Asparagii of Unknown Origins

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

Meditteranean Asparagus-Well known species asparagus

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

Meditteranean Asparagus – Asparagus acutifolius

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

Asparageyser Asparagus – U.C. Hybrids Asparagus officinalis

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

Death Valley Asparagus– Asparagus officinalis

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

Vining Asparagus- Asparagus verticullatus

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

Purple Dutch Asparagus officinalis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asparagii is good.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

The Jerusalem Artichoke Goes the Distance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Value is This?

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

Taco Bebbs Oak: Increasing Diversity

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

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

“Hit me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

Biodiversity in Fruits: 250 Year Old Pear Leads the Way

Diversity Expands In Novel Ecological Ways

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

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

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.

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

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

Enjoy. Ken Asmus

The Inbetweeners

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.

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.