On a camping trip when I was in high school I ate a bunch of bunchberries, Cornus canadensis. It is a common groundcover found in the northern woods of Michigan. The edible wild book that I had said they would sustain you. This was true. It was bland but it was edible.
Bunchberry, Cornus canadensis
Through my camping experiences I found many of the shrub dogwoods had a similar type of texture and flavor. As I started growing the silky dogood, Cornus ammom, in my nursery for wildlife use, I had heard about a culinary type of dogwood used for food for generations in central Europe called the Cornelian cherry, Cornus mas. It was of great interest to me to hear about the cherry-sized fruits used historically the same way sour cherries are used today. Where would I find such a tree already fruiting? It was not a common tree in the nursery industry and no examples could be found in any landscapes I was familiar with.
Not long afterwards, I found you could easily spot it in March with its faint golden yellowish green flowers when nothing else was flowering. It often flowered before forsythia. This plant was used in many of the older homes in the city as well as some college campuses. My experience of the plant changed when I happened to be in the older part of town and noticed several large cornelian cherries fruiting surrounded by a parking lot and a sidewalk. Here I could taste the ‘wild’ cornelian cherry. The extreme tartness was something to appreciate much like the high vitamin C acerola berries that are used in supplements. Two major roads in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan intersect there and the red stains on the cement were clearly visible at the stop light. I knocked on a few doors and got permission to collect and sweep the parking lot. It was a non-profit organization who rented the home, and no one would park their cars underneath the plants during fruit drop. For me it was a glorious mess. Now I could obtain fresh seeds and eat plenty of the fruit while picking away. Normally I would just suck on them like throat lozenges one at a time. I would then process the bulk of the fruit back at my nursery for seeds for planting. I even hand picked some fresh fruit for my jam making. The high pectin fruit would make a dense spread rich in red color and flavor. People spoke highly of it despite its acidic nature.
If the light was red at the corner, people really stared at our fruit shenanigans. Sometimes we would climb up the trees a little and shake the fruits on a tarp below or use pole pruners to release the fruits. It rained fruits at times because the yields were significant on these old trees. Then we would sweep up the mess with push brooms. Since it was an area with international students, occasionally someone would yell out from their car, “We have this in my country” or “I know what this is.” As if it was a secret handshake to a world of unknown flavors, the cornelian cherry spoke to people who wanted to let me know their connection to the plant. Several people stopped by on the sidewalk and I would ask if they would like a taste. I was happy to see their expression on their faces. Students from Iran, Hungary and China all knew the fruit. Not everyone liked it in the fresh state but smiles erupted despite the tartness. It was the ‘cornel’ dogwood. Dried, made into drinks, compotes, and olives it was collected and harvested the same way tart cherries are used in Michigan. Because of the chart-topping Vitamin C and tartaric acid, it was like a sweet tart candy on a tree.
The Cornus mas was a forgotten fruit plant and was only remembered as an early flowering ornamental plant in North America. It fell into the forsythia camp of spring flowers. Few knew about the fruit let alone how to make something delicious from it. When the plantings at my farm started fruiting, I would often make jam and offer taste testing at the farm shows I was displaying at. Processed with sweeteners, it became a whole new fruit. Once made into jam, syrup or salsa the fruit became known again as worth growing even on a small scale. Today those trees on that corner in the city are long gone. They were replaced with less obtrusive bushy tufts of native bunch grass, daylilies and stone. The parking lot is not stained red anymore. The cement painting done by the Cornel has been erased by time.
I too know that fruit. We have this in my country.
Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus
Flowering Cornus mas just opening. Look for it in the spring.
In my senior year in college, I was employed as a gardener for a home that was near a nature reserve in the city. From time to time, I would cross the street with a wheelbarrow full of spoiled apples harvested from the perfectly manicured lawn I was tending and pour them down a steep slope. It was here in that oak woodland where I saw my first chestnut tree. It was over two feet in diameter and at least fifty feet tall. The ground had several layers of nut burrs underneath it. I was not aware of this tree and looked it up in one of my botanical books. The tree is found sporadically in southern Michigan. Because of the location of the tree and the value of the land, several new homes went up there after the land was sold by the city. The tree was eventually removed to accommodate a garage. I went back to collect nuts before it disappeared forever. There must have been another one nearby because the burs had a few solid seeds within them. Without a pollinator, the nuts would have all been blanks. I grew about a dozen seedlings from that tree and planted them at my farm. They grew unbelievably well however they eventually succumbed to blight right about when they started to fruit. I knew this was going to happen so I positioned them near a fence line where they could be cut easily. That took about ten years. Luckily, I harvested one log from the best tree and stored it in my barn in the rafters. Almost four decades later I decided to take up the challenge and make something useful from it. That day is today.
Wood Characteristics
The grain patterns in chestnut wood are very pronounced and stunning. Even on small diameter pieces this pattern is apparent. The hybrid trees show the wide growth rings probably due to their fast growth, some of which are up to an inch in size. This fast growth creates a very uniform lumber. There is a simple way to use my repository to create even faster growing trees while at the same time having an orchard for nuts. Harvesting the nuts along with the trees for lumber could be done on a small scale now. Further improvements over time could bring together an industry of both nut and wood production which would be more profitable that either alone. The trees would be of a mixed hybrid nature of several species. This mixture greatly improves the odds of resistance and eventual immunity to blight.
Today American chestnut used for wood working is available only due to the reclaimed lumber business. Here planks are taken from old barns and homes where the trees were harvested from standing dead trees after the introduction of blight to North America. This lumber can have drill holes in it from different beetle larvae. The holes give it the name ‘wormy chestnut’. It is the only form of chestnut wood.
Wormy chestnut wood from my farm
According to one seller the planks can have a 20 percent loss on high-quality pieces for furniture making and a 40 percent loss on lower quality pieces used for craft projects. After scouring Etsy and eBay, most of the lumber sold has natural fissures and cracks in it despite it being milled again. Surprisingly some look very clean and smooth with no fissures too. That is a minor miracle for something that came out of barn used over a hundred years ago. It is considered very rot resistant in that state. One source today on Etsy lists: 7/8 inch thick, six inches wide, three foot long boards. Cost: around 100 dollars. All of these wood sources are found in the historical range where American chestnut once flourished in quantity. You wouldn’t find this in Michigan. There is no new wood. It could be possible to harvest and mill a Chinese chestnut tree. They often have short trunks that branch 2-3 feet from the ground and are pruned for nut production. One of my first Chinese and Korean seed sources came from the late Norm Higgins near Lansing, Michigan. A few of his seedlings grew fast and had a timber-like form.
Wood Hardness:
American chestnut regional hardness rating is 80. (Listed chronologically from hard to soft.) It is close to Northern Catalpa and Yellow poplar. Chestnut is a soft wood and easy to work. The wood of the European Sweet Chestnut, Castanea sativa is harder with a 680 Janka rating. American chestnut has a 540 Janka rating. Some of the hybrid trees that I have would likely be in between those two numbers. There is differences in the grain patterns of the individual trees.
On growing the American Chestnut, Castanea dentata:
I used to receive a lot of calls in my nursery about the ‘pure’ American chestnut tree. The American Chestnut Foundation used to give out my name as a source for seeds and plants for both the hybrids and the species. Because of the susceptibility of the blight and no means of preventing or stopping it, I never sold the pure trees because I knew what would happen. But it is possible!! The only ‘for-sure’ locations you could grow the American chestnut would be in places completely isolated hundreds of miles from the nearest chestnut tree either planted or natural as well as far outside its native range. Because chestnut blight does survive on oak trees to a limited degree, it would be ideal to live in a completely different bioregion far from oak trees too. The western United States is one such region. You would have to start with seeds and never use nursery stock or scions for grafting. The reason for this is that blight, if it was on the surface of the seed would perish if planted in the soil. The blight on the seed would have no effect on the seeds germination and would not transmit. Scions or cuttings potentially could carry it. One year seedlings likely do not have blight on them but ideally if you went the seedling route you would want them grown in screened polyhouses as one year plants. The blight has to attach itself and grow which normally requires older stems, branches and trunks. I have seen two year old trees with blight on the stems but it is rare but never on one year plants. Ideally you would treat the blight as a living biohazard and be very strict about it. You would never want to visit other chestnut plantings. You would have to decontaminate your footwear and clothes if you did. Certainly you would not want to allow other nut growers to visit your magnificent American chestnut trees. That would be very risky. This has happened in the past! Many isolated trees have died either through wind born spores or people not knowing what they are doing. I knew of one American chestnut seed source super isolated in the far north in another state that many other nursery people used for seed. Eventually the whole planting became infested and died within a few years. It was thought at the time, people brought that one in. I remember talking to the late Dr. Dennis Fulbright, a leading research scientist on chestnut blight from M.S.U., about these isolated trees that look spectacular in Michigan. He knew of many American chestnut trees and would visit them periodically. I saw pictures of them and they were often huge trees. He said just in his short time of discovery several of these remote and old Michigan trees died just by wind born spores floating in. It was a game of chance and sometimes we blamed ourselves and sometimes nature. Today the community of American chestnut lovers include a wide range of ‘deliver us from the evil blight’ projects to simply discovering and disseminating nuts of wild trees that show immunity. I personally favor the latter.
I was rarely successful at telling people not to plant something more than the American chestnut tree. It was in the same boat as the white birch trees where borers turn them to sawdust. There was nothing I could say to warn people about the risk. They had read so much about the plant in its great historical past that it created a deep passion for a tree important to North America. For that reason I gave up and always encouraged people but never said anything about what would inevitably happen. I never sold the trees or nuts but did offer words of encouragement. By itself, that type of planting is where ideas can take root which then leads to a means to overcome the fear of loss. In the bioregion of the human brain, a beautiful tree flourishes. Who would say no to that?
Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus
American chestnut wood tables available starting November 1, 2026. For pick up direct at the farm. Appointment only.
Red Mulberry. Morus rubra. In a subdivision in Texas, this tree was pruned to accomodate the home and yard it was in.
I like mulberries and everything about them. It doesn’t matter what type they are. I made the selection Lavender Life red mulberry based on heavy fruit yields. It was not based on percentage of how much it may or may not be native or if it was a hybrid of another mulberry. For that you would need genetic testing. A colleague of mine found a subspecies of a hackberry not long ago. He sent it in to have it tested and sure enough he was correct in his taxonomy. They published a paper on it somewhere I hear. On the surface, mulberries vary tremendously from tree to tree and if you look online, it is common to see conflicting information. It is possible to ‘ball park’ it. Genetic testing takes the guess work out of it. Over the years people have sent me their thoughts on something I was growing which had variations found within the progeny. Once the ballpark species score card read, 2 for, 2 against and one hybrid tie on a type of Viburnum I was growing. “Not Sure” won that game. For me I go back to my seed sources and the story behind the plants. That is considered quaint and old-fashioned now in a world where everything has to be nailed down. My Viburnum story involved an actual research scientist, a fence row in Alberta, Canada and why someone would live in the middle of nowhere. Here is another story.
The Red Mulberry Morus rubra.
Starting in 2000 I began buying red mulberry seedlings from different wholesalers for my nursery for resale. It was probably the first time they were available nationwide. These are often grown in Missouri and North Dakota by massive nurseries cranking out millions of plants. They resale to other sub-wholesale nurseries some of which I used to buy from. The first batches of trees were across the map in terms of uniformity. I would buy anywhere from 250 to 1000 trees every year or two. In 2001 I potted up part of a batch and let them fruit in the greenhouse. It was kind of cool to see all the fruit on the three-year-old trees. I felt they did not have much of the red mulberry in them as far as I could tell but the fruit was huge in size. I mentioned this to the owner of a company I bought the seedlings from, and he said they were constantly improving the seed sources for that species as natural hybrids were common. Eventually those companies must have gone to more southern isolated seed sources like Texas and other southwestern seed sources.
Nice home and nice red mulberry I had a chance to visit.
You can find pure red mulberries in these isolated locations probably due to bird migration and coyotes who also eat the berries. There are also several Texas varieties of Morus rubra. I tried those at my farm, but the grafts failed over time. People know what the red mulberry is and have made selections from it and use it. Some of these places don’t have other mulberries just because the climate is so unforgiving to those species normally found in the northeastern U.S. The downside of this is the seedlings from these new southern batches were also not hardy and frequently came to me with major winter damage. I attempted again and reluctantly grew some of these sources in pots to fruit. This time they looked very true and uniform to me as far as my limited subjective experience. The original seven trees dropped down to two after deer and a few Michigan winters. This is Lavender Life. See below.
It is isolated to some degree, however roughly 200 feet away is a nice mulberry tree on my neighbor’s land and has been growing there for over 50 years. I have three red mulberry trees ten feet apart and I am assuming it is a cloud of red mulberry pollen around them like all mulberries which probably causes a great degree of self-fertility. However, that too would need to be genetically tested to see the percentage in the seedlings or seeds.
Lavender Life
Here is the part where people tend to get upset. It doesn’t matter. What am I proving or disproving and how is that better? It appears I am only doing it to placate the nativists and purists. By the way, nature apparently doesn’t care either because hybrids are everywhere in the world of mulberries. Hybrid means different but it does mean bad or worthless. Unfortunately people view all mulberries as weed trees and undesirable. The red mulberry is not losing its identity. It’s adding to its identity while creating new expressions in the real world. That is adaptation. Mulberries have the highest chromosome count in all of the plant world. There is a reason for that. You could also grow it out by finding isolated trees while making new Morus rubra seed sources in an orchard. That I do care about, and it is of great value in generating greater diversity. It is very cool to think of a hardy form of pure red mulberry, however that is defined by the caretaker or breeder of the line of plants under cultivation. This is called domestication and you are domesticating a wild form of mulberry. Creating new seed sources is critical in that the diversity needed is way beyond the percentage points of native and not native. The mulberry genus is filled with rich flavors and sweetness. I’m picking some today and sharing them with my friend Not Sure.
Enjoy, Ken Asmus
Mulberry lumber at a local sawmill. This is not a composite. Those are rays of wood sunshine. All glory to Morus alba.
Removal of the polyhouses creates an opportunity for greater plant diversity. You say goodbye. I say hello. Farmall.
In terms of establishing new perennial plants in my treeless pasture, my farm was a good testing ground for all these different methods I kept reading about from other growers in gardening and permaculture. I applied these ideas to my farm on a small scale. One of my first attempts to go to zero vegetation was to use the old shag carpet in my living room as a giant mulch mat. I thought I could reuse it several times as it was a tightly woven burlap on the back with super dense in fibers on the front. After we redid our floors, I hauled it out to my farm and spread it out shag side down. It was ideal and it did block out all vegetation from emerging, but it also turned into public housing for bumblebees making the perfect nesting habitat. When I went to slide it over to the next area it became a bee volcano. The shag part also created nesting resources for the white footed mice. I found it all over the farm for a while. A decade later the synthetic fibers hardly broke down, so I removed it. This created my prairie plant area. See below.
Prairie Iris-Iris virginica – Plants grow upwards to three foot tall in an open field, not wetland conditions. I purchased this seed source from a collector found in a prairie in Illinois.
I then went to what was being touted as soil sterilization using solar to heat the area under a 4 mil black plastic. I took a 40 by 100-foot piece of black plastic and pinned it down via boulders from my field and let the sun bake it. You could feel the heat from it. This was highly effective at removing all living plants including deep rooted perennials. It took about two months for that to happen. This created some of my planting beds for walnuts and chestnuts and eventually this large row of pears and American persimmon. See below.
Pear petals-I reseeded this area with grass after growing the trees. It is a common place for deer to aggregate.
I was involved with permaculture from the early Bill Mollison days and began using cardboard and mulch methods of creating areas free of vegetation. I obtained the cardboard from a retail food store where they allowed people to take boxes for personal use. I would break down the boxes and flatten them out to fit into my pickup bed. The cardboard might have tape on it and the whole project involved huge amounts of mulch and time. I substituted newspapers for a while and switched over to sawdust because it was half the cost and much more forgiving to shovel by hand. This worked well in small plantings using small trees. See below.
Wild strawberry planting using sawdust mulch. Allows for runner regeneration under black walnut selections wedged in by sunchokes.
Having an open field is a rare event at my farm so recently I had to come up with a cost-effective means of covering the soil after the polyhouse removals. In total five houses are being taken down which is now zero vegetation. Covered in plastic and two types of woven polypropylene ground cloth for more than two decades, the original native soil underneath was locked in place. Removal makes it possible to replenish the soil once again. Over time the original orchard grass was still at my farm, so it was natural to reestablish that as a baseline in this area and then go from there. Orchard grass is a thick bunch grass and very succulent in growth. When you hit it with a weed whacker prepare to be bathed in rich green protoplasm. It tolerates mowing and it flourishes despite truck traffic and crops of black walnuts from overhead. From the company Green Cover, I purchased the variety Devour which is more drought tolerant and disease free. See below.
Devour Orchard grass, Dietrichs broccoli raab/ On the left: Kentucky coffeetree that managed to grow between the frame and woven mats of the greenhouse. It was cut down several times in the greenhouse only to reappear ever more vigorous. It must feel relieved. Finally free at last.
Each of these applications worked for covering the ground and creating diversity where there was none before. In the process, you might find that you may have to add to the soil surrounding the plants to get them to respond as if you had a rich organic garden. The polyhouse soil under the mats had zero organic matter. The constant irrigation and lack of oxygen created by the woven polyethylene Dewitt ground cloth for more than 3 decades of use was not good. The soil was lifeless. With the exception of one blue salamander I found under the frame at the end of the house there were no worms Even moles avoided the area. See below.
This highlights the changes that can happen when you go from zero to hero in this world of creating diversity. You will try anything and tweak those ideas to their limits. Each has its place and application as a previous stage you must try. Like plants, you tend to forgive your past mistakes as you move on in your pursuit of diversity and grow as best as you can given the circumstances. You always wish for more.
Any species of fruit as it is found in ‘nature’ can be cultivated. Two years ago, I grew a wild tomato from the Everglades that produced a tomato the size of a pea. It tasted like a tomato but was constructed like an asteroid with a spikey seed center and a few layers of red fruit cells. It was the “off gassing” of flavor barely detectable by the human palate that leaves you wanting more. This seed-selection has little to do with the cultivated fruit that we know as tomato. I did the same experiment with a wild tomato from the Galapagos Islands. They never turned red and were hard as nails into October. Imagine if you were introduced to the tomato fruit from these seed sources. Today is another story where huge fields of selected seedlings are grown from seeds that are stable enough to generate delicious fruit. The wild beach plum is bit like the Galapagos of tomatoes. It sounds cool but is it practical to grow and what are you going to do with it? The difference is the wild beach plum is already delicious as it is found in the wild. No selection needs to be done. Like a commercial tomato, you could easily grow wild plum seedlings and continue its progeny without employing the cultivar-based system of fruit growing. It is stable. It is delicious prepared a certain way and it is super productive in most types of environments that lack an actual farmer. This is the beauty of the wild beach plum which generated a lot of beautiful populations at my farm. A few seed selections proved to be fruitful in the process of discovery.
Nana Beach Plum in fruit at my farm.
The above image is one of the first beach plum seedlings grown in my open field using prolific fruiters selected from populations I was growing for the nursery trade. In the process of doing that, I noticed it was quite common to see flowering on young one and two year old plants. (The first ratio from wild plants was 1-3 plants per 1000 seedlings.) I would tag these plants and carry them out one by one to my hillsides devoid of any trees at the time. The pasture was thick with grass still and I would use cellulose and polyethylene mulch mats. The plants grew very nicely in these locations on my sandy low organic soils. As time went on and I grew successive generations from these plants from seeds and they too were very productive. They had a more compact structure much like the Nana evergreens that people use around their homes. From seed the progeny also carried those traits in greater numbers than before. I sent seeds around the world to share in my discovery at the time. It was much in demand because of its precocity and heavy bearing.
What did not work so well was my employment of an idea of using seedlings in commercial fruit production. It was a success in my retail trade in people’s backyards with a few plants or rows of them here and there. It was without a doubt one of the most celebrated fruits for jam production and fresh eating by homeowners across many zones of growing. They flower very late, missing frosts. They resisted insects and diseases and are super productive without spray. The wholesale deployment of a wild plum like tomato did not fly. It fell into the native camp a few times along with researchers who work with stone fruits. I was hoping for more of a farmer-led coalition and done from seed. The lone plum out in the field reminded me it only takes one to make it happen. Yet that did not happen either in the beach plums range or outside of it as a stand alone orchard or planting of some sort.
Nana beach plum in fruit. Unlike American plum, it is free of curculio damage and the foliage is highly resistant to mildew. This is due to its adaptation to its maritime location. It is a much better plum to grow, harvest and use than the American plum, Prunus americana. It is naturally lower in astringency so it can be eaten fresh off the bush without wincing. The compact size and structure of the Nana beach plum aids in preventing browsing and creates heavy fruit yields all along the branch and trunk structure.
The graft unions of beach plums are short lived. The trunk itself is replaced roughly every 10 years as it breaks down, and new sprouts are formed from the roots. For this reason, I contacted another nursery to root the plants. He did find a way to do that, but it was not published so the secret lies with the nursery owner who has since passed on. Let’s face it, there is no farmer for the beach plum but from seed it also has a super power on its own without a human champion. It attracts people to harvest and use it the same way wild blueberries are still harvested. You plant them in public areas-locations in poor soil, uncared for on state land with denuded hillsides, open fields with little vegetation. (Not to mention land owned by the people of that state or federal land.) There are rocks. There is sand. The few trees that grow there are stunted. The soil is naturally acidic in nature. The growing climate is short and unpredictable. The frosts are late. This is ideal location for the beach plum. There it will flourish in this farmerless field. It acts as a germplasm repository, healthy food, social attraction while providing a wild harvest of delicious fruit high in vitamins and minerals. Maybe at first we will still view it as the Galapagos of fruits. I hear freedom ringing. It is small and powerful and has places to go far outside its historical range.
Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus
One of the seed selections moved out to the farmerless field section of my farm.
We tend to think of forests as random sets of plants in a structured organized way. Things are not in rows. It is a mixed forest. We might think, “oh this is much more desirable and destined for perfection” if forests were laid out like corn fields. Like the image of Mayapple foliage above you wish for even distribution of each plant. Maybe you do not desire commercial forestry with long rows of the same species. When trees are in rows in an orchard, we maximize the production of something spectacular like apples or hazelnuts. What if you could combine the best of both worlds yet still have a productive planting that is also commercially viable? My idea of doing exactly that stemmed from an ecology class I took in college where I counted and measured seedling trees and shrubs in a beech-maple forest. I had to identify seedlings as they came up in the shade of the forest and then kind of guess how that might influence the future of the forest. I had to take a lot of measurements, count and identify many seedling plants. The teacher told me to go back and do it again several times. When I got more involved with my plantings at my farm and began adding and subtracting vegetation, I began to once again look at those tiny seedlings in the understory of my trees. I began thinking about the future of my planted forest. It took a while to realize that all of the plants in these locations were beneficial including those plants people think are not desirable like multiflora rose. I began to see the benefits of the rows while at the same time began ‘saving’ those ‘errant and random’ apples, pear, hickory, chestnut, basswood and everything else growing in-between the rows and under the trees. My future forest was becoming more diversified while providing a broader range of seeds. Each generation improved in terms of disease resistance, fast growth rate or other values found in a natural forest. There is no difference. It is a forest after all. It has a canopy. It has an understory and it provides seeds for replicating itself for generations.
Hybrid American Chestnut Pruning-Trimmings provide fertilizer as well as habitat for toads and salamanders. Using hand tools allows you time to identify, thin and select the trees you desire without the rather care free use and speed of power equipment. I use both types of equipment and still make mistakes. Mistakes means I cut a desirable tree to the ground I wish I hadn’t. Relax. It will be back next year. I’ll mark it with a wooden stake to avoid a repeat the next year.
By judicious pruning and the slow conversion of field to forest, my plantings are a joy to be in today. It is both diversified without the use of cultivars and it has a trajectory which combines the global combination of species used in agriculture today. It has the Himalayan and Eastern white pine blister rust resistant trees, and it has the pawpaw plantings near the wild peach along with the hybrid American-Chinese chestnuts. This is the real world of seeds, seed sources and a means to replicate it easily and inexpensively. Although not a commercial orchard, it can provide seeds for commercial agriculture, agroforestry and other woody plant ideals currently being employed slowly in North America.
Apple seedling grown under the chestnut tree limbed up to prevent browse. Clean foliage is a good indicater of clean fruit without spray. I slowly cut plants around the trees to preserve them and limb them upwards to speed their growth into the canopy. Hybrid American chestnut (as above image), multiflora rose and white dogwood. The rose creates the perfect seed bed for the apple and other trees which seed in and are protected by browse from deer. After a few years, I prune it to the ground which then resprouts and feeds the deer with young succulent foliage and diminishes its vigor.
The prunings of multiflora rose degrade quickly while creating mulch and fertilizer. This particular chestnut tree is super productive and relatively healthy. Some seedlings are kept at the edge of its canopy too because of its immunity to chestnut blight. There are four seedlings in its understory ready to take its place when the time comes. The multiflora rose aids in regneration of the field to forest. This particular version of chestnut has more of the Chinese characteristics in it making it ideal as an orchard tree with broad spreading limbs. The flowers of multiflora rose are very beneficial to polliantors and having the arching branches way up in the tree is ideal despite the drawback of trying to harvest nuts underneath which is impossible without blood shed. Eventually you have to prune it flat to the ground to gain access to the orchard floor.
Random could be considered maximum entropy in nature. I’m setting the example of self-selection by a human over time and a means to measure and guide the plants I chose towards a healthy diverse forest that was once a hay field. It is one option of many to choose. What do you choose?
Random has structure. Random is not chaos. The design is implemented automatically as order is already there as an unseen design like a architect drafts a building. The design is just another expression in the infinite tree crop forest using global food forest genetics and its expression from seed. From seed to forest is the secret.
Trunk of the Paradise Apple: Tension and Compression
When you grow an apple from seed (which I highly recommend) you will see the extremities of what is possible in terms of what the apple will look and taste like. If a crabapple tree is nearby, then there is a huge outpouring of it’s opposite values of the culinary apple that you may have started with. It could be anything. This is only natural. It is good for the apple genome as now it is gaining a certain stability in terms of its expressions over time in a real-world scenario of diseases and insects. It is a back up plan to the back up plan. By grafting and selecting cultivars you put an end to this evolutionary trajectory. But it is a trade off in terms of consuming a fruit that is sweet and delicious versus a highly astringent pea sized fruit plus everything in between. That variation is scorned on by scientists and fruit growers yet it is our salvation as well. It turned out that in my growing apples from seed I also found the opposite; uniformity of successive generations. This is an apple tree that more or less stays roughly the same from one generation to the next. Two species that are naturally like this is the North American apple, Sweet Crab, Malus coronaria and the Russian apple called Paradise apple, Malus pumila variety niedwetzkyana. Part of the reason for this is the period of pollination; no overlap so bees cannot do their magic. It may be too late to get cross pollination as is the case of Sweet Crab or too early to do the same for the Paradise apple. Both exhibit flowering with a two week difference no matter what the weather is like. That means it doesn’t exist; it just is not that common. When I was growing seedling apples by the thousands for my nursery, you would not see the hybrids like other apples which showed a wide range of integration of different apple values. Never say never because the apple is one flexible little plant able to leap tall boundaries to find an avenue of greater stability and flexibility. This is the nature of plants.
Malus pumila var. niedwetzkyana………. The Paradise Apple
I received this seed from an overseas arboretum collection many years ago through the International Dendrological Society. It is a white flowering form of crab apple with red flesh. I only had one tree of it at the time and planted it near a group of Finland subarctic Norway spruce as a nice backdrop. I grew many seedlings and eventually I added to the lone tree by selecting four of it’s most vigorous seedlings. What I did was select seedlings that had clean foliage. This type of selection process also tends to improve the fruit quality and size too. The seedlings had larger fruit than the parent and were also very fruitful at a young age. When fully bletted, the fruit has a powerful almost medicinal flavor. For that to dissipate you must let the fruit sit in the tree late and wait. Astringency is very high until it breaks down fully. After that it is like apple concentrate but paste like in texture. This is ideal if you are using it for adding anthocyanins to an apple jam, jelly or spread. The Paradise apple has possibilities as a species outside the world of grafted cultivars. It can harness its frost resistance, fruit free of disease and insects and its high powered anthocyanin rich fruit in a way no other apple tree can make happen. What is needed is a larger grow out to further refine the population of apples from it. It might lead to cloning it via grafting but looking at today after 40 years the species is suitable for use as it exists.
I must be in paradise.
The tree can support huge weight on its limbs. It often bends to the ground with its yield. It fruits every year. It combines high yields with dense fruiting clusters throughout the tree.
I can see that Niedzwetzky’s Apple could be used for syrup, cider and flavoring in its native lands of Russia, Germany and other middle European countries. I climb and shake the limbs or use a pole pruner to drop the fruit. It is always clean. It inherits many of the wonderful features of the subspecies and species of the domestic apple. It is a free apple-not cultivated that moves with evolutionary time and can help us in the quest for a delicious apple rich in health giving properties.
Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus
Dense flowers means dense fruit setCrotch angles play a role in supporting the crop weight. Super floriferous with lots of pollen is the key
Just one single species of plant can positively change the world in so many wonderful productive agricultural ways. To make the world more fruitful and abundant, crop enrichment could light the way by harnessing new species of plants outside of what we currently use. The one crop that no one wants could be a weed somewhere. Aligning with the potential of new crops and healthy foods is a direct path to bringing better food and improved human health. Weeds are very good at this. I view them as nature’s suggestion box. I cultivated many of them and made some slight selections in the process. Even the dandelion has been selected to some degree. It’s picture is featured prominently on all lawn herbicide bottles.
Evidently cultivating the weedy plants is also one of the most controversial activities I was involved with. My nursery was very small scale and rarely made a dent into this new food crop category. Nothing caught on to any large degree. I began to think that possibly I was standing in the wrong field alone and isolated like many of my weed friends. Every now and then people have opinions they like to share on what is good or bad. There were some weeds that fell into the legal category of invasive species. I stayed clear of them in commerce, but secretly I grew a few to see what the noise was about. Like one of my employees who had a pot growing operation behind a secret door in his closet, I was hiding my weeds in plain sight. I mean how many times do people look at the plants in the cracks of the sidewalks. No one cares about those plants. I would dig them up and bring them to my nursery and put them in prop trays. I always go to the U.S.D.A. definition of weed as ‘a plant some where and at some time people find objectionable.’ Frankly, I found none of them objectionable. Framed by this, the long-winded emails and pencil written complaints on lined binder paper made me smile.
Biodiversity is a word we cuddle up to. To wander outside into the weed category is a great joy but is thought of as a threat to biodiversity. The plants are sometimes found on this isolated island of potential food plants. Here are two.
Such is the case for the hardy citrus species called trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata. It has been used as understock for citrus and an ornamental plant for over hundred years in the United States. No one has looked at it in any serious way other than a novelty fruit plant with thorns and a zig zag growth pattern. There is some renewed interest in it again as a fruit producer. The quality of the fruit is questionable, which can be packed full of seeds. In Michigan, it was not a particularly easy plant to establish. However once set, the plants took off after the fifth year. Today my hardy oranges are left alone on a hillside and struggling in a mix of goldenrod and an active groundhog colony. It is alone and far from any form of citrus. Yet far outside its cultivated range also offers opportunities in that there are no pests or diseases that affect it. It grows like a …..weed. I had to protect it with a mesh guard because the deer would nibble on the foliage trying to miss the giant thorns. The last time I checked there were over a dozen states prohibiting citrus plants being shipped from outside of its state. Likely we will see more of this as certain historical ranges change of crop plants and disease, and insects make it unfavorable to grow the crop anymore. With imports soon behind it signals the end of certain fruit farms in different parts of the United States. Although I have no fruiting plants, I feel enlivened every time I see them. I have no idea on what I am doing in the world of citrus. I’m from Michigan. Yet already I see differences in terms of hardiness and growth patterns. I also see this same plant being grown by other weed lovers like me. Some of them are secret about it and others are full of bravado and confidence. I stand in the middle of this field and wonder what its future will offer to the fruit growers of my state and beyond. It is only a rootstock let to grow after a real citrus orchard is abandoned. That sounds promising to me. Alone and free to grow.
Poncirus trifoliata. Japanese Bitter Orange.
To mention you are breeding and selecting autumn olive is controversial. It is one of those taboo subjects and can only be done in certain circles. Once I almost got kicked out of a dinner I was at because the landowner was livid about autumn olives. He only loved native plants. I said it was a good juice plant rich in anthocyanins. The weed in me was speaking. It’s high anthocyanin compounds along with its rich vitamins and minerals have huge potential as a perennial crop plant. People are now harvesting it and enjoying the fruit that once was considered ‘wildlife food.’ Other related species like the goumi is also considered desirable and said to be not as weedy although no one planted millions of them like the conservation districts did to test that theory. For me finding the deep red selections and heavier fruiting plants was both rewarding and an eye opener to its value. It shows the potential of going past the 100 x times more than the tomato mark. My little gene pool was found at my family’s abandoned Christmas tree farm wedged between the scotch pines and white spruce. These were loners in a population hidden from view. These isolated plants were filled with promises which can be used as an energy drink and a means to fight cancer. The nitrogen fixing capabilities also provide additional benefits in tree crop plantings as an understory plant. The birds and mammals know this already, which is why you see it everywhere. They recognize its benefits. Now it is our turn. Just some slight selective varieties and this weed will become less objectionable over time. For now, it is a closeted love affair hidden from view and talked about in secret circles on social media under the name Elaeagnaceae, Few notice but some say it is a great fixer upper in the plant world.
The autumnberry is a recapitulation of the now forgotten autumn olive for human use. This was a chance seedling with darker fruit with good yields found many years ago at my families farm. Using selections based on high levels of lycopene along with the culinary means of delivering that goodness be it juice, syrup or supplements could make this a profitable shrub crop. Only a weed can do this. Of course some negotiations with regulatory will be needed or a change in the laws on its cultivation for human use. Oh oh. I just thought of this. Prepare to be met with lined binder paper.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Such is the case of using cultivated plants as a means for overcoming disease and other environmental calamities. To overcome obstacles, it takes a population not a lone individual to make that happen. This type of cultivation and selection is a short cut to move the population along in a smooth trajectory while it generates new expressions far outside of what you thought was possible. Plants are very good at surprising you. You don’t have to hybridize species, but you may choose to because of the dynamics of a hybrid population. That will add to your soup of knowledge about the plant, but it may not be what you want. It was what I wanted only because it was all I had available. I used the hybrid population to my benefit as well as the environment surrounding my farm. It is not possible to live in a world of isolation. The disease is a motivator of sorts and helps plants in terms of adaptation. When you see genetically engineered trees, what you are looking at besides the quiet desperations of research scientists are the failures of both modern sciences to capture the populations as well as the limited knowledge of understanding the value of the whole. It is one of the best examples of destructive technologies applied to plants. Many years ago, I would attend the lectures of the late Dr. Dennis Fulbright from Michigan State University. He was a leader in understanding chestnut blight. He frequently discussed breeding wild American chestnuts only because of the rather ironic twist of breeding selections to create wild. He said you can breed a wild chicken but in the end no matter what the outcome; it becomes domesticated. You bred it. You domesticated it by breeding. That is domestication in its essence.
The generations of plants that I have at my farm are not just random configurations of two or more species. I have seen it in the populations while generating new trees from those populations. My subjective anecdotal experiences could easily be explained as random. It is the interpretation of random that changes within me as it becomes well defined and selected in an effortless way. It is one of the reasons I am currently measuring those plants which best highlight this effortless way that made it through the cloud of disease and other environmental conditions found at my farm. It turned out it was not just one and done. As painful as it was to watch my plantings disappear at first, it was a great joy to see the new generation built on top of the mulch of the old.
Here is some of the good, not so good and fading hybrid American chestnut trees which helped make that happen.
Fusion
You see it with oaks. Why not chestnuts? The tree on the left is a Chinese and European hybrid. The tree on the right is Viva, an American hybrid that had over the top hybrid vigor. Viva is no longer with us these days, however the seedlings surrounding Viva are showing more vigor than the parent with strong apical dominance. The blight is still there but its effects are greatly muted. This dampening of the disease may not look pretty but it demonstrates the effects and power of tree callus the same way a tree is injured and the bark is lost in the process. Callus equals vigor, health and power in the world of chestnuts. To make that happen, I let the seedlings grow up and around these two trees while over compensating for the lost due to disease in the process. That worked. As far as the fusion equation of planting trees like this. It is not recommended but I am glad I did this because it added to my soup of chestnut trees and helped in the process. The planting is flourishing again. I dodged a disease bullet.
When you first look at a disease that is on the surface of a trees bark, you only see the outside. This creates a certain uneasiness because you wonder will this continue to get worse or does the blight also have blight and is now in a weakened state. Maybe the tree will make it. I will cut it down and leave a sprout to test it further. This is one of my gritty tests. Recently I dumped 10 pounds of chicken manure on a particurally good tree to see if vigor and disease resistance can be influenced by fertilizer. For a brief moment in time I thought I was a passenger pigeon helping the tree reach high into the canopy.
I use to be quite fastidious in my chestnut plantings removing suckers, understory seedlings and other plants which slowed harvest. Since we were on our hands and knees harvesting I liked the parking lot view. Over time I began to notice some trees had what is called water sprouts. These were very fast growing whips which can put on 8 feet of growth in a single season. Why was this happening? I wasn’t sure so I let several go. This is one of them. Apparently it signals to the tree that the main trunk is under pressure and time for a new top. Part of this is due to the chestnut blight in the top shrinking the crown and stressing the tree. This tree is very productive and has done well generating new plants which are immune to blight. The generations under this tree along with its natural resistance add to the self regeneration of a hybrid population showing good form and resistance to disease.
I wish I could tell you all is right with the world. It is not. In this plant world, loss means salvation. It also means a hole in your heart for something you lost. There is a way around. You just have to compensate for your beliefs and understand it is not what you wanted anyways. These two images of the same tree show both the death and mayhem of destruction along with the regeneration of new sprouts from the rootstock. This type of regeneration depending on the composition of the individual tree moves quickly past the death of the old which can bring it back to fruiting. In my plantings, this was a common experience and shows the overall weakness of the plants in the beginning without the life support of a new generation. I’m keeping the walnut and seedling apples under its canopy while I harvest the wood and coppice. This tree did produce some seedlings for a while and a few are kept along with the walnut and seedling apples. This is one way to benefit my farm as a biodiverse tree crop farm. The seedlings of other trees are also more than the sum of the parts.
T0 PRUNE OR NOT TO PRUNE
I wish I knew what I know now is a common sentiment amoung gardeners. With chestnut trees, you soon find out that just a simple cut can cause problems. This is a case of doing the trimming and leaving a small stub which then trapped the disease. The smooth bark of young chestnut trees are often immune to blight because it has to adhere to something to grow into the tree. As trees mature, the smooth bark becomes less and less on the main trunk. If you prune a tree you are inadvertently creating a nice habitat for the disease to settle in. Yet it is surprising I don’t see more of it because I do love to prune. It is just today I have to think about it more and its repercussions of the trees health than I did in the past.
Sprouting signals both the end and beginning. In cases like the above, it helps the tree wall off the damage, feed the root system and improve the trees health. It might not be enough. A windstorm swept through this area and took out a portion of the top. I will wait.
Scorched Bark
How bad can it get? Disease is part of life right. I wish it wasn’t sometimes. It’s brutal to plants.This highlights the power of the chestnut tree and the over the top response to stop and wall off the damage. The bark has fallen off. The tree barely can leaf out yet it has for the last 20 years. The original tree in the background shows the first go round. The two sprouts on the side show the second go round. Here we see the final showdown of the weakened blight state and a tree that essentially refuses to give up. I had cut this tree down a few times only to let a couple of sprouts grow to see what would happen. I found out. Weakened blight. Power of an elephant encapsulated in a tree.
The Grant chestnut combines the best of the European hybrids with crossing from the American chestnut. Today it has few limbs up in the canopy as the blight took its toll. The trunk is clean. This was one of most vigorous chestnut trees I have. The Grant chestnut tree was grown from a seed of a very weak European tree with minmal nut production from northern Michigan. It happened to have been crossed with a nearby and very healthy American chestnut tree. The original tree is gone. New ones from sprouts as well as seed nuts provide an avenue for a future population to take the place of the lone plant on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. For my farm it was a loss. For me it was a gain. Now it can survive in the real world. I will make a few tables from the wood. Two gains plus One loss equals net happiness with the results.
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.
biologicalenrichment 
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