Hips to Be
The Apple Rose: Rosa villosa
Rosa villosa (Pomeifera)
It generally takes a generation or two to really get an idea of what potential lies within a species to grow as a new food plant. This was the case for the apple rose. I heard about it from another nursery and then found seeds of it produced in an arboretum. Arboretums can provide food and crop possibilities to the public. Normally they are not thought of that way. The first generation looked promising, however the plants were overrun with Virginia Mountain mint and Indian rice grass in this particular planting area. This greatly lowered their vigor. The second time I took those seeds and did a production in my greenhouse of several hundred plants. This produced 4 individual plants that flowered at one and two years old. This extreme precocity is indicative of heavy fruit production especially if it is combined with increased vigor. This is the wide open avenue for fruit production. Those plants were then spaced several hundred feet apart in a mixed oak, lilac and plum plantings. More or less, it takes about a decade to really see what you have found. Now you can taste and test everything to make sure your super hips are actually delicious to eat and not just a fiber filled Vitamin C capsule. This is the final step on what is now becoming the superhighway of fruit production for hip roses. You have both a population and a variety should you need it. It is the hip to bring the rose into fruit production under all cultural circumstances for its vitamins, seed oil and syrup.
Apple rose hips are best when slightl bletted like medlars. The fruit will be smooth textured at that time.
The apple rose is a rose species found in the mountains of Europe. Its first incarnation came as the ‘Wolley-Dod’s Rose’ as a semi-double highly floriferous selection called ‘Duplex’ prior to 1770. Its cultivation as a fruit rose has been explored before but nothing in modern times. It is mentioned as ‘some commercial importance’ in the writings of Gerd Krussmann, Cultivated Broad-Leaved Trees & Shrubs (1978).
Join me for tea and incense as we create health via the rose fruit. It is the hip to be.
Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus
This is a first part of all things hip. The second part will contain other species hips.
There is a magnificent specimen of black mulberry filled with lustrous green foliage in Central Park. I had my brother help me photograph one of the branches. To me it was a miracle because it isn’t suppose to survive in a New York winter. The black mulberry is the premier mulberry in terms of it’s cultivation as a fruit plant. It’s called a cultigen by people who are aware of it’s origins and distribution. Cultigen means it is of obscure origin which may not have a wild counterpart to it anymore. People have eaten the black mulberry for millenniums. I had previously grown this species at my farm from grafted named varietal plants. These were the huge white and black berries so well known in commerce in Pakistan and India called ‘Hunza” named after a culture noted for long life and great health. Most international food stores have these selections dried like raisins in clear cellophane packages. After a mild winter, the trees were destroyed well below the graft union. I next went to the grafted hybrids. They lasted a little longer when one fruited in my largest polyhouse next to some overgrown red mulberries. Many of the nurseries that produce this tree are in Florida and California. Taking a plant grown in the south and then plunked down in the north was too extreme. Next up for me were the seed sources. Hungary, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Southern Europe-Mediterranean regions are the main sources. Mulberry seed is plentiful, but quality is lacking. I think it might be overdried and old. I noticed on a social media post that someone was using the dried mulberry paste at the food store to generate seedlings. Evidently the seeds were still viable. My first batch of seedlings showed promise despite the great amount of winter damage on the twigs. I remember finding one tree out of two hundred after the first winter that survived minus 20 F with zero damage. If you look up the hardiness of the Morus nigra tree you will see a question mark near the Zone 7 indicator. This means, “I am not sure but 7 seems right” zone. The mega tree in Central Park was a pointed reminder of the questionable nature of giving plants zones in the first place. One tree points the way for a human to follow. One of those humans is me.
Oikos Tree Crops black mulberry. Mixed planting using newer seedling selections with trident and cutleaf types along with extremely fast growth rates compared to other seedlings. The deer love the foliage of the black mulberry and will do anything to push the trees over to browse the trees.
ON THE HARDINESS ISSUE OF TREES
It is both the seed source and a physiological response to low temperatures that allows most trees to tolerate cold temperatures beyond their indigenous and current cultivated ranges. You can take any warm loving plant and move it farther north. The best way to do that is from seed and then have several plants. I have Louisiana cypress on my hills in Michigan. I have Nuttall oaks from southern Georgia. Neither has experienced winter damage. To make that happen you grow batches of seedlings and wait to see what happens. Eucalyptus, palms, tea plants and even oranges can be grown far north. There is flexibility within the species to some degree. Either from a hybrid standpoint or an isolated population found in a northern location that is self-breeding, you can find plants able to grow in locations outside of its normal domain. The limits can’t be reached unless you have a population of “like-minded” plants all of which can interbreed and create an unwavering seed source able to withstand the speeding train of winter. This applies to apples in the subarctic region and to oranges in southern Michigan. You need a population not a cultivar.
Black mulberry fruits forming early in the year.
This is something that is missing in the world of fruit selection where the cultivar is king and everything else is a worthless seedling. Here, it is reverse. It is the opposite of Luther Burbank breeding. Seedlings produce the best fruit for the climate which can then be recreated using more seedlings. Cultivars are a stopping off point like a train at a station where you go to meet a friend. You give it a hug. Have some coffee. Talk about old times. Remember when I sprayed you. Remember the mulch. You laugh. You cry. Then you say goodbye. That is the cultivar. Now, wave goodbye. I know. It’s emotional. You get attached to the cultivar. It was nice knowing you, cultivar. Thank you for your progeny. Now all of your progeny is cultivar and constantly improving while you quietly enjoy your farming life. There is less drama. Certainly you can create more cultivars. That is not bad. The future requires a river over flowing the banks and not a trickling brook level of cultigens and cultivars. The trickling brooks are the patents and the misguided scientists who have exploited plants like they were wind up toys. The plants can do it better than a human. They are in on the ground floor of breeding. You are not. You are the facilitator not the owner of the plant. It’s a relationship between human and plant. That is what you are co-building.
Morus nigra seedling at the Oikos Tree Crops farm. White Black Mulberry Morus nigra
From seed:
Mulberry has a tough seed coat and this coupled with a cold dormancy makes the seed require a year in the soil to help break down the coat and a cold dormancy prior to sprouting. There is also the opposite where no dormancy of any sort is required. This seems to be the case with Morus nigra. You would normally just surface sow the seeds like the birds do and the plants come up in a week or so. When you buy mulberry seeds from the different seed companies here in the United States, it is hard to know how they have been handled and when they were colleted and processed. We would just sprinkle them on a flat of soil media and cover them with a bit of sand or screened peat and let nature take its course. Mulberry seeds sprout very quickly and will continue sprouting for up to two years. It’s a surprise tree. You will never know when it will happen.
From seed everyone wants the pure mulberry. I think they are all pure. Under the banner of complex heterozygosity the mulberry does not care about your love of pure. Pure in this sense means combining the nearest plants into one unadulterated whole. The whole reflects the individual as a universal mulberry oneness. Is this cosmic or me lost in interpretation? Both. The mulberry has other plans from an evolutionary standpoint. It’s an out breeder. It can be dioecious, monoecious or both on the same tree or not on the same tree. More than the apple it hides its origins to the point even modern day genetics has thrown its hands up. I like that. It’s a plant with a plan. I’m a follower. One fruit and you too will follow.
American persimmon seeds in the first phase of processing for seed planting.
Everyone wants to create a forest. It’s a natural desire. How hard can it be?
You start with a blank canvas and add paint in the form of seeds or trees.
Like the book “The Man Who Planted Trees” by Jean Giono, your mission is to grow trees where there are none. You naturally want to align yourself with the fictional character, Elzéard Bouffier. You have a satchel filled with acorns and an iron planting bar and you drop acorns into your divots one at a time across the barren landscape. When Jean Giono was interviewed he said his goal was to “make trees likeable but more specifically make planting trees likeable.” Having an activity that is easy to do and refreshing is ideal for tree planting. In the end, your reward is a forest. The direct seed method he was describing is possible and real. You could do that with many species of plants by distributing seeds in a way that allows for regeneration without huge amounts of resources. This was something I was intimately familiar with only because I grew many genus of trees in my nursery from seeds. I soon discovered the secrets of dormancy and the means to release the seeds at the right time to gain the maximum tree percentage. Could this fictional story be applied to a larger scale model to make reforestation less expensive and more efficient? Absolutely. Get your satchel and iron divot.
My fathers Christmas tree planting bar surrounded by hickory nuts I fruited at my farm.
Reliable, Consistent and Repeatable Is the Likeable Planting of Trees
American persimmon seed
American Persimmon Diospyros virginiana
Of all the years I grew American persimmon from seed there was no mammal or bird that ate the seeds after they where planted in the ground. For this reason alone, it is a great species for direct seeding. With good seed you easily pass the 90 percent success rate. The seeds are inexpensive and if handled properly can be primed for dormancy for spring planting too. They are competitive enough to compete with other shrubs and grasses. The deer and rabbits avoid them. The foliage is poisonous to all mammals. The plant regenerates a strong response from the root crown should it be clipped off. Plant the seeds an inch or two deep in groups of four and soon your persimmon forest will come to life. It is an unstoppable seedling tree. You can plant them like beans. They all come up.
Pawpaw seed
Pawpaw Asimina triloba
Pawpaws are incredibly easy to direct seed into shrubby areas or forested areas. The seed requires partial shade to get past that first year. After fall planting, the seeds will sprout very late into July. It is not possible to direct seed pawpaw in open sunny areas unless you haul brush or create artificial shade in some way. It is possible to direct seed into multiflora rose, autumn olive and buckthorn because all of these shrubs provide a great benefit to pawpaw. The benefits are living shade cover, large amounts of organic matter with minimal competition of grasses and the retention of soil moisture during the summer months. Pawpaws can easily be seeded in mature oak forests. Placing 3-4 seeds two inches deep in the fall is the best method. The seeds contain toxic alkaloids and are never consumed by small mammals. The trees are rarely browsed by deer or rabbits. It is a perfect tree for direct seeding into both forested and non-forested shrub filled areas.
Chestnut Castanea x, mollisima, seguinii, dentata x, sativa x hybrids and species
Chestnut was the preferred nut in THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES. Why not try? If you put this delicious nugget of goodness in an open field it soon becomes a magnet for chipmunks, thirteen-line ground squirrels as well as blue jays and brown thrashers as they sprout in the spring. It was a series of unfortunate events that I found a partial solution in terms of prevention. I coated the nuts prior to planting (they were not sprouted) with eucalyptus, neem and fish emulsion oils. This kept the nuts intact for the winter dormancy. For the life of me though, I couldn’t figure out how any chestnut tree could ever regenerate at all until I started digging up sprouted trees. It turned out that the leaf litter combined with the sharp spiny husks along with deer walking overtop of this combination creates the perfect seed bed. This combination of encapsulated seed in the husk means no animal is willing to risk lips, nose or tongue lacerations to yank out the nut out of a burr. They are incredibly sharp. My suggestion would be to carry one burr for one seed and like a puzzle put them together while planting and encapsulating the delicious nut in a coat of spiky armor. The seed will sprout in the husk and grow around it. Now you will need two satchels for the chestnut. One for burrs and one for seeds.
Turkey Oak Quercus cerris One of the most beautiful of acorns and easy to direct seed.
Oaks Quercus robur x, macrocarpa x, alba x , bicolor x. hybrids
Acorns are easy to direct seed. As my oak forest matured, I began to wonder if some oaks were better at self-seeding than others and why. My aha moment came twenty years later when I noticed that the natural hybrids of burr, white, English and swamp white oaks were really making the rounds. I found them everywhere in a wide variety of soils and locations. What was happening was that despite the normal predation and movement of the acorns by small mammals, it was the fastest sprouting selections that were creating the highest number of trees directly in the field. This has a simple explanation. The fast growing and fast sprouting white oak hybrids create a tap root within a few days of hitting the ground. If it is not disturbed and left long enough, the acorn creates a fully formed tree with an epicotyl capable of creating a seedling. It only needs dormancy in the winter to throw its top. At this point, it does not matter if the acorn is ripped off the root. By now it is too late and the tree is secure. The acorn has done its job. It’s created a new tree and can feed an animal as well as help the plant distribute itself throughout the landscape. Win, win, win. If a human like you and your satchel filled with acorns enters this equation, you will want to plant a little deeper going into the 4-inch “zone of least discovery”. This will give the acorn a little more time to create the sprouted root without disturbing the delicate procedure. The iron bar is not too heavy now and the oak forest is right behind you as an all space filling lumber and edible acorn heaven on earth.
Shellbark Hickory grown from seed.
Shellbark Hickory Carya laciniosa
Every now and then when I was digging plant orders in the spring, I would find a random shellbark hickory nut in my plantings. Since I know these trees by the individual fruits they produce, I was surprised at the distance these nuts were carried by squirrels. Some were hauled over 400 feet away from the parent tree. I was also surprised at the ‘lost nuts’ not dug up during the winter or spring months. There was a lot of them compared to nearby black walnuts. After careful excavation of one year shellbark hickory trees in an old greenhouse space, it turned out that the lost hickory nuts were planted intentionally deep to avoid detection by other squirrels. This behavior equated to a higher tree percentage compared to black walnut. They specifically choose areas that were relatively free of tree and shrub competition and far from the parent trees. They were also taking a chance being in the open to birds of prey. Slipping into this natural regeneration of an ecological theater as a main actor is not too hard. You would fill your satchel with hickory nuts and use a wide spacing by planting shellbark hickory nuts every 100 feet or so. There is no need to protect the nuts. Plant them deep into the 6 inch zone. Shellbarks have a high tree percentage due to their large seed size which equates to a large germinative capacity. Going deep does nothing to slow down the tree from sprouting into a seedling. Your forest is taking shape and the shellbark hickory is rich in food and timber creating health for the world.
Your satchel planting is working as you traverse the barren landscape. Your forest is taking shape. The trees are at home wherever home is for you. You help define the forest and give it a use far beyond the botany of yesteryear. It is likeable to everyone and everything.
One of the most underlooked tree crops for Michigan and other northern short season areas is the pecan. The pecan has a ton of research behind it. It has the mechanization. It has shakers, crackers, dryers and sorters. It has mechanized pecan picker uppers whatever that is. It has a human support network like no tommorrow! Go ahead and buy that Costco bag of pecans. (Sure. The sugar encrusted cinnamon ones. Do it. I dare you. ) Look at the countries of origin and how many countries grow pecans. The U.S.D.A. has devoted resources for its improvement over a span of 100 years. Hey, it even has its own extractors for oil. After its debut almost 50 years ago as a northern crop from the University of Nebraska and the germplasm rescue from the Northern Nut Growers Association few farmers took on the challenge. The most northern forms of it are viewed as hobby like and okay for the horticulturally adventurous. This highlights the oh-so-slow acceptance of a new crop in a new environment. To me it is the poster child of an unknown known crop. The drain pipe for the ultra-northern pecan is plugged.
I was unsuccessful to get it into nursery production outside of my farm. I tried to give my cultivars away to other nurseries. It’s very specific in rootstock and scion capabilities and requires a production system that demands strict protocols. To make a northern pecan industry in Michigan possible you would need large areas devoted to it. I would say a thousand acres would be a good start. This would allow for the costly mechanization and processing facilities. For Michigan that would be mostly in the southern region of the state. You would need a willing and able farmer based enthusiam for the crop because having others produce the crop with you allows for an industry to develop. I’ve seen individual English walnut orchards come and go only because there is no broad support for it. It requires time and patience to establish an orchard. The only thing I can think of that is a little like this is the Northern Spy apple. On a standard rootstock, Spys take 17 years to fruit. Even seedling pecans are not that tardy and grafted pecans are half that to producing nuts. Of course, money has to be devoted specifically for this crop to kick start it into commerce. Let’s treat it as not experimental and not native to Michigan because it is neither. We should treat it like a crop and raise it to fruition under organic conditions. For the northern pecan, this is very easy. It’s a food and oil crop widespread throughout the world. It’s been done before. There is no frost damage as it flowers in June. There are no insects or disease and the nuts literally shake out of the trees covering the ground.
In synchronizing with the fall season, its home is here in Michigan for this indigenous North American plant.
The mature northern pecans I have at my farm were all found originally along the Mississippi River in central Illinois and Iowa. It turned out that people had a natural inclination to move the pecan inland and northward. Some say the crow did it and others say boat loads of nuts were carried in canoes long ago by the Native Americans even into southern Wisconsin. The season for ripening was the limiting factor not the trees hardiness. What would happen if you took a southern selection farther north is the nuts never get past the milk stage. The nuts never fill and solidify because the heat units are too short. Michigan has roughly half the heat units needed for most pecan varieties. This was exactly what I found at my farm. The term northern was widely applied and northern was not northern enough for some seed sources that I grew. I really had to do research on the nuts I was buying for nursery stock. Through the Northern Nut Growers seeds from Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota soon filled my seedling plantings. They were northern enough and then some.
It’s ripe. It’s September.
Today I am harvesting older and over planted pecan trees for my woodworking projects. My northern seed grown trees from the James and Shepherds farms in northern Missouri are being thinned in my old planting beds where the rows were once 12 inches apart. It’s bit too much to pack them in like that. It’s not a telephone pole farm in the form of a red pine plantation. I was told by a fellow nut grower, the late John Gordon who was a great pioneer of the northern pecan, to leave only the most vigorous of pecan trees in the seed beds. He was emphatic about it like he discovered cold fusion. He said that these super fast growing plants are also the most productive, precocious from seed and early ripening. He was right. This type of advice is precious because who in their right mind would grow pecans in New York? Oh wait. Me in Michigan. We must be related.
The seed tells a story of a plant. If you’re willing to listen, you will benefit from your experience with the plant. Such was the case for some of the plants I grew at my farm that by seed were considered challenging. Phragmites was one. Remarkable and a powerful perennial grass, Phragmites can do it all. It is a well-known as a plant silt stopper in the wetlands of North America as well as a circumpolar plant found throughout northern Europe and China. It is growing in places where few other plants can tread. Once it’s job is done, it quietly fades into the background. Even the cattails can’t do it like phragmites which often grow right next to it.
Could you grow the Phragmites like the picture of my farm pond above as you would any other crop plant and harvest its sprouts and high sugar leaves? Could this be replicated in dry soils?
It was only natural that I try growing it to test its adaptability in non-wetland conditions. I was quite fond of the sprouts of phragmites flavor. In the spring, I would pluck a few and nibble my way around the pond. In many ways they were like mini-bamboo sprouts found near the base of the canes. I have several edible wild books touting Phragmites as a delicious edible plant found widely in North America. Like another wetland species, River cane bamboo, the sprouts are completely delicious, crispy and worth harvesting. The first place I took the roots home was my home garden. I told no one because people have strong negative reactions to any stoloniferous grass that can skip on the surface of a pond twenty feet in a year. I hid in my grassy meadow of ideas with my eat-the-sprouts philosophy. I did have company. I joined the muskrats. They had figured this out and were not bashful in decimating the populations every now and then. The bluegill and frog populations exploded after Phragmites and cattails first appearances at the pond. The high sugar content of the leaves brought in colonies of aphids which also fed other insects willing to dine on their sugary excretions. I carefully plucked out several roots from my family’s farm pond and put them in my garden. It took less than a month and they died quietly. My next attempt was from seed. I gathered a grocery bag full and layered them in a propagation tray. Six seedlings came up out of several hundred thousand seeds. Obviously, the Phragmites plant does not need the seeds too much to continue its existence. Because of their rarity, once the seedlings were grown, I plunked them carefully into a sandy dry hillside next to the river cane bamboo. It too is found in wetland conditions but will grow perfectly fine in dry conditions. This time it took a little more than a month to die out. My perennial sprout farm and grassy meadow dream filled with phragmites was a no go and fading fast.
River Cane Bamboo from North America grown at my farm. Along with it’s seeds, it could be both a sprout and grain plant given the right attention to selections and understanding its value as a crop plant.
Not to give up entirely, I moved on with cattails. Cattails have sprouts that are wonderful fresh. Pure white and crispy is the cattail sprout. This time I found a cattail colony on a steep bank off a major highway intersection in Michigan. It was just plain weird this colony was growing over 40 feet uphill from the native soils below. I pulled over and picked a grocery bag full of heads and drove off. As people stared at me driving by, I repeated, “Nothing here. Move along now.” Many of the seeds blew around in my cab as I drove away. Like a snowstorm of seeds, I had accidentally left the passenger’s side window open which left me fully engulfed with the fluffy seeds as I headed north on I-69. I eventually took them to my farm and put them in a propagation tray of which nothing came up. Luckily, it rained and I had left that same window open in my truck. The seeds that stuck to my carpet on the floorboard sprouted. It wasn’t like the blow molded alfalfa sprout package density but a few here and there. This too failed and it was obvious that growing a good cattail root for eating would take only wetland conditions. For the record, the F-150 floorboard is not conducive to cattails.
I still have this idea and cannot shake it. If you were farming your meadow of sprouts, it would not make sense to convert a wetland to your perennial green idea. The same is true with running irrigation in non-wetland conditions to make the whole system work. This is not a crop like cranberries so well known in modern agriculture. Few will care about your love of sprouts. The Phragmites for all intents and purposes is the running bamboo. I tried a sterile Miscanthus for a while. It was a good landscape plant growing in my dry soils but the flavor and toughness was not good. There are many hydrologically damaged ecosystems done entirely by humans that could be used for species like cattails and phragmites. But since the actual crop yield and desirability is in question you need a representative planting where that could be measured and tested that same way you would grow a new tree crop. The same questions apply and yields could be done by selecting seedling characteristics which show a greater propensity for dense sprouting along the long stoloniferous roots. I have seen this characteristic on all plants while digging thousands of plants by hand over the last 40 plus years. Even the potato has it. This type of selection would be a highly dense sprouting plant with more of a clumpy nature with dense sprouting just like asparagus varieties. It is no different only you harvest the plants before the cholorophyll gets a chance to fill in. It is also possible it could be grown in darkness in the spring to allow the sprouts to develop to larger sizes the same way asparagus is done. The vigor of the species is most evident in the spring as the water temperature heats up.
I once tried to talk to a company about installing certain woody plants in a wetland area that was a superfund site. I was planning on donating the plants as I had many extra Michigan holly plants. I thought we could bring over some employees from my farm to help too. Win-win. I had the thought, I will just knock on the door and show up with my great idea. The company that got this massive contract had this trailer parked out front with people working in it. It was near the Kalamazoo River. After the second time, I noticed that the office in back would get mysteriously quiet when I walked in. The office manager wanted me out of there and said please do not come back in a very nice way. Before I left, I tried to share with her some of my ideas, thinking certainly she is interested. She said, “Please do not come back.” She was very nice. People don’t want to hear new ideas because the old ones are already bought and paid for. You can’t interfere with that. Today there is grass and nothing but grass and this grass is mowed ever now and then. Of course, it looks very nice.
Swamp Rose hanging with the cattails and phragmites.
The story of a grassy meadow sprout farm is within us. That is where the meadows can start and flourish without the noise and misinformation from the outside world. Phragmites and cattails help create the grassy meadow. In this meadow, you could grow sprouts and eat them like many have done for thousands of years. Maybe we can hide there with the muskrats and bluegills for a while and enjoy the flavors. The laws of nature in the grassy meadow allow it. Here you can uncover and quietly enjoy the delicious nature of the world. But let’s keep that a secret for now. The sprout farm will have to wait.
Zea is the genus name for corn. It is the Greek word meaning bread. The first Zea grain goes back to at least 12,000 years ago. Evidence was recently found in a cave in Turkey that Zea grains were cultivated from wild plants in the region. Zea highlights the power of an ancient grain shared cross culturally as a staple food filled with health giving properties much like corn is today. Farro is closely related to Zea. Occasionally I will buy the whole grain farro at the health food store and make a porridge out of it for lunch at my farm. Alexander the Great consumed it. The ancient Egyptians preferred it. Kenny the farmer from Michigan ate it. It is the ‘life giving’ grain mentioned in the Illiad. I began wondering if corn had a similar origin as a grain which also contained life giving properties. For me the northern highland teosinte was the North American Zea. It too was untended and found growing in the rocks and cracks of a high elevation mountain desert. It too was shared cross culturally as a form of popcorn and made into porridge. This was the Zea I was looking for. Here is what I found.
Plate one; Zea mays var. mexicana selections
Plate two; Zea mays var. mexicana x pop and sweet corn
Plate three; Zea mays var. mexicana x pop corn mixtures
Plate four: Zea mays var. mexicana x heirloom purple sweet corn
Plate five: We’re going to need a smaller sheller. Not adapted to modern or even a quasi-primitive hand held corn technology. Is Zea a grain without a means to make it useful on a broader scale?
My experiences:
dwarf annual grass
30 day corn
dark purple pigmentation in foliage and kernels
popcorn from an ancient grain
diverse progeny in an open pollinated population
low water-xerophyte of a common food plant
Nutrient and Mineral Dense Grain
self-seeding
freedom of expression-you cannot stop it
continuation of wild corn without boundaries
new evolutionary and ecological trajectories for ZEA.
lunch
Teosinte corn bread made with 25 percent Ashworth sweet corn flour. Ground in an old Vitamix blender. Like grinding buckshot, the kernels were incredibly hard and heated up the metal top quickly. The sound could be heard for miles! I wore protective eye and ear gear. The flavor was mineral like with a strong corny flavor. Betty Crocker recipe.
biologicalenrichment 
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