The Wild Andean Pumpkin

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

I have always enjoyed finding and growing the ancestors of crop plants. Unlike what would be called scientific breeding or selection I have a different motive. I want to see the plant that began it all. I want to time travel back to the origin of the cultivated plant and take a look around and see what’s doing. I want to leave with knowledge of the plant and what it was that civilization needed from this plant at the time and the culture that initially found it growing in its wild habitat. Then I want to share that experience with the rest of the world in forms of knowledge and seeds. It’s the straight arrow of experience plus knowledge equals enlightenment.

I found a seed source through a now out of business seed company that had managed to find the wild pumpkin in Peru. This is a certain subspecies that is considered not edible and poisonous to consume. I was doing a small planting in an area that was recently cleaned of nursery stock and was awaiting a new polyhouse. In this area I was attempting to grow both wild forms of watermelon and pumpkin in this wide open sandy area wedged into between the northern pecans, wild pears and persimmons. It was a good location with sandy low organic well drained soil. The pumpkin vines grew luxuriantly and tapped into the soil at each node growing up to 100 foot long. There were no insects, no deer damage and great competitive leaf canopy unphased by drought and weeds. As the vines grew, I was excited to harvest the little green balls and see what the flavor was like. As I cut open the fruit, I realized this might not be the same as the pumpkin I know. It wasn’t. The bitter alkaloids flooded my mouth numbing my tongue for a good three minutes. Water only seemed to make it worse. Yet, there was this aroma in the background that was very pumpkin like. You could smell it, but not taste it. One fruit had a tiny orange sliver of a speck on it. “There you are my little pumpkin”, I thought. The orange speck said it all. The orange portion made up less than one percent of the fruit, yet this one percent was the future pumpkin. How did someone even know this? My guess is pumpkin consciousness. Someone had knowledge of this plant at its very source and as unusual as this sounds, the pumpkin told him or her in some way either through cognition or a ‘medicine man’ as a intermediary where to look and made changes to help the farmer, the curator of its knowledge. Life is mutual. Otherwise the pumpkin from the wild form would have never arisen. You have to know a direction to follow otherwise it would take too long to develop and actually use and eat. Whole civilizations would crash and burn if they were forced to eat this fruit I just tasted.

One year on the way home from my farm, I noticed a great deal of smashed pumpkins on one particular country road from Halloween night. Pieces of pumpkin littered the road as cars crushed the remaining pieces into an orange paste. The following year in the same area I began to notice a few ‘wild pumpkins’ making their way to the gravel shoulder of the road. It had turned out that these teenage planted pumpkins were making a go of establishing under the sugar maples and black walnuts along the road. One vine in particular was working its way into the road and was loving the open pavement. It appeared for a brief moment that teenage pumpkins were being purposedly being avoided by traffic too. I know. The vine inched out more and more everyday. I swerved around them. Don’t hit the pumpkin vines. Like a late night possum, teenage pumpkins are worthy of living a life uninterrupted. Everything was looking spectacular until the county road crew and their mowers showed up. At that point I had visions what the end of the world would look like when the streets were filled with pumpkins rich in fruit. Imagine a pumpkin laced roadside rich in nutrition. Now I was onto something. My dreams were the same as the pumpkins. Pumpkin consciousness was here to stay as long as I kept the thought alive in my mind.

Today this is my new life with the pumpkin. My hats off to the angst ridden teenagers and the wild Peruvian pumpkins. Eventually they will meet and find a solution for all of humanity. It can happen. I saw it. It is true.

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The Edible Lily

Posted on June 20, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

I have always found it fascinating to read about the use of wildflowers as food plants. In particular, I wondered how anyone could make a go of harvesting lily bulbs to any degree for food. You hear stories of many cultures eating the lily bulb and you will read the rich ethnobotanical literature about the Lilium genus. When you test that knowledge and grow the bulbs from seed and wait a decade you soon realize the food potential is very low. If you were to harvest them for a meal, there would be nothing left. On the other hand, you see lily producers from Holland crank out mega-tons of lilies for the flower market. So you know it can be cultivated in mass.

The raw bulbs taste good and have a nice crispy texture but I am hampered by yields and knowledge of cultivation for food as well as its culinary details. I was trying to figure this out and only recently discovered a few secrets. The developing colonies take centuries to form. This is not like Jerusalem artichokes, groundnuts or potatoes. They are not like any other bulb plant that is consumed in that the colonies are very slow to establish. One twenty year patch that I have is roughly four foot across which was seed grown and started from five bulbs. You must treat the colonies as a super long term tree crop with maturation rates measured in decades at least. The bulbs of the two North American species are small and grow along a small rhizome which looks like a string. I hope to dig up a few this year and get some images of this growth habit. It is a different form of colonization of each Lilium species. What is interesting is that some of the bulbs lie dormant and wait their time to flower once free of the rhizome. What would be the impetus to flower and spread outside of seed production? Here is a personal example.

Lilum canadense Canada Lily
Michigan Lily Lilium michiganense

I got a call when I was in sophomore in college from my father one December day that he needed me home to help on the farm. It was Christmas tree season and sales were off the chart on our new 400 acre wholesale tree farm. Unfortunately, I was completely hung up on exams. I never really thought much about it until I had heard from my brother who said that some problems that winter were way more difficult to solve than giving out a few candy canes here and there. To begin with it had been a wet winter and the farm itself was more or less a wetland lined with drainage ditches. In the process of harvest a giant cluster of machinery of pretty much everything my dad and his partner owned ended up going subsoil way past the axles in the middle of a field. This involved a flatbed truck, two tractors, bulldozer, tree bailing machine and I think a wagon. The memory of it alone was so brutal to my dad refused to even drive by that area where it occurred years later. Finally out of curiosity in the summer, I scouted around for the location and saw it from a distance punctuated by loads of beautiful orange lilies. As if it was a location of great purity, the lilies sprang from the soil like nothing I have ever seen before or after. When I got into one of the ruts, my eye sight was level with the field soil. It was like standing in a forest of lilies. They really did go subsoiling. It was deep. Seriously, I’m surprised they didn’t find a mastodon. I’ve seen this type of plant action once before when toadflax covered an area damaged by diesel and oil off of I-94 when a truck skidded off an exit into a nearby embankment. Toadflax is a rare plant in that it can flourish in these toxic ridden soils where nothing else can. It has a superpower. You will see toadflax grow along railroad tracks too with the combination of creosote and herbicide it seems impervious to every man made petrochemical. I tried to grow toadflax at my house and each time, it was not successful. At our farm the lilies were spread out over the fifty foot area rich in muck and sand caused by the attempts to extract the equipment. This location may have had a few lilies before but I never noticed them. From reading about lilies, you will find that bears and other ground rooting animals eat the tubers. I am sure wild hogs love them too. Either way it is this love of lilies that helps bring them into production more. You have to do a bit of subsoiling. I have an area I planted them that was set up as a hugelkulture. They thrived for quite some time. Now they are on the decline. I need to get in there and loosen those strings of tubers. It is this process that can speed the spread of the plant. I threw some out under a walnut planting and there they really have taken off. But the colonies are clustered together tightly because I have no bear or wild hog to kick start the spread. I do collect the seeds so I will likely self seed them in certain locations free of dense sod and other vegetation that may impede the grass like foliage when they first sprout. I will try different locations under shrubs or trees including some dead wood where the vegetation is not thick. I do have groundhogs, skunks and racoons but they do not appear to have the lily as part of their diet.

I think I have an idea. Perhaps I could go there in December and bring with me a flotilla of equipment, get stuck and go subsoiling. I know that works.

Michigan Lily
Cultivated White Lily
Lilium species grown from seed
Lilium species grown from seed.
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The Earth Pea

Posted on June 18, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

One of the most interesting perennial crops I grow is the earth pea, Lathyrus tuberosus. It reminds me in many ways of the highway pea that is so common along roadways used as a soil stabilizer and nitrogen fixer. As a cultivated perennial vegetable, the earth pea was low yielding but had delicious crispy pea tasting tubers. Definitely worth growing for the flavor. It was not a colonizer like the highway pea and needed a bit of care to establish. Once established it came back every year despite temperatures below minus 20F and me tilling it under several times in an area that I was planting new things in. It never took over an area unfortunately as I wished it would. Today it resides on a trellis as I continue to plant its seeds again and try to establish it by planting a few seeds every year.

The earth pea is a nitrogen fixer and this is an advantage if you wanted to combine it with other woody plants in a landscape. On its own it could likely be developed as an agricultural crop in the same way radishes are grown and used. It doesn’t necessarily need a trellis and it will sprawl along the ground and branch outwards like the highway pea. I grew several North American pea species including the prairie and beach peas from the Great Lakes region and Washington state. These species usually produce poisonous seeds each to a different degree and long thin rhizome roots. They were short lived in my location likely because of their specific soil conditions which were not met at my farm. The perennial beach peas on the Great Lakes are edible and can be snacked on. But there is some concern eating a lot of them could be a problem. Beach peas do have a good flavor. There is a larvae of a moth that drills into them turning the peas into frass. This is a common occurrence if you decide to collect or eat the peas. The earth pea does not have much of a pea seed crop and it could be possible the seeds are not safe to eat anyway. When in doubt, leave it out is a good philosophy for some types of wild foods.

The heat tends to diminish the earth pea’s growth and by August and September it pretty much goes dormant here in southwestern Michigan. This is probably related to its alpine genetics and adaptation to cooler locations. It produces a few seed pods every year with very small peas about the size of a BB. I can easily see the earth pea being used in orchards and permaculture plantings. The tuberous pea is long lived, delicious raw and easily digestible. There is a question still that some want to know more on the compounds within the tubers to be sure the selection process makes it safe to eat in large quantities. There is no evidence of toxins found in its chemistry but it should be looked at if you plan to feed it to everybody and not just anecdotal evidence. Another aspect that is being considered is increasing its yields. There is at least one company breeding it hoping to release a new patented selection of it. I purchased my seeds from J.L.Hudson, Seedsman. This particular species is not easy to get seeds like normal peas. There is some genetic variation in the progeny. Ideally you would like a thousand seedlings to see its range of diversity. A thousand plants paints a picture with lots of details. However, my guess is even a few seedlings are uniform enough to cultivate without selection. It would be ideal if you could buy a fifty pound sack of seeds and field plant them just like…….PEAS! Yes. Hard to believe I know. The image of my tubers above show the largest ones I have found. In the meantime, I will snack from time to time on my crispy tuberous peas and wonder if I am the only one tasting this delicacy and how I can share this crop. One seed at a time would be ideal.

Safety First On Wild Foods and Plants That Look Similar

Many years ago a neighbor farmer of mine who raised beef cattle and was a strong vegetarian and Seventh Day Adventist told me a story of his family reunion and the highway peas. He and his ‘Uncle Bob’ were checking out his garden and near the fence line he had a nice planting of highway pea. His uncle started snacking on them in great abundance. He consumed a few but told Bob that it was probably not a good idea to eat them at all as he had heard they were poisonous. In the meantime, his uncle ignored his warning and told him how could anything taste so good be bad and likely many animals consume them too with no apparent effect. This of course was a huge problem filled with deep potholes of ignorance. After calling the ambulance and having his stomach pumped he did bounce back from his poisoning. It was fortunate he didn’t decide to tough it out and got treatment. I used to jog by his garden and perennial hedgerow of peas and every time I thought of their beauty and fragrance. I was never tempted to snack on a few. I am sure on future family reunions someone brought up the “Uncle Bob Moment” of the past. Maybe someone with a sense of humor layered a whole bunch of shucked peas on top of the salad as a reminder. Well I guess that is just me thinking aloud.

Great Lakes Beach Sand

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

Great Lakes Beach Pea
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The Shape of Oaks To Come

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
“Plentifull” Oak An extremely productive oak tree with large acorns which drop free of the cap. This seedling was found in one of my seed beds with clean foliage and vigorous growth.

I’ve always like the description of the oak genus as young as evolving. When horticulturists make selections from oak trees they are strictly ornamental in nature and usually columnar in shape. It is old and devolving in terms of our use of the oak tree as a crop tree. No one is considering creating an orchard of oaks for acorn production. I am sure there are a few brave individuals out there doing that. Meanwhile, the use of the acorn has taken on a new life as people begin to discover its use from wild trees. This has proven to be beneficial in terms of acorn awareness for human food. The selections I have ‘bred’ and selected over the last forty years are very good in terms of yields and improvements for the edible acorn. Yet on applying them on a broad scale in some way has not come to fruition. Why is that? The whole thing really revolves around experimentation and not implementation. I mean what are you going to do with an acorn? This is a bigger question than you might think. The acorn is widely available as wild trees and there is a whole market available in terms of woody plant seeds. But there is no market for orchard grown acorns because there are no orchards. I had developed very good cultivars for orchard production. What was needed next was specific processing techniques for larger volumes of acorns from specific varieties. As time went on I began to see a light into this production scenario. To explain it to others was equally frustrating. There was the native only philosophy and then there were the feed and hunt the deer philosophy and finally the feed the hog philosophy. Each of these ideas on their own are weak and to me are a waste of time. I am focused on feed the human philosophy with acorns as a source of healthy food directly to Homo sapiens. Yes. Acorn pancakes. To me this is the future of the acorn with no intermediate steps.

For many years, I grafted some of my selections and was excited to offer them in my nursery. They were expensive and difficult to produce so I contacted another nursery on the west coast who had the resources and expertise to do the grafted oak trees. My rate of success was low rarely exceeding 30 percent takes. It turned out that all Quercus scions or trees are prohibited to export out of Michigan to the west coast due to oak wilt disease. I had the thought that I could have my nursery and land inspected for the disease. I asked the state and they told me I would need to have the whole county inspected. It was very expensive and time consuming and no guarantee that it would be allowed by other state officials in other states. One told me that oak firewood is likely the main vector from mature trees not little twigs like my scionwood but because it is live wood it too is banned. Between the condescending attitude of the other nursery owner and the state officials I bailed. I have hopes, I have dreams.

For me this image of my empty wheelbarrow reminds me of hauling the sawdust up to the top of the hill and spreading it under this wonderful English and white oak tree. It brings back memories of hard work along with how much there was to gain and learn from the world of oak trees. This image tells a story of an oak as a crop tree. The wheelbarrow is empty. The tree is full. I am going to harvest the acorns now and place them in my empty bucket. The harvest can only bring benefits of which go directly to you and hopefully future generations yet to come.

Plentifull Oak acorns developing.

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The Brassica Forest Comes Alive

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Tree collards are naturally a perennial brassica. Its perennial nature can be harnessed as both a seed and foliage crop even in cold climates.
Tree collards for seed production were always low yielding seed producers until recently. It takes a bit of cultivation to find the right plants from the right selection to produce seeds. In this case, it was the last seed I had of the ‘MIchigan’ collard. This seed production will aid in producing a full zone 4-5 tree collard that is both winter hardy and tastes delicious as a perennial plant.

About a decade ago, I began growing tree collards from cuttings and seeds from The Tree Collard Project in California. I also purchased seeds of other types of brassica from Chris Homanics, Joseph Lofthouse and Southern Seed as well as J.L. Hudson, Seedsman. I found one company to ship me tree collard cuttings to and rooted those in my garden at home. These seed sources allowed me to peek into the window of what is called land races or grex. I was not aware of this type of breeding at all. It was very similar to my means of selecting woody plants and creating populations. The tree collard group has an interesting history only because it is normally clonally propagated and came from the slave ships from Africa. As time went on, the plants continued to flourish in the African American communities and spread from there. I had very little knowledge of collard but I had a great way to test for hardiness. I would grow the plants in pots in one of my polyhouses and then leave the end open for wind to penetrate it. This would reduce populations of many tender plants very quickly. Michigan is a good testing ground. I would still water the plants in December and again as early as possible in March. I did not sell collard plants for very long but eventually after a particularly brutal winter, sorted out the remaining plants after three years. There were not many left. One plant from the Tree Collard Project looked spectacular. I decided to keep one individual that had grown two leads over six feet long and was not bothered by the minus 27F that winter. As I cut it up using my hand pruners, I was surprised how hard the stems were. I put the cuttings into a large 30 gallon grow bag and moved it to a permanent polyhouse. When it would flower, I would move it outside in the open to get the pollination it needed. This was ideal and the plant did produce some seeds but not many. I took a few other plants and moved them outdoors under a chicken wire mesh to protect against deer and groundhogs from foraging. Those plants also produced some seeds, but they too were low producing. It appeared the perennial nature of the plant that I was selecting for was reducing the seed yield. I know that is some instances after flowering with kale, the plants will die. They are biennial in nature. This is an issue of selecting the right balance of vigorous growth as well as heavy seed production. Seed production for most vegetable crops is a must for diversity sake. But for the tree collard, it is not necessary as it can be easily rooted by sticking the plant in a jar of water or even directly into the soil. So why is this important?

Now instead of one in five hundred, you may find all of the seeds produce winter hardy plants. Certainly there would be variations of flavor and texture but now you have a robust population to choose from. Whether the seeds are used for sprouting, an oil crop, or an organic form of a ‘green’ drink , the perennial genetic diversity is off the charts in terms of its nutritional composition. It is not a cultivar. Praise the brassicas for that. You can harness the full range of benefits. This is the age of the tree collard. A brassica forest is now a reality. Only new seed can create that and nothing else.

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Too Little Too Late

Posted on June 15, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
The crinkly gene sweet kernel is inherent within the Ashworth sweet corn. Small but early.

Extreme environmental changes will require a major shift on how and where we grow certain human edible crop plants. Although human edible corn makes up less than five percent of all corn, it is still important to think of it as an ally of nutrition, healthy and even a solution to climate change all wrapped up in one. The Ashworth sweet corn pictured above highlights this idea of a short season crop that requires less resources to grow while ripening its crop around 60 days. Despite its smaller size, it is a selection that could be used as a secondary crop for many applications. I purchased it on Ebay. All power to Ebay, the home of things you can’t find elsewhere. I heard about this corn from reading about the late Fred Ashworth, the founder of St. Lawrence Nursery. When I grew it out, I reselected it for both pure yellow and bicolor kernels while keeping the short season part of its heritage. It was very stunted when I first did it in the polyhouse years ago filling up one 30 gallon grow bag of soil and then moving it outdoors for a while and then back to the polyhouse to ripen free of racoons. I called it my traveling sweet corn.

Sweet corn could be used in beginning tree crop plantings as multiple use scenarios before the crops begin bearing. I view it as a nutrient collector able to create healthy food in a short season area. This is a type of integration of a well known annual crop able to meet these demands in the rough and tumble world of heat, drought and fluctuating temperatures. Although the yields of Ashworth sweet corn are very low compared to Peaches and Cream, it can be used as a green manure too building up precious organic matter at the same time. The philosophy, “Its not broken, why fix it” pertains to annual crops being implemented in mixed plantings. But certainly it could play a role in our re-creation of our tree crop and orchard systems. A few have ventured into the pollinator friendly native plants. But commercially that idea interferes in many ways with current orchard practices and it costs too much to implement with “no crop sold” in the end other than the environmental benefits which is good but not good enough. It would be better to combine the ideas to make a secondary crop even if it is just a seed crop of some type. The farmer needs to be paid for his ability to role out new ideas right away from the crops he is tending both perennial crops and annual crops.

This was the reason for my fascination for short season crops. At the same time, the annual crops seed production could be developed as seed production saving time and resources. So in some ways you end up with a population of plants being selected for this localized ecological conditions.

I once met a plant breeder who worked in short season crops in northern Canada. The goal of his work was to develop short season crops including sunflower, soybean and corn. He was to create other crops outside of the major canola industry for use as oil or animal feed crops all ripening in under 60 days. In fact some of them were 30 day crops. What happened to his crops? They were shelved and never used. This highlights the importance of developing connections to the farming industry with your new crop and joining forces with others who want to make changes on a broader scale. Just because you breed something, doesn’t mean it will be used. I got a feeling there are a lot of shelved crops. To solve a crisis we need all ideas on deck otherwise it will be too little too late.

Ashworth bicolor sweet corn
Ashworth mixed colors sweet corn
Developing sweet corn selections means looking at corn that may not be perfect when you first start out. Believe it or not, this was a vast improvement compared to the first time I did this. If sweet corn looked like this people would likely not eat it. But it was delicious despite its size and formation. What you going to do? Refuse sweet corn? Never.
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Wild Tomatoes are Out of Control

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Every now and then people will discover wild colonies of domesticated food plants like tomatoes. Some are accidental pitches by motorists but some have been around for many generations and have adapted to their new homes self seeding and creating vibrant colonies of delicious fruit. There are several varieties of them I have found in the seed trade that I grew at my farm. It is a good representation of integration ecology and biological enrichment.

The first one was “Texas” as pictured above. What made it wild? Essentially this was a find where many generations of this cherry tomato were growing untended in a extremely hot and dry location in southern Texas. The vines were very long and had developed the ability to root as it grew along the ground. To further help itself in this endeavor, the plant had these larger than average joints on the stems to a degree where their weight would bring it down to ground contact. This would further strengthen the plant in its ability to capture water whether that was dew in the morning or a brief rain shower. The plant itself was quite hairy and it was not very full of foliage which aided in its ability to survive drought and still fruit. It did not have massive yields like most cherry tomatoes either. When we grew it at my farm, the plant was under some oak trees and did fairly well even in the shade. Each plant grew up to 20 feet long as it skipped along the ground. It also self seeded the following two years. It is critical for an annual plant to establish in the untended world of no till. I like this ability of the tomato to reproduce on its own and create new populations in other locations all of which are not hybrid plants. That is wild.

It turns out there are several types of wild tomatoes world wide and a few species that also grow throughout the world in some very isolated areas. One I experimented with a little bit in 2019 was the Galapagos tomato. The Galapagos produces a green or yellow tomato. I kept the seeds separate and hope to produce a population of them again. The groundhogs loved the foliage too much last year so there were no Galapagos tomatoes. Just using the name ‘Galapagos” is magical to me. That might be the only reason to grow it. “Oh, your tomatoes are from the Galapagos?,” people will ask. The tomatoes were rock solid roughly an inch or more in size. It has a certain fern like foliage and seemed quite vigorous at my farm. You can imagine some of these species types would be good to use as is and not hybridize them just to see what sort of nutrition they contain and what new flavor profiles are possible. It would be ideal if they could be established as a wild plant growing untended in North America.

A new one this year is the Everglades tomato. It is interesting in that the Everglades tomato has an industrial looking seed coat with all sorts of barbs over it. I am guessing it developed this as a survival mechanism but I have no idea why. I purchased both of these species from J.L. Hudson Seedsman. Joseph Lofthouse, a prominent land race plant breeder, also grows many of these wild tomatoes and is actively searching for the perfect tomato by crossing tomatoes of many species. That too is wild.

Creating populations of common food plants in untended or lightly tended areas could create a form of foraging where the cultivation is only dropping off a few seeds here and there to come back to harvest later. It’s a food opportunity waiting to be developed further. Will we take the first step of planting a seed of an idea and bring it to fruition? It’s totally Galapagos and part of our evolutionary nature.

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The Making of a Forest

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

It’s a great joy to plant trees. It is a type of activity that is always rewarding. You need to bring with you a sense of wonder and patience and wait for the outcome. When I planted these northern pecans on my hillside, I was not very confident of the outcome only because there was no one who had done this before me. I had nothing to go on. There were northern pecans but there was no one that planted seedling northern pecans from specific early ripening trees far north in its range. Some were cultivated in an orchard and some were found in the wild. Either way, planting the trees on this sand dune type of hill with thin topsoil was tricky because of the wind and dryness. In the above right of this image is American persimmon. This particular seed source was selected from orchards where people had rich varieties of them full of early ripening fruit. Both the pecan and persimmon required a certain seed source to be successful in Michigan mainly because our season is much shorter and we have very cloudy weather. It turned out that these seedlings can make new crops possible in areas where they could not be grown before. Both the orchard and seedling forest can now be grown from these new seed sources. The future becomes land use and how to deploy these new crops on a broader scale so others can enjoy them as well. It could be creativity is at a premium too and this might be the real barrier to adoption of new crops on a broader scale. It could happen. I have confidence and patience along with a sense of wonder for the human race just like the trees at my farm.

This persimmon was the first to fruit from seed at my farm.

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The No Spray Apple

Posted on June 11, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

What would happen to the apple if we decide collectively not to spray anymore? Every good experience that we have with the apple would change for the worst. The flavors we know and appreciate would disappear. To create a new variety of a no-spray apple is the moon shot of fruit farming. The apple industry does not care. Everyone knows this. It is infatuated with itself focusing on narrow profiles of apple and apple flavors. It has a completely different trajectory. Apple enthusiasts including scientists have looked into this no spray or low spray in various ways. Personally, I have no idea what I am doing in this arena. Yet I did find a sort of cold fusion back door method that could play a role in weening us off the pesticides so luxuriantly used in apple production. At the very least, it would create many new apple flavors. The problem is I need 100 acres to make it happen in force. You need a large sample size of diverse genetics and a means to explore that diversity free of spray. No one would do that. The conservation industry is so mired in native only that it would never be applied on public land. A private land owner would need some serious cash to set aside that much land for thirty years. It’s a whacky idea to most. Meanwhile we continue to snack on apples sprayed sixteen times a year. That in itself I find very whacky. The goal would be find a way out of this complexity of environmental and ecological mess we are in and the ability to produce a clean fruit without insects and disease. This would be one giant apple forest in the end. You are creating something that would only exists in one place in the world. Russia. The home of the Eden apple forest. Certainly we can go organic and find varieties suited for organic production. That is one very good step in the right direction. But can we go one step further? That is the issue with this most wonderful tree crop and its importance to human health. We need apples more than ever. If we take a sneak peek of possibilities, it lies within the wild apples already in existence in North America. It already has been bred by nature for the most part and is in existence right now. It doesn’t have to be a moon shot in many ways.

When I began collecting seed for my farm and nursery, I was always on the lookout for apples. I tried to find clean fruit from trees growing untended. One species type that was consistently good was Malus coronaria or Sweet Crab. It is a native North American species and is found here frequently in southwestern Michigan. It is inedible in the fresh state because of the high amounts of astringency and tartness. Yet here was an apple completely free of bugs and disease. The hard green one inch size apples were always pristine no matter where I found them. Small size aside, you have to admire its cleanliness. The foliage on the other hand was very prone to disease and usually by August the tree had lost a good portion of its leaves due to rust, scab and mildew. This was it’s normal condition and it always happened every year. Some years are worst than others. This species is biennial in bearing. Every now and then you will find a particularly good seedling with heavy yields. I found a couple of trees with massive yields in a park and another in a curb lawn near a parking lot. One was in a yard along a Michigan highway. The owner was happy I was cleaning up the fruit off his beautiful lawn. Sometimes this species is used as a rootstock. My guess is the crabapple production folks will use anything for rootstock.

At one point, I had to get to the bottom of the coronaria flavor department and decided to make jelly from it. When I went to the store to purchase massive amounts of organic sugar, I met up with a colleague who worked at a local nature center as a botanist-environmental science teacher. I told him I was making jam out of the Malus coronaria to see what it tasted like. He asked, “What’s that for?” while pointing to a bag of Almond Joy minis that I had in my hand. I said, “Back up.”

It turned out that even with massive amounts of sugar you end up with a green hard jelly you could easily bounce a bowling ball off of. I am not sure why I added Sure-Gel pectin to it. It still was tart and astringent. No one ate it at my house. Seeing a jar of green jelly light up when you open up the refrigerator is not particularly appealing either. Probably storing the apples in their green state for a month or two would have decreased this effect.

It was from this species level, I had the thought you could find a clean apple somewhere. I found larger fruited Malus coronaria and ioenensis as well as several hybrids called heterophylla apple. I found and grew one selection at my farm with relatively decent flavor and juiciness. People began sending me seed of certain selections of wild apples. I collected a few scions off trees here and there too and some people sent me what they thought was good. But the grafting was very limited. I mostly wanted to see what the seed would do and not the cultivar. In a certain twist of fate, Malus coronaria rarely overlaps its pollination with normal apples, Malus domestica. It is often two weeks later in flowering. That is a good thing in terms of frost avoidance. But unfortunate if you want hybrid seed. It is an uncommon cross.

A seedling apple grown from seed at my farm originally from a russet apple found in northern Michigan at an abandoned homestead.

Wild apples show a huge array of variation from year to year with appearance changing radically depending on insect and disease pressure. There were many good crabapples but for some reason the size of the fruit was a road block. The cider folks have found that the russet apples (the ones that look like baked potatoes in a tree) produce seedlings that are valuable in terms of flavor and bug proofiness. They tend to have impermeable skins. I have found the seedling russet apples that I grew from the gift box of heirloom apples did produce fairly clean apples with minimal damage from insects and disease.

The Waterfall Moment

It was a December morning and I was having my catalog worked on by a designer. On my way to his studio, there out in an open grassy park was the tree I was searching for. I saw a huge volume of yellowish green apples that looked like they were dumped under a tree. I decided to go back later to harvest the fruit. It snowed the night before and I froze my fingers digging them out of the crusted snow and thick grass. I took them back to my farm, processed the seeds and grew out many seedlings from this batch but kept one tree that had clean foliage without rust spots on the leaves. This tree grew very fast and began fruiting so heavy that the weight of the branches made the tree bend over to the ground making it look like a waterfall of fruit. Nature has its little surprises. The fruits quality was very similar to coronaria being high in astringency and barely edible in the fresh state locking up all other flavors in your mouth making it impossible to taste anything else. It was a Eureka moment in my land of seedling apples. Today more seedling trees are waiting to fruit and new seed has arrived this last year. I think I am going cold fusion on the apple. I have to figure out this dynamic tree crop and force of energy we call the apple.

Malus x heterophylla apple found in a batch of Malus coronaria seedlings and pulled out and planted in my mini apple forest. Is this what the no spray apple would look like?

Much like the apple you need to cross pollinate your ideas to find the combinations of flavor while creating ways to use the fruit. We can get a clean apple full of wonder and health. We can continue spread that message of “one a day” and to keep the doctor away. And if we have to, we can call for back up and pick up a bag of Almond Joy minis.

A seedling apple orchard in an open field untended is one way to grow apples from seeds. The nets provide a little browse protection from deer who also love the apple for both its foliage and fruit.

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The Glorious, Exalted and Most Powerful Beans

Posted on June 5, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Thicket bean-perennial in nature.

Every year in the spring I go through my small bins of seeds and figure out what I am going to plant. I have no plan so the choices are wide open. I like that idea. It reminds me of music. I could play anything but maybe I am not in the mood for that. Instead I will do this. I am not a fan of death metal, yet yesterday I heard a flugelhorn being used in a death metal song. Okay, that I like. The same with beans. Only one small thing will change my mind on what I feel about beans. I am not thinking about beans. But almost as soon as I approach my seed shelf and I crack the lid on the bean container, the ideas flood my mind like a flugelhorn. There are some good beans in there. Look out! The colors, shapes and the potentiality makes me immediately want to plant them all. This year was no exception.

Bean trellis in the midst of hybrid chestnuts and a couple of Schisandra vines.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time growing the perennial bean called thicket bean as well as its close cousin the lima bean. I have always been fascinated with the tepary bean too. I love the vine beans the most because you can put them up on a trellis and see the beans right in your face where you can watch them flower and develop pods. They make for good photographic subjects. Bees and butterflies love them which adds to the excitement. In this process of getting to know beans you soon realize a lot of people have huge knowledge of the bean universe. To think you can contribute in some way to the world of beans seems impossible. It was a “Nothing is new under the sun (bean)” moment.

Tepary beans on the rise.

While growing beans, I was brought to great humility because I could see the huge variation developing. It was a quiet bean revolution going on in front of me. I can add to the discussion. I will continue my bean quest. It’s much more enjoyable to grow beans just for enjoyment and not some long winded breeding project. It would be like planning fun. It never is quite fun. You need spontaneity in growing beans. True with many things in life.

The Tepary Bean-Fertilizer Plus Bean Equals Contribution To the Bean World

I really liked the tepary beans dense growth habit and healthy foliage. The tepary bean is considered the world’s most drought tolerant bean species. It can grow in desert like conditions and is incredibly vigorous. It has a good flavor and is a great dried bean produced in the southwestern U.S. where it is a native bean of both wild and cultivated varieties. In my plantings, almost all of them originate from Native Seeds. They offer both the wild forms and hybrids. When I grew the teeny wild forms in Michigan, the ripening period was too long and there was not enough heat units to ripen the beans fully. But I did squeeze out a few from the early flowers. You really need a long growing season or a sunny hot summer. I had two plants self seed and I kept that group eventually finding early ripening selections. The yields were very low so subsequent years I have found higher yielding selections. One plant in particular was off the charts yield wise last year. The whole purpose of this grow out was to develop both a nitrogen fixing crop much like blue vetch is used and an edible bean to harvest. Blue vetch is in the bean family too. It is one of the best nitrogen fixing plants ever. For me, if a plant can produce a large amount of foliage especially in drought soils like blue vetch, then tepary could play a dual role as both a nitrogen fixer and an edible bean crop that could be harvested. This year I am trying to build up my stock of what I have so far. From previous experience, it is likely to succeed in growing but flop as far as it being implemented anywhere. I need to be a better bean salesperson.

The Lima Bean and Thicket Bean Party Like its 1999

It turns out you can accidentally create many crosses with the lima bean. The question is why would you? Is there something deficient with the lima bean? Not really. The thicket bean is perennial with a super deep root. It tends to blend the colors of the Lima and shrink its size. That is a win-win. To me it does offer a way to tip toe out of the human consumption of the soybean market. I don’t mind the soy based products, but I think we can do a one up on soy. Flavor is not soys strong point. It is the reason why I have difficulty with the flavors and digestibility of soy products. Yet, I like tofu. Few will admit that in public. The lima could easily make a case for many edible bean products. First, shrink it. I have found many small types of lima beans in my so called breeding project. Second, improve the yields like no tommorrow. The yields per plant seem low to me. They too characteristically require a long growing season to mature all of the beans. This is a problem for those who have cloudy cool summers. The lima is not a fan of that. You could also select for perennial traits. This was a lot easier than I thought but you would need a more robust population to work with than I have. You could infuse it with purple limas or small lima beans that don’t take so long to cook. Flavor has to be number one in the Lima bean world otherwise there is no reason to change. We will continue to soy ourselves to sickness over the plant protein quest. Right now we have vat grown protein coming along the technological trail. So in some ways we are going backwards in knowledge. It’s not impossible to think of a butter bean Lima used for delicious flavored plant protein much more than soy. There is plenty of room at the top. It’s not impossible. Nor a burger. I think I hear a flugelhorn playing right now!

The variations are endless in the bean world.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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