Diversity Explored: The Edible Sunflower

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Cucumber-leaf sunflower Helianthus debilis var. cucumerifolius
Arikara sunflower Helianthus annus
Sand sunflower Helianthus anomalos

I always was fascinated with the sunflower. There was always so much activity around them. My parents decided to move to a new home when I was 16 years old. It was in a new subdivision in the midst of a suburbian utopia. My dad hired a nearby landscape architect and nursery to put in the landscape. The landscape looked identical to all the other landscapes in the surrounding homes. It had the junipers, media yews and crabapples. My dad added a few white birch clumps from the farm. Perfect. The whole thing was exactly what you would expect to see. A couple of years later, when I came home from college during the summer, I would sneak in sunflowers between the shrubs. No one noticed until they started flowering. My parents started getting good comments from the neighbors who thought it was quirky and cool. My dad found it annoying and wanted me to stop doing it. Quirky and cool was not for him. Back off on the sunflowers son. My mom liked it and soon we began to plant petunias in the front yard near the groundcover junipers. Not long afterwards, a few other people down the road planted sunflowers around their mailbox and garages. My dad relinquished and let the sunflowers live but I could not put them in great density like I did the first time. It was my landscape art. I made it look like a South Dakota sunflower field blended with a modern suburban landscape circa 1970. I call it South Dakota Suburbia. Like a well worn lesisure suit, that landscape was not all that exciting to begin with. As time went on I added northern pecan, cactus, yucca, apple, metasequoia and bayberry. The pecan and oak are still there today looking spectacular.The whole sunflower thing was attracting too much attention. To begin with the sunflowers are heliotropic attention getters. Very gawdy. Perfection has arrived. Ta-Daaa.

“Haven” sunflower-dwarf early ripening sunflower -single and polyheaded versions were produced at my farm. We had to use various bags and coverings to protect against predation by birds and chipmunks.

It’s a different story today. The ornamental aspect of sunflowers has been highlighted by numerous colors and forms with super breeding and the strong floral market. It was Stokes Seed Company that offered the first red sunflowers. I grew those a couple of times. I only knew of Mammoth up to that point. It was the standard. The seed production for oil and its edible seed is like hybrid corn with many selections all from North American genotypes many bred in Russia. I knew by the early 90’s that it would not be possible to add to that genetic diversity at my farm in any meaningful way. With that in mind, I grew several wild forms including species types as a sort of filler for landscapes that were more or less in transition much like my old suburban family home. I sold small packets of them for $2.00. Some of these species and their counterparts of Native American selections were not grown commercially. I was wondering if the wild forms or species had unique flavors and oil qualtities. Often these qualities are left in the dust in modern plant breeding.

I began the grow out of perennial sunflowers and began plantings for seed production including using the Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus while finding and creating new selections in the process. My world was becoming full of sunflowers. At one point I met an actual sunflower breeder from Canada who was working on extremely short season sunflowers for oil production. I lost that strain but found others almost all by accident. It was like the sunflowers were finding me. I could not stop making eye contact. No one can. At one point while renting a vacation home near Lake Michigan I found an accidental seedling dwarf sunflower that had ripened very early in a mulched yew and rose bed. It reminded me of my hometown sunflower plantings. I started grow outs of that strain at my farm winnowing it down to the poly headed forms with early ripening.They were both black and the grey stripe types mixed.

Even this year, I still keep company with a few sunflowers. I find another annual species to grow and buy a few packets from a specialty seed company that has wild species in different locations throughout the U.S. There is a lot of diversity. When I did this in the past I soon found out that many of these so called sub-species are very unique in their flowers and foliage yet they also may not look like the images on line in many ways despite the seeds being wild collected. They do not sit still in their morphology. This is the nebulous world of part this and part that. Subspecies means it is a branch off the tree of Helianthus annus, the edible sunflower most of us know. It is a genetically complex plant easily connecting species and selections one gene at a time like a bridge with infinite highways all creating a uniformity of characteristics. You could create a hybrid and not even know it.

Sand sunflower Helianthus anomalos Not quite there yet with its ta-daa moment.

I grew one variety called Havasupai. I knew the story of it as a wild relative and the Native Americans that fostered this selection in the southwestern U.S. It was used in breeding to save the modern sunflower because of foliar disease. I had not heard about its flavor or potential for oil as it existed in its wild form without hybridization. This was a surprise. The flavor of the seeds was like a concentrated elixir of sunflower with the fragrance of a boquet of fresh sunflowers. Like everyone else I was chomping away at the roasted sunflower seeds I buy when I fill up at the gas station. The gas station sunflowers are a bit mealy, pastey with a hint of canola oil mixed with sunflower. Even the ranch and barbeque flavored ones do not mask or help the rather weak flavored seed. With Havasupai in tow in my memory bank of flavors, I had a standard to go on and to find others with similar attributes but possibly more concentrated in flavor. For that I had to go a step down the ladder of domestication and go into uncultivated and wild species as much as possible while looking for high yields.

Polyheaded Haven selection

Is it bland, oily, rich or cardboard? It is surprising in that each sunflower selection is different. The species types can taste like a pine cone. My goal is to taste as many sunflowers as possible. I am finding the short season plants under 60 days. It is different type of selection because you want small seeds and heads to fill all along the stem. You want the strong over the top flavors minus the barbeque and ranch. But more importantly when people taste even the raw seeds they experience the ‘wow’ factor like I did when I first started looking into this. I visited the Chicago Botanical Garden’s sunflower collection once. It was my Jimi Hendrix moment where you want to throw out your guitar. It reminded me why I thought I had nothing to contribute because it all ready existed. The sunflower is very unique in its ability to redefine itself. It can change and realign your thinking about it and how to best harness the sunflower power. It creates a new means of expression very easily. Like a dahlia, changes are always going to happen in unexpected directions. You just have to be there and notice. It’s a good example for woody plants. There are the tiny heads of sunflowers filled wth great abundance along the stalks of the polyheaded sunflower.

I still eat the roasted sunflower seeds from the gas station but now I know what I am missing. I know what I have to do. I know the solution has already been laid down long ago in a pristine land untouched by humans and a suburban utopia. I just have to capture and share it with others in the way of the sunflower. What’s not to love?

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

“Home” Sunflower for large seeds from selected plants at my farm some of which were cultivars and others just random selections with larger than average seeds.
“Afar” Sunflower for selected seedlings with good production and some cultivars mixed. The flavor was very good.
Jerusalem artichoke flowers will produce fertile seed if you have genetic diversity. They are not sterile and will cross with the woodland sunflower and the annual sunflower quite easily. The question is will you notice?
A perfect sunflower day. Jerusalem artichokes in the background.
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Diversity Found: American Black Currant

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

When the ponds were built on my family’s farm, large ditches were needed to drain the water to finish the excavation. It was roughly a 30 acre pond surrounded by a wetland. The ditches near the highway were massive as the road needed to support the weight of eighteen wheeler trucks filled with wet sand. The sand was being used for the Zilwaukee bridge-I-75. The driveway was made of spent industrial cinders, cement chunks and sand. It was the granola of gravel. The steep cliff face into the ditch had little plant life on it. Even the wetland sedges and grasses gave up ship colonizing it. Yet here on the slope was this small wirey shrub dangling fruit calling out to the world “this is not so bad”. Wedged between cinder chunks in the shade of a red maple tree, a bird had dropped the seed there years ago along with some fertilizer. I had read about this Ribes from my cold descriptive botany books. Who doesn’t remember Billington, Shrubs of Michigan? The small taste sent me on the path of fruit salvation. For God sakes, no botanist ate the fruit. The descriptions would fly off the page if they had. There was only a few clusters of fruit on the small shrub but it was enough. I collected them and cleaned the seed and brought it to my nursery. I wanted to capture a bigger picture of the plant and how it could be cultivated. I had dreams of jars of American black currant syrup and other healthy concoctions made on my stove top. It was from here I began the process of growing the plant at my farm specifically for seed production. Apparently, I was not alone in the search for what best could be described as species Ribes that could be cultivated in some manner. In my best Borat immitation, “Very nice.”

The black currant that many of us know are the European types. These have been cultivated for hundreds of years and have a rich history of selection, breeding and growing in many countries throughout the world. That was a different fruit entirely. Yet if I was starting from scratch, the American black currant would still be considered black currant. That is how people would view it. I would have to come up with a different identification with it because the black currant is in so many health products on the shelf already. It is pointless to reinvent the wheel of currants. I met a nursery person named Clayton Berg from Montana. He was a big fan of the buffalo currant, Ribes odoratum. I was purchasing and growing many of his currants at my farm at the time. We were able to collect seed of it and enjoy the flavor of this western wild currant. Yet it too was very low yielding and not particularly adapted to Michigans’s climate. Eventually the plants faded with time and died out. I met a USDA scientist who visited my farm that made a seed selection called “Riverview” American black currant. It was found along a river in North Dakota. The images showed very heavy yielding plants with dense fruit clusters. It was a dream come true, yet they too had low yields in my limited grow outs. Even today wherever I plant them, there is beautiful flowers, large amounts of pollinators in my genetically diverse plants yet few fruit. My first accession American black currants still persist and grow at my home. I love to smell the fragrant flowers. The frustrating thing is I cannot share it. It is too little. I have hit a dead end.

This year I found the rest of my Ribes americanum still hanging on after 30 years. I am going to fall plant a more robust group. These were plants that showed excellent flowering, growth habit with zero leaf disease. Most of the seedlings look very nice. High five! In a Borat way! I have this thought that if I put them in a new area they will thrive again. I have no plans to alter the soil with cinders and cement chunks but I am trying gypsum with a top dressing of chicken manure and mulch with composted hardwood chips. There is one more dead end. This time it’s a human induced one., Ribes is the most regulated plant with a long history of restrictions going back to the early 1900’s due to white pine blister rust. This makes it very difficult to distribute throughout the United States. Each state has different regulations some of which are county or regional restrictions. But it is possible to offer seeds. But once you got the seeds, you may be prohibited from growing it depending on where you live. The data waffles on the American black currant. For a while the USDA said it was immune to white pine blister rust. Then it wasn’t yet no data exists. It landed in the ‘better safe than sorry’ category of rule it out. When I spoke to a Ribes organization they said it was completely immune. The two roads both have dead ends. We will have to create a third road. This one will bring us to our destination . Ribes americanum.

Stuck between Indigofera, peony, lemon balm and Baptisia the American black currant fruits.
Small seedlings will be moved to areas with greater fruiting potential.
Seedling American black currants show their ability to seed in areas with a light leaf mulch over sand near the foundation of a garage.
Clove currants – One of the most heavenly fragrant flowers is found in the clove like essence of the buffalo currant. It too flowered like no tommorrow but left only small yields in its wake. You went there, you got the t-shirt at the gift shop, now it is time to go home. The fragrance is enough for now.
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Diversity Found: Dandelion

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

I had this collection of dandelion varieties for a while. These were selections bred for human consumption for the foliage as a super nutritious perennial green. I kept the collection secret. My employees noticed when they started to flower and release their seeds in the greenhouse. There they spread on the weed mat wiggling their way past the best of weed barriers into the ground below and flowering like all of life was one glorious exaltation filled with immense possibilities. I love you dandelion. Yet here was the poster child of the herbicide isle in Lowes plastered all across some of the most toxic substances on earth. My frequent visits to fix or find something for my farm always surprised me. Don’t look to the left was my thinking as I walked into the store. Yet in a few minutes I will be in my greenhouse tending my dandelion collection. Don’t tell anyone. I am sure I purchased the seeds illegally. I would like to think that anyway. Like I’m some sort of bad ass of weeddom. Don’t mess with me, I have dandelions. I’m a lion too. Yet I saw only one place where they were quasi-outlawed: the northern arboreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Evidently the sides of the gravel roads have created the perfect dandelion habitat. I may visit there someday looking for the perfect dandelion. But then maybe I don’t have to go that far. I found a nice one at a rest stop coming home from my parents house once. There herbicide and mulch in a not so cared for landscape created a dense planting of dandelions. One in particular with multi-clustered flowers and foliage caught my eye and I popped it up and put it in my truck. No one noticed. Whew! I am sure I could get arrested for that. But then I have connections being in charge of dandelion weedom and everything so not to worry. When I offered them in my nursery, few if anyone purchased them. I planted them in bulk under the bald cypress. I couldn’t just throw them out. Almost immediately they were browsed by deer and rabbits. It turns out that the lower bitterness levels and the upright growth habit of the blades of cultivated varieties were also appreciated by the animals that shunned them before. Who knew? Today I don’t have my collection. It turns out that once a dandelion flowers, the root fades and breaks down eventually. You need to collect the seed and continue the cycle to help the dandelion along. The flowering is one giant expression of pure consciousness to capture wind and disperse to open soil far away. No one knows how far the seeds can travel. Children seem to know the potential as they blow them upwards into the streams of wind far above the tree tops. If we keep an open mind, maybe the seeds will land and grow into our diet as we cultivate this wonderful green. In the meantime, the bumblebees and honey bees will fill up and pack their bodies with pollen and head home telling others of their location and the great discovery of the giant yellow flower rich in nutrition and life. That is the dandelion. Everyone knows it. Just don’t look to the left when you walk in.

French Improved Thick Leaf Dandelion
Nouvelle Dandelion
Vollherzigen Dandelion
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The Pecan is the Pie in the Sky

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

I live in one of the cloudiest counties in North America. When sun appears, people comment on it in the stores. “Oh, it’s a sunny day!” As if to say time is short and you better enjoy it now! The sunny levels are spotty because of the effects of Lake Michigan which is roughly thirty miles away. Today the water temperatures are in the forties. This too creates this cooling effect along the lakeshore and inland. Called the fruit belt, Michigan has an ideal climate for a wide variety of fruits. Pecans on the other hand do not fit into this cloudy short season area. They are heat lovers and like to bathe in a long season of warm soils and air to ripen the nuts fully. If you announce to the world you are going to grow pecans in Michigan, you might as well say you have figured out cold fusion. The pecan market is massive and you need massive plantings to make it profitable. When I first started growing pecans in the mid to late 1980’s from the Northern Nut Growers Association northern pecan seed distribution project, I was not as optimistic as I am now. Cold pecan fusion was a dream not a reality. What happened? Time and the constant dream of this pie in the sky tree crop kept me going.

To find, create and develop any tree crop, takes patience. The pecan like all hickories takes a lot of time and space. They are huge trees. Some of the older southern orchards clock in at 8 tree per acre. People today do not have patience or have the land resources to make pecan growing profitable especially into the unknown real estate of Michigan. There is a large government breeding program in Beltsville, Texas that houses all the pecan varieties and actively breeds new pecans. It takes a certain stick-to-itness within a government repository. You need a long cycle time to grow and release a pecan variety. Very few are found in the wild anymore and used. Although it is still done this way, it is not a common thing in the most southern part of its range. Breeding pecans is all hand done with mass selection in the hundreds of thousands range to create the perfect pecan variety. No other tree crop takes this much time. The juvenile age of the tree runs from 15 to 30 years from seed. The short cut for researchers is to graft seedling trees into mature trees. This brings it down to 2-3 years to fruit but it doesn’t tell the whole story until several characteristics are met and then put out into an orchard as a single selection. Today at my farm, I still have some seedling plantings from Missouri seed from James Pecans and Shephards Farm that after forty years still have not fruited. Typical of seedling populations, I also found several seed strains that fruited in under ten years of age. One of them is highly precocious and a dwarf tree with minimal foliage production. This natural variation of pecan and its ripening period along with its precocity doesn’t mean you have a commercial pecan. It just means you have a pecan that can grow and ripen in southern Michigan and reliably produce good crops of nuts every year despite the climate. Is that commercial? Probably not, but then those characteristics have never been put to the test because…….. pecans do not grow in Michigan. See what I am saying? This highlights the issue of developing a new crop that is only thought of as a southern species. For many, it sounds too pie in the sky.

If you could have a working clonal collection here in Michigan, that would likely help alleviate the problem. There are other ‘ultra-northern’ pecans.They too are from some of the same wild selections I have at my farm. The difference is location, location, location. You need to have them in a short season area with cloudy cool weather area. This makes it possible not only to grow the tree but to ripen the fruit. I use to take my family to the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary not far from Battle Creek, Michigan. There they had some of the nut trees from the early Kellogg days. Near the lake there is one massive pecan tree reaching 70 feet tall. The nuts never ripen and do not get past the milk stage. The tree looks fantastic but nut production is zero and stayed that way for the decades I would visit the area. This is a common issue with pecan with such a huge range from Texas to Iowa. The pecan is a fast growing hickory species for Michigan. We have the right soils, climate and the tree is very well adapted here. Once I received seed from someone who collected from a tree in northern Minnesota. The nuts were fully ripened. This was in an area that minus 40F was common. This highlights a physiological compotent of hardiness much like bald cypress. Bringing a plant under cultivation expands the range and makes it possible to grow food in areas not thought possible before. The northern pecan leads the way with its high oil nut and rich flavor. The pecan pie is brought down to earth and made possible by human selection and agricultural innovation.

I asked one of the USDA scientists about the use of pecans in Michigan at a nut growers convention. He said I should focus on yields and not pay attention to the commercial characteristics needed for a commercial nut. We do not have heat stress, drought or missing levels of funky micronutrients. The shucks pop open on their own and the nuts drop in September and October. Michigan pecans are high in oil and delicious radically better than their southern counterparts.

“Michigander Prolifica” A dwarf selection with clusters of nuts forming on the tips of the branches. Small, compact nuts form and drop free in late September. Tree is not as vigorous as others. Minimal foliage is produced and the crown is wide open with good light penetration throughout. Tree is very heavy bearing. Parent tree is on a low organic soil on a windy bluff. Hardy to minus 30F.

Michigander Prolifica Super productive small tree.

“Michigan” Selected from dozens of other ultra northern seedlings, this one selection was both the most vigorous and heaviest yielding of all pecans at my farm. Almost every year the nuts ripen fully and drop free of the husk on its own. It has long thin nuts that ripen in early October. the ripening period is spread out over a two week period. This is by far the best selection for ripening and yields on a large robust tree. It was likely one of the seedlings from the Voiles #2 seed source which was from the Richard Best orchard prior to its demise from the Mississippi flood waters. The Northern Nut Growers Association brought this seed source to light as well as others found in Iowa as possible sources of short season pecans in the northern part of its range. This was the geographical hot spot of short season pecans distributed by crows, native Americans and early settlers.

“Michigan” variety of pecan grown from seed from Illinois wild pecans-early ripening. “Michigan” had the highest yields by far compared to all other seedlings at my farm. I still sell the nuts of this variety and the scionwood.
Dawson Creek Pecan from Shepherds Farm in Missouri. This was a good northern seed source from wild trees in northern Missouri.
Some of the Michigan pecans on my farm enjoying the early morning sunshine. Pecans naturally split their husks and the nuts drop out or fly off in a blue jays beak.
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Chufa-The Savior of Sedges

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Commercially produced chufa from Spain

One of the tuber crop plants I had the pleasure of working with was chufa or tiger nut. I first read about this plant from a food website describing the use of the crop and how it is cultvated. You could purchase oil and dried tubers from them. I ordered a pound and found them very delicious. They tasted like minature coconuts. I ate them like a snack food while driving to my farm in the morning. Chufa is used in a beverage called Horchata de Chufa. Chufa’s 25% oil content makes a rich drink. With the addition of cinnamon and sugar it is well knowned drink with many different versions using almonds instead of chufa. Much of the world wide production of chufa is in Spain. This is where the U.S. imports them from.

As a secondary use they are also put in turkey and duck seed mixes for planting for wildlife use. The smallest tubers are used for this purpose. It is the same sub-species as the chufa only graded for this purpose. The plant does not produce seed like normal perennial sedges so it is difficult to breed and is only grown from tubers. There are no true seeds available. So the diversity you see today is all clonal. Instead they are listed by their geographic location of where you might buy them. Each country has its own selections. Africa has a lot of them. None of them are cold hardy or perennial. It is treated as an annual crop.

Chufa produced at my farm. 2012.

I was not aware of anyone growing it in the U.S. at the time but I did find one seed company, J.L. Hudson, Seedsman that offered them for sale for planting. I knew this was a tropical grass and might have some problems ripening in Michigan. The first plantings were done outdoors on a warm sunny hillside under irrigation. The plants grew wonderfully up to three foot tall but when harvest came, it became abundantly clear that every small mammal within olfactory range completely eliminated the crop to the point, there was just enough to replant. It was weird because when I went to dig them, they came out like pancakes with few roots and none of the delicious tubers. They shredded the roots. Only near the densest part of the root near the root collar were some tubers they could not get to. In a fresh state, the tubers were even more delicious than the dried packaged ones I purchased from the Spanish food store. I did notice the turkeys found them too.

Chufa produced outside in one of my first plantings of it. 2012.

From this experience, I doubled down and began growing them in poly bags in my greenhouse. This allowed me to extend the season by 45 days and control the mice and voles to a greater degree. Like a vole magnet they found them there too.The length of time needed to finish the crop was an issue even in the polyhouse. It was from here I moved some of the planting outside and began to measure tuber size and length of time to finish the crop and the real life yield of the plants. This explained why previous attempts to commercialize the crop was done in the southern U.S. You need heat units big time. They were not the most productive tuber crop I grew. I spent over 15 years growing them off and on. I didn’t sell them because it seemed too pie in the sky even with my pie in the sky attitude about many edible plants. However, one year we did package up a few of the shorter season selections.

Chufa produced at my farm 2012.

I finally did manage to squeak out a couple of forms from the original J.L. Hudson Seedsman company as well as others. I was at a point of giving up until I visited a Detroit permaculture group with a few clumps of my chufa grass with tubers attached. I washed them thoroughly and removed all the stones. People kept eating them and saying over and over how delicious they were. Gosh darn it, people love the miniature coconut tubers. Inspired by the delicious fresh tubers, I continued my chufa quest and grew more of them only to be nailed by the ever present rodent populations. The island of chufas I was creating was a huge magnet. If I were to do it again, I would build a screened house including screeening underneath the plants. The poly grow bags was a good method for them. They grow shallow in the soil and come out with the roots intact.

Not A Nutsedge

This chufa is a tropical annual grass which does not flower, produce seed or is winter hardy in Michigan whether the soils freezes or not. At this time the taxonomy has it as a subspecies called ‘sativa’ but some scientists want to classify as a separate species. It is not a serious weed or any weed of any magnitude and cannot spread on its own. The mis-information on chufa as a weed lies within its confusion with yellow nutsedge. The images and information on line are frequently copied by writers who have never grown chufa and likely have never seen the plant in real life. The flower images are way off the charts wrong. Sedges in particularly hard to identify but chufa is very distinct. Today everyone is a botanical expert. Since the introduction of chufa, there are no satellite populations floating around somewhere in Michigan. However, there are likely wild chufa or native chufa here in the United States that the native Americans had also found and made selections from. I am sure they are also likely annual seedless types heavy in tuber producton. This type of selection process is common with such a high calorie and delicious food plant that can easily grow on river plains exactly the same way they are found on the Nile long ago. It would be a tragedy to loose that germplasm through misidentification. Cyperus esculentus, odoratus, rotundus,squarrosus are a few species used by the native Americans as a food source according to Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany. Many species remain unidentified even today.

For a while, there were a few laws put in place which led to the removal of the chufa from the store shelves and on line sales in some states in the wildlife sector. People are unjustifiably paranoid about chufa. Chufa is not nutsedge in the way the herbicide companies advertise it. However, it is listed as the same species and that is the source of the confusion. This leads us directly on the path of good intentions which then becomes the path to hell in terms of crop biodiversity. In this regulatory process it eliminates a great crop plant by spreading false information. The wildlife industry followed the regulation to a certain extent but when I checked, it wasn’t enforced as I still found it for sale locally during this time. It is possible this is still an issue in some states for those still going down the path of good intentions.

I had read with interest several growers who were actively trying to grow the plant here in the southeastern United States again. Besides getting the right selections, drying, storing and selling, it was not an easy row to hoe. I would put it in the category of trying to grow AND sell daffodil bulbs. I knew a flower farmer that tried that for a while. The pricing is built on the help of the countries that produce the crop in bulk and then ship it elsewhere. This cozy relationship makes it very difficult to compete with other countries. This sounds familiar doesn’t it. I still think it could be a locally produced tuber and grown is sandy stone free soils. It would similar to the production of lavender oil. You could combine it with other tuber crops like ginger and tumeric and grow it polyhouses.

Gardening With the Chufa

Minus the rodents and turkeys it is an easy plant to cultivate. It grows in the worst soils with minimal organic matter. It seems to tolerate drought well but regular irrigation improved yields. I enjoyed growing it and sharing it with others. It is getting a second life from my early ripening selections. To me chufa cultivation is my ‘path to heavenly enlightenment’ thinking in terms of its acceptance by the public and widespread use by the gardening public. It is much better than the path of good intentions. There does come a point that makes you wonder what sort of potential it has as an oil producing crop plant on a larger scale. I think in this new age of climate challenges, chufa will make us think of its cultivation in Spain, how it grows in the arid climates of the world, its calorie per acre yield and health benefits to humans around the world. A grass species producing tubers sounds enlightening. Can we bring that back into the United States as a healthy food crop beyond the wildlife sector? It would take growers, processors and a commitment to make it happen in the face of negativity and those who down play the crop as a weed.

The Nutsedge Returns

In one of the parts of my farm, I have a small colony of nutsedge. It is the perennial species that is the poster plant that sells herbicides for corn and soybean fields. It produces long rhizomes in all directions and is quite a powerful plant. My colony is on one of the sites I never tilled. When I decided to investigate, I found only one tuber on the rhizomes after ten minutes of digging. It is not a very productive plant tuber wise but it has a large numbers of rhizomes. It could be possible to take what is considered the worst weed in the history of mankind and hybridize it with the greatest tuber chufa and make it a savior by selecting it for heavy yields and ease of cultivation. But like all saviors would anyone recognize the value of it or would it just be another weed and shunned for generations. The chufa was that weedy nutsedge at some point in time with fertile seed heads. It is a crop plant that was cultivated 4000 years ago. It originated in Egypt as a source of food on the flood plains of the Nile. I am sure it flowered and had great diversity of progeny too. Today those varieties are scattered around the world as a common food plant. It is possible that the forms in East India or West Africa could provide us with a new view of this crop today. If you could find the wild chufa in the United States we would be drinking gallons of horchata.

But for now, it is the miniature coconut tuber that grows on a sterile grass found in Spain introduced by the Moors in the 11th century. Thats a good start.

Many good ideas start here. Knowledge. Education. Action. Dispersal.

Enjoy,

Kenneth Asmus

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Bean Flowers

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Yesterday while trying to capture insects working my bean flowers via photography , I remembered the college professor that I took an Entomology class from Western Michigan University in 1975. The whole class went out one night to a nearby state forest. We whizzed up a peanut buttter and beer concoction and lathered it on oak tree bark with paint brushes. It was a secret formula according to the intern who was totally into it. We lit up a bed sheet with a black light of some type for attracting moths. We hiked up and down the forest road to check our splotches of beer whizzed butter using flash lights. At some point, someone said, “You know if the police come, we are going to have a hard time explaining this.” There it was a giant blue white square orb in the middle of the woods. Some of the students had mining hats on. “Want some peanut butter beer officer? If you drink it, you will attract moths.” We stayed out quite late in the night. We found spiders and a few other night insects but no moths. This experience has stayed with me and highlights my thinking with pollinators today. It is constantly changing with a wide range of butterflies, bees and flies. You never know what will come if anything on any particular day.

In terms of my bean flowers, I see new insects every year and wonder where they came from. Others vanish entirely only to show up years later. I rarely spend more than an hour every week looking at my bean flowers when in blossom. I do not go at night either. I need a larger sample size to grasp this complex system of pollination. Some appear to vanish for a while or have greater reduced numbers in some years. Since my neighbor took down an out buidling made of wood, the carpenter bees are not there like they use to be. But again, I am guessing. Saying one insect is dominant is completely impossible but for a brief moment the carpenter bees were king of the bean flowers. Today a small bumblebee is seen hovering above my lima beans. There is one constant in all of this related to my love of beans. It is the consistency of my planting and the populations I am inadvertantly supporting during pollination time that brings them back year after year along with a diverse cast of new species coming and going. There is a huge number of very small bees that look like sweat bees and flies that appear to be really going after the small lima bean flowers. They are very selective on the flowers preferring the creme colored lima flowers with the broad petals and a curved ‘landing field’. As a result, the flowers, plants and beans have responded by creating plants with greater flowers with more open faced flowers and a greater potential for seed set. The pollinators are changing my populations to be more successful for them while helping me discover heavy fruiting selections. This was my aha moment of bean consciousness. You would have to be completed blinded to say only certain plants attract certain pollinators. That is just not possible. The insect is wrapped in this new source of food and it is not going away easily as it chooses wisely the flowers that suit it the best. This is also the type of plant I want. I want it easily reproduceable from seed and highly successful in a wide range of environments with extremely delicious nectar and pollen. This in turn produces more beans. The hybridization process is worthless unless you consider the value of the pollinators that do the work. From honeybees to the teeniest fly its not a competition. Its a collaboration far outside anything you could construct or direct in any way. For that I am thankful. I propose a toast of peanut butter whizzed beer to all. Here, here.

Farmerless fields can sustain all life even if it is a minor compotent of a farm encompassing less than one percent of the land area. One percent is enough to improve the other 99 percent whether it is intentional of not.

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One Plant-One Human-One Idea

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

If you have ever planted a cover crop of rye, you soon realize how much this powerhouse of a plant can do in such a short period of time. It is such a simple thing yet has immense environmental benefits. I know many people normally don’t view rye like this but after creating a field of rye on a family Christmas tree farm I soon became a believer of the little rye plant. It was more than wheat. Recently I saw an article questioning the use of rye in wildflower plantings since it is not native. My first thought was how stupid can you be. The second thought was how similar it was to my own thinking until I actually planted a field of rye! From the idea to its creation, the rye field became much more than I expected. It was definitely more than the sum of its parts. In the real world of an abandoned Christmas tree farm surrounded by white pine, oak and birch forests of central Michigan rye enriched all life on the many levels of plants and animals. It was from here I saw the light. And wow, was it bright. I too was lost until I was saved by the miracle of rye. There was nothing before and then after a few rains a green field emerges from darkness.

My daughter Kelly helped me create this image of the rye field in its first year. I used it for one my catalogs. The field was prepped by my father, uncle and a contractor with a bulldozer. The bulldozer removed the few remaining trees in the field. My uncle yanked out an old disc from the woods and attached it to the tractor. There are probably a lot of old discs sitting in Michigan woodlands. I rented a rotovator to run off the tractor to smooth everything out prior to planting. It was an abandoned Christmas tree field. Soon it will be rye. Rye seed is relatively inexpensive so we overplanted using a hand held spreader and walked back and forth criss crossing the field several times to get uniform coverage. It was a joy to do. I was wondering how many birds this would attract. The only thing to do was wait for rain. The stage was set.

I was aware of ryes green manure potential. I used it on my tree crop farm to build the soil prior to planting acorns. The stems and foliage break down quickly adding organic matter to the soil. The rye held my low organic sandy soil in place on this slope I was working and helped in the production of my seedling oak trees. You normally till it under before it reaches maturity and sets its ‘berries’. One day at my farm, I saw two large pheasants consuming the rye seed I had just planted. I was so enamored with these beautiful birds and the rarity of their presence, I considered it a great honor for them to visit. I didn’t scare them away. You just don’t see pheasants very often if at all in Michigan. The rye brought them in for me to see. Since there was no future Christmas trees being planned at my families farm, my father and I decided to let it go to maturity to see what would happen. This rye field signaled the last crop we would plant together. I would visit my parents home during this time and would always make a point to check the fields progress to see what sort of rye shenanigans was going on.

After emergence in late October, the plants were being heavily grazed by deer. The ground was solid with hoof prints. The succulent nature of this grass brought in large herds of deer. It was attracting the attention of many of the nearby homeowners who were probably spritzing out their coffee in the morning looking out their patio windows. It was solid hoof prints. The grazing had little influence on the plants themselves which seemed to generate even more foliage. Even in December with snow cover the deer kept coming back moving the snow aside for obtain fresh forage. The following year, the plants put on their heads and grew upwards to three feet tall. It was at this point, the turkeys began to nest in one thick area. As the seeds ripened and the stalks turned to a golden brown, a huge number of jumping mice filled the field. I began to mow it shattering the seed heads and spreading it in all directions just like I had done earlier with a hand cranked seeder. The field was alive with mice. They looked like kangaroos jumping in front of the tractor as I mowed the field. Finally after the mowing and a little rain, the new rye grass started again. This time it was not as thick. This same process continued for three more years minus the mowing and finally only one plant remained in year four. The rye had run its course.

The cumulative benefits created a new field of ecological opportunity. There was less thistle in one area. New trees began seeding in. Wild strawberries were there in great abundance again with solid patches of them here and there. A few willows grew in the area with the highest clay content. You could say it went back to normal and everything calmed down. To me it set the stage for things to come whatever that may be. We sold the land and gave up the field. But for a brief moment in time, we came together under one idea and one plant and immersed ourselves in the rye. Out of darkness we emerged after a few rains.

The ‘Kelly Renee’ apple looks particularly good this year and free of insects and diseases. Named after my daughter this apple variety was grown from seed from a russet apple found in northern Michigan at an abandoned homestead. (Probably not far from an old disc.) This selection is what I would term as a no or low spray apple. It has a few blemishes but hey, we all have them.

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The Deer Solution

Posted on August 12, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
2024

For many years on my way into town, I would drive by a farm that raised sheep. The pasture was very neat looking and was often cropped to the ground. Like a neatly mowed lawn with isolated thistle plants popping out of what looked like a green ping pong table, this was their home. My farm is home to another herbivore called the white tailed deer. It eats my pasture grasses but also the foliage of many species of shrubs and trees. It has a varied diet including my tree crops of persimmon and acorns. The pasture at my farm is dense and rich filled with many species of grasses and forb of which the diversity increases every year. It is never cropped. The deer are selective eaters. This makes the deer a shaper of vegetation of which it is of great benefit to my farm. I realize when I say, the deer love that, I know the deer will partially or totally destroy it. I had a large collection of sunchokes and each time I planted them in the outer reaches of the farm away from my weekly spraying of “Deer-Off” or outside the electric fencing, the deer loved them to death. Like a herbivore freight train, even the most vigorous selection of Jerusalem artichoke was gone by the second year.

I had the thought many years ago after seeing browse on a neatly chomped buckthorn bush that it might be possible to stimulate browse on other plants that I needed to reduce or eliminate to make it easier to harvest under the trees. I have to do this from time to time. I use a weed whip and lopers. I do not own a tractor or mower. Inspired by sheep, the weed whip would allow me to crop an area like a ping pong table. I would use lopers to flatten shrubs around these mature trees. I started by testing large shrubs and pruning them back to the ground. I used multiflora rose and tartarian honeysuckle. The groundcover at the time was pasture grasses, timothy and quackgrass. When they began to thin due to shade and star thistle, the other shrubs took hold. I was using sawdust mulch at the time and this aided in seedling establishment as well. I would prune back the shrubs to ground level using lopers. New sprouts from the rose and honeysuckle are very succulent. Deer will consume these in great abundance coming back to them over and over just like my sunchokes. The forage of honeysuckle is rich in protein. The multiflora rose sprouts are heavily browsed in the winter too. I have noticed that the young sprouts of grape vines are relished and are quickly consumed. That seems to be a favorite after I cut back the vines from climbing my pear trees. Even new seedlings of pokeweed are tipped by the deer. You would think this would make them sick. One of my cameras in the winter showed a line of deer eating the pasture grass near my Korean nut pines and hybrid chestnuts. This particular low area was capturing the warmth of the sun which made the grass grow late in the season which in turn created a small herd of deer all eating in a row cafeteria style.

Not an easy row to hoe, any wild squash is difficult to establish due to deer browse. I keep trying.
One of the most beneficial plants at my farm consumed by whitetail deer. Star thistle.
A new dwarf species of Desmodium at my farm likely brought to my farm by deer. This is a cool species of which I cannot identify yet. I plan to put some into cultivation to see how it grows and test its seed production.

I do not allow hunting.To begin with, my farm is too close to residential homes to be safe and would not be legal. I love the deer and their presence at my farm. I do not feel they are destructive. The benefits clearly outweigh the small amount of food they take from my tree crops. I do not want them killed or managed or whatever you want to call it. The coyotes do a better job of that plus they feed on other animals in the process. It is interesting that my small 13 acres rarely has more than 3-4 deer at a time on site. I found out a few winters ago after a light snowfall that many deer from outside my farm come in to feed at night before retreating to the heavily forested areas and a nearby wetland.

It is through the white tailed deer that land can rebound by increasing plant diversity, improving habitat for other animals. Their waste feeds other plants with its nutrients while cultivating the ground with its hooves allowing for greater water and nutrient penetration. To me the white tailed deer is a perfect animal doing everything it can to shape my vegetation into a greater whole while asking for so little.

People have told me stories of specific deer they have gotten to know a little. For many years there was one female deer that did not run away when I was working in the fields. I was a steady fixture with my shovel harvesting field trees for the nursery. I would turn away or walk at an angle to her. Once I saw her giving birth. She looked at me from a distance but did not move and then looked straight ahead. I turned away. There was a certain trust built up over the years. One day she was consuming grass in a recently demolished greenhouse area about 40 feet away from where I was standing. I could not figure out at first why she was eating Johnson grass of all things.Then I saw the buck sitting on the ground about ten feet away from her. He was not moving and with my presence probably was on the verge of bolting. I quietly slipped into the barn and lightly closed the door. I will let that play out on its own in this ecological theatre I call my farm.

Yum Star thistle.
Low valley area with pasture grasses
The doe on the left is the one in my story above.
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Michigan Oranges

Posted on August 10, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Poncirus trifoliata. Japanese Bitter Orange. Hardy Orange. Trifoliate Orange

Not too long ago, the USDA sent me a newsletter that contained a snippet of nursery catalogs from the early 1900’s. It is interesting to see the drawings and written descriptions of plants used in gardens at this time. This was at a point where gardening became possible through the mail and new plants could be ordered via the U.S. Postal Service. Like the Sears and Roebuck catalogs before them, plants could be written about in wonderful prose featured in a print media. This allowed you to think about your gardening ideas and what types of plants you want around your home. Before the era of credit cards, you would just write out a check or send cash. Prior to the internet, this was exactly my business model 80 years later!

This is one of the first catalog covers done for Oikos Tree Crops by Finger Prince circa 1980’s. This was the beginning of finding artists to help capture botanical images in my catalogs. Finger Prince was deep in meditation until noon so you had to call later in the day to discuss your project.

As I scoured through the catalogs there it was in large font; HARDY ORANGE. I thought I was a pioneer of the trifoliate orange. Evidently it has been around a while. It was by accident I began to grow this species fruit in Michigan starting with an arboretum seed collection from overseas from a Zone 5 location. I started the seedlings in the 1990’s. I really didn’t know what to do with them. I remember thinking that a normal Michigan winter would likely destroy them. It didn’t. It turned out that the zone 6 rating for the species is accurate along with the ability to withstand the cold winter winds. The leaves are not evergreen in my climate.

There are few if any mature trifoliate oranges today in any northern landscapes. My guess is the early 1900 plants disappeared entirely as peoples tastes in plants changed along with incredibly cold winters. Michigan State University has one in Beale Gardens in Lansing, Michigan which puts it into a zone 5-6. There are others. One mature large plant just outside Philadelphia is in a public garden.The late Adam Tuttle had a sizable hedge created from them in Kentucky. The seeds and plants he produced were grown at my farm for sales. His planting gained national recognition for its hedge like qualities. The whole idea of growing citrus in cold climates is not universally accepted as a fruit possibility. The quality of the fruit comes into play making the trifoliate orange the crabapple of the orange. You can see by searching the species on line the whole range of experiences from weed to the holy grail.

The thorns of the hardy orange “protected” by mesh tree guard. The deer love the foliage of this tree in winter.

This hardiness aspect of it is not that far off, to the point that it would not take too big of a population to find hardier selections along with higher quality fruit with less seeds. There are hybrid selections of it too filled with unique possibilities. What is stopping anyone from doing that? Nothing. It is not on anyones plant radar. For a while I was trying to obtain 50 lbs of seed from abandoned rootstock trees in Florida and Georgia. There is a lot of them because of failed citrus orchards from cold snaps. There are very few seed companies that offer it. I get the feeling the seeds are not treated properly. Some of the seeds I have received are over dried. They would just rot going through dormancy. With that in mind, I had the thought to travel to these southern citrus growing areas which I could load up on fruit. I would then process it at my farm in Michigan. I have a Dybvig seed cleaner which tends to atomize fruit pulp. It would fill my barn with a wonderful citrus aroma. If you were to grow upwards of 10,000 trees you could easily find significant diversity even at an abandoned rootstock level. It would be a good start for the Michigan orange.

The plant does have a few attributes that might need our attention in terms of cultivation. When individuals look at a new or emerging species of fruit for cultivation, they often do not see the full picture. A plant breeders goal is not always aligned with the plants evolutionary history and its connection to cutures already in use. In the United States the trifoliate orange is a rootstock plant for oranges, a weed tree and an ornamental plant all in one. No one is cranking out selections to eat. A whole industry of citrus is being ignored only because it seems so hopeless to begin with. Citrus is also not a particularly easy crop to produce. There are many diseases and insects in citrus farming and maybe importing the fruit from far away countries is not so bad. This importation is not a solution. It’s a work around. Either way it is likely the citrus industry in the United States will move north.

In the meantime, I dream of a Michigan citrus industry filled with the fruits of a very hardy orange rich in vitamin C. I love the idea of a syrup made from the whole fruit or even a natural pesticide made from the peels. Maybe the fruit will be small and kind of seedy at first. The plants may be too thorny and the trees kind of a pain to work around. It may not matter because we love the orange. What if we could have that in our backyard and not have to import it from thousands of miles away? The weedy little rootstock tree becomes our savior in the end creating a new industry in its wake. Now if only I can find an abandoned and dying citrus planting rich in cross pollination and great diversity. This is a good place to water the root of ideas.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Pawpaw

Posted on August 8, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

I always felt the pawpaw was the Sasquatch of fruit. I read about it in college. Later several people told me they had seen it. My botany teacher told me of a huge colony. I think someone showed me a fuzzy image of one at the Michigan Nut Growers Association meetings. The images are always fuzzy. They were taken in shade with low shutter speeds and high ISO if there was a choice on the camera. I was not sure where to look for the tree. I knew it lived in my area. I used to jog by a huge long grove but it was a single individual with never any fruit. You need two genetically different trees to have fruit set. There was no commercial seed sources of it and few growers of the tree. The plants that were sold were often dug out of the wild with no roots to speak of. They always failed. No one seemed to care about the pawpaw. The seeds were always over dried in the commercial seed houses. If you were to produce them from seeds, the plants require 50 percent shade the first year or two to get established. No one was willing to spend time with the tree and get it into production. I wanted to see the tree in the wild and how it grew untended. Every now and then I would spot them in the fall with their bright yellow foliage. There was one park that had several nice colonies of them. They grew like shumac with underground runners spreading in the nearby open fields and the maple forest. It was a robust tree but it was not in commerce.

With this knowledge in hand, I began collecting seed and connecting to people who knew the pawpaw tree more than me. The seed collection started by using the park and roadside trees just north of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Several people let me collect in front of their homes where they had no idea what the tree was either. I tried to enlighten them of the values of the pawpaw. To me folks looked confused. If you use the words “Michigan banana” then this paints a picture of tropical wonderment and combines it with a Sasquatch type cult following. I don’t think I was helping and few people wanted to eat them. It looked gross to them. I liked them but not on daily basis. The fruit has to be perfectly ripe and soft to eat but not over ripe. It has to ripen on the tree. Green fruit will make you sick. The skin is not good either and should never be eaten. The jet black seeds are lima bean in size and run along the length of the fruit. The whole thing throws people off. Yet if you eat one of the fruits when perfectly ripe, it is a wonderful treat and has a certain power to it just like an energy boost but with a calming effect. It is hard to explain. You have to experience it. So it was from here I thought having an orchard would help share this fruit when I invited people to my farm. I wanted to use it for seed and plant production too. That part had some obstacles but in the end it did work.

My first pawpaw planting about 15 years old.

Eventually in 1988, I began a pawpaw planting on my farm. At that time it was still a wide open field in many spots. I really wanted a source of fruit for myself but also wanted to produce seeds of the plants. The roadside trees were gettting nailed by herbicides and the yard trees were sometimes cut down by the owners. One of the parks run by the county built a tall chain link fence to prevent people from going into the park near an abandoned parking lot. In the process, they destroyed the trees completely. That was a bad day when I went to visit that fall.

The image above is one of the seventy trees I put out in my field of pasture grass on a windy hillside on that spring day of 1988. They started as little sticks of two foot tall trees grown from seed from the original plantings of Corwin Davis from central Michigan. I found another nursery who produced the trees and he used a back hoe to dig out the small two foot tall trees. They had long skinny tap roots. 1988 was the mega drought year and the trees immediately lost their tops in this location. Over time they resprouted from the root collars and grew luxuriantly past the two foot tall Tubex tree shelters I was using. Today this colony is roughly five times its size and has spread out into my walnut and pear orchards. Many of the original trunks are now long gone but the roots continued in great robust fashion. This is the part of the tree I love. It is a colony producer and will grow as an understory tree fruiting under oaks and walnuts constantly replenishing itself. You could probably age a wild planting to some degree just by the ground it takes up. The tops of the trees last roughly 20-30 years before the root suckers take on the new job of fruit production. That is a wonderful system of plant replacement when you have a seed that is filled with toxic alkaloids that no animal will eat it or even move to any degree. It just falls to the ground.

Here we are all those years later and so many wonderful things happened in the pawpaw grove. And continue to happen. An escaped pet pig visited once and left his calling card. He loved the pawpaws. The governor of the state of Michigan came along with his secret service. He laughed hysterically as I shook the trees while the fruit missed his nice blue suit falling all around him in a uniform pattern. The sound of the fruit hitting the ground caused joy for us all that day. My family, employee Tracy and the secret service all laughed. This is what happens when you visit the pawpaws. All the shackles drop off: the heavy weights are gone and there are no barriers. It reminds me of a story from India where a certain plant is in great abundance to the point that even the tigers are calm and unthreatening in this valley. Some say it is the purity and silence of the saints that live in the caves. Others say, no it is the herb. And others say it is both. Once in a while you will see on the wildlife cameras the possums and unknown people taking fruit not knowing what they were doing and throwing it on the ground after a bite or two. People told me amazing stories of their lives here in the shade of the pawpaws. All the situations seem to get resolved in this dense calming pawpaw environment. I’ve noticed people seem hesitant to leave and go to other parts of the farm. This is the effect I notice. It happens all the time. Most laugh. Some cry. Some go in silence and are moved in ways I cannot gauge.

Govenor Rick Snyder after exiting the pawpaw patch

I created several plantings throughout my farm and as they grow by their stolons, I train them by limbing them upwards and thin the density which creates greater fruit production. It is solid shade in most of these plantings with no understory of any type. The pawpaw may have a bit of an alleopathic propensity leaving the ground free of plants. The leaves are thick at first in the fall but are completely broken down by early summer the next year. The ground is smooth and easy to walk on like a super highway accessible from any direction. Even the multiflora rose and brambles disappear entirely.

What can be learned from the pawpaw grove? We need more of them spread out though the southern part of Michigan where the wind, water and sun are just right for this tree in giant colonies free of toxicity of modern society and rich in flavor, nutrition and health. Even if it is only eaten once, it is enough. The experience is there and people will remember it forever especially if it is connected to the land and the farmer or person who created the grove. Then there is an association to the fruit and the dynamics of the environment of the Michigan banana.

Farmerless fields can be long country roads where the pawpaw would flourish but only if we discontinued all herbicides. Shade loving pawpaw thrives in these often neglected roadside ecosystems where all organic matter accumulates in great abundance. It’s a win-win.

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