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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus