Plants That Saw The Light of Day

Posted on March 24, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

(Part 1) I do not have much of a selection process for plants. Every plant looks interesting to me. I really liked the flavor of that wild Rocket I found in the cracks of a sidewalk in Grand Haven, Michigan. I loved the white berries of a sprawling evergreen wintergreen growing over a decaying log in a swamp in northern Maine. They both failed in cultivation for me. I tried but they did not stay around long. This loss also equates to knowledge of the plant. I learn and move on. There is no maxims in horticulture. I like the wide open highway of plant life. This is the ideal world of finding new food plants. Anyone can take part. It is good to listen but it’s not etched in stone. This article features a few plants that I attempted to explore only to watch the sun go down on their possibilities.

Nine Star Perennial Broccoli

The idea of a perennial broccoli or kale is not that hard to imagine. It is a common experience of brassicas coming back to life in the spring from last years roots and stems. Nine Star used a unique set of breeding potentialities within the Sea Kale plant, the original species level perennial broccoli. That was the theory I was told. A couple of natural tendencies alerted me to several problems including zero seed production, the love of the plant by groundhogs and finally the deep sixer: winter cold hardiness. It was a cluster effect which left Nine Star as Death Star. Yet, even today I see it on Instagram having a new life for those who live in milder climates. It’s hanging out with the pure and illustrious folks now. Oh, it’s having alot more fun without me. Live and let live I say. The final two plants mysteriously disappeared at my farm. We never did know what happened. The nursery manager at the time was baffled. Poof. Nothing left. There are some broccoli conspiracies about it even today.

The Perennial Cucumber

Melthria scabra is best known as the Mexican cucumber. It is a perennial cucumber relative from Central America. You eat the fruit in the green stage which is the safest way to consume it. In the forests of Panama, Columbia and El Salvador the plant grows freely. It is cultivated in the United States too mostly as a minor annual crop for pickling the fruit. Somehow I was given seed of one the original strains found in these regions and made several plantings near the shade of a nearby greenhouse and oak planting. The plants grew very nicely and fruited the first year despite the shade. Surprisingly, it did regenerate from the roots the second year. The roots were very small and wire like. I was surprised it was possible this could happen. It appeared that near the irrigation pipe and grape pulp mulch the soil did not freeze entirely and the roots went into dormancy. I was never able to replicate this experience but wondered if the roots could be harvested and replanted versus using seeds to develop a more robust and winter hardy selection. It wasn’t suppose to happen at all. Yet here we were snacking on Mexican cucumbers in the shade of the Philadelphia oaks in the middle of Welch’s grape country. What does that say?

Equidistance Horsetail Groundcover

When my family’s farm ponds were made, one area was constructed poorly using a solid clay and sand mixture instead of the original peat and sand soil. A colony of horsetail, Equistem grew luxuriantly there. I had never seen this type before anywhere. It was odd in that it was incredibly dense like a thick shag carpet and gloriously invasive filling in every crack in the soil there where nothing else could grow. Even the great phragmites gave up in this area.When I started propagating it in my nursery from cuttings, it was very simple and effective. What I didn’t know was outside of the greenhouse, the wet clay and sand could not be replicated and the plants languished in my sandy loam soil without regular irrigation. I finally lost the propagation stock during one dry winter along with me saying goodbye to my nursery. Every now and then I look for it like a lost friend. Maybe it will spring up somewhere else. To this day I have not seen it. I will keep looking.

Buffaloberry

For many years I grew the buffaloberry, Shepherdia canadensis and sp. of many different seed sources. I had dwarf plants, tall robust almost tree like selections, yellow fruit and super hardy selections. They all faced the same demise: too much humidity and soil moisture in southwestern Michigan. I am not sure but it looked like a canker moved in on the weaker plants completely destroying all the producing plants I had. In many ways, very similar to Seaberry in structure and fruit quality that is currently grown as a juice plant. The above picture shows a seed source from Idaho which was one of the best in terms of fruit production. This was the last plant I had. The fruit by itself is not possible to eat fresh but somehow people do make a jelly out of it. With sugar all things are possible. I never got that far. Someone had suggested to me it could be an autumn olive substitute as a native plant that is full of native joy and wonderfulness where the autumn olive is evil and hated by all. I didn’t like his attitude but who cares? The plant itself doesn’t have that wide range of flexibility needed for a cultivated food plant in a wide range of growing zones. However, it is likely you could take your Shangri-La plant and have it in its more appropiate cold and dry environment and go from there. One of my customers in northern central Michigan who purchased several plants from me, told me it was a bear and unstoppable in terms of its stoloniferous tendencies. It took over a sandy hill where nothing else would grow. Joy and wonder abounds. Now that is Shangri-La for buffaloberry. He feared it with its thorny attributes. I couldn’t talk him down and I think he removed it via tractor and herbicide. He had a hard time admitting to me of its demise. This Shepherdia genus is dioecious with separate male and female plants. Before it left, I made a small walking stick out of one of the canes-branches of buffaloberry. It has a purplish splottchy hue to it. Very nice. I got the t-shirt from the gift shop of Shepherdia as I left the grounds.

Siberian Apricot

One of the most cold hardy apricots in the world is the Siberian apricot, Prunus sibirica. We are talking in the minus 40F and below range. I had read only small paragraphs here and there about the plant. I was able to get seed of it here in the United States prior to the Prunus ban. I made one planting of ten trees. When they started to fruit, I was confused at what I saw. When I tasted the acrid fruit discolored by disease and rot, it tasted much worse than it looked. This was not the fruit we know as apricot. It was the seeds that provided a nut which was then used to extract an oil. The pits were the goal not the fruit. As the fruit dries on the tree, the seeds drop free to the ground free of fruit. Perfection on an evolutionary scale. It’s an almond like apricot. The plants are very heavy bearing and generally short lived fading after 15 years or less. The issue I faced was it was too warm in my location. It would do better in zones 2-4 than my zone 5-6 farm. With warmer winters and fluctuating temperatures, the Siberian apricot represents Siberia with its long uninterrupted cold periods. However in this case, there was a little wiggle room. It potentially could offer a new oil based tree crop plant in the most northern reaches of the world. For now, I had to say goodbye as I was never able to replicate the plantings again before my original ten plants perished.

Every plant that sees the light of day does so because you desire an outcome of some sort. It might be a short lived relationship or it could go on for a long time. Doesn’t matter. It saw the light the day thanks to you and your love of the world around you.

Enjoy.

Kenneth Asmus

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Two Story Agriculture

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

Ground Floor and Going Up

I first found the concept of Two Story Agriculture in the best selling book Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith. He was an economic geographer for Columbia University and had written extensively about land use and is considered the father of agroforestry. The title of his second chapter, “Tree Crops-The Way Out” with a sub heading of “Two Story Agriculture For Level Land” discusses the possibilities of using annual row crops with tree crops. It seemed to him that valuable real estate was being wasted and not used to its full potential. His ‘level land’ idea was to use trees as a type of vegetative buffer with different tree crops to harvest as well as to shade the soil and improve the crop yields below. As an example, you could also add the honeylocust or mulberry and then allow grazing of the animals in the pastures below supplied partially with additional feed supplements of the tree crops. My interpretation and implementation was to use woody and perennial plants in the understory in the attempt to create a highly diverse farm. The above image shows a slice of my plantings containing an example of two story agriculture. The tree on the far right is a shellbark-pecan hybrid followed by two types of late lilac species from China and then followed by a seed selection of northern pecan from Minnesota or Iowa. The tree in the background is a Quercus x bebbiana or Bebbs oak grown from seed discovered in Michigan. Each of these plants were grown from seedling in my nursery. It was very easy and inexpensive to do this. The crops in this area are pecan and hickory nuts and low tannin acorns. The results allow me to harvest seeds and make them available in a market of tree seeds. This in turn can make it possible for others to replicate my plantings in some individual interpretation of two story agriculture. Once in a while I will create something delicious from the crop plants. New seedling selections of chestnuts, apples, plums and cornelian cherries are coming on strong in this area most of which were planted by small mammals and birds. The largest trees tend to aid in this conversion of pasture to forest which essentially leads to a situation where it is not necessary to plant trees anymore. It is done for you.

Location, Location, Location

The image above is taken at the very top of the hill with the highest elevation in the area and was one of the most difficult places to establish trees due to the wind and drought in the summer. I lost a lot of trees when I first started planting there. With the advent of Tubex tree shelters along with changing my choices and timing, my success rate greatly increased. The fall planted oak and hickory began to make it through that critical first year. Just to the left of the picture is a steep hill facing due west. The prevailing winds are from the west and southwest. Particularly hit hard were many chestnuts and hazelnuts so I began using more oak and hickory within this area including shrubs like the lilac. As those species grew so did the self seeding of other trees including hybrid American chestnuts and shellbark hickory. It took 20 years for the whole system to begin to take shape. One area that is thick with dewberry, wild red raspberry and wild Himalayan blackberry became an ideal place to self seed as well as eliminating the pasture grasses.The turkey use this area to nest. Once the tap rooted trees grow deep into the subsoil, they grow very fast and are immune to drought even on this hill of sand. The two story root system reflects the canopy and is a mirror of what is below. Today it is very easy to grow other shrubs, small trees and perennial vegetables in this location due to the protection from the mature trees. Now it is time to make hay while the sun shines so the last few years I keep adding potato for groundcover. I am adding comfrey and self seeding yucca directly in the new plantings of plum and chinquapin chestnut.

Preston Lilac developed for the Canadian Prairies

The Power of the Lilac and Its Olive Family

Conservation loves the lilac. It was the plant used extensively on the plains states as a wind buffer but it became popular due to the fragrance of the flowers and ease of cultivation. I started growing them from seed using commercially purchased seeds. There are many species of lilac and soon I created a collection of them at my farm meant for just this purpose. I focused on the seed production part of it as most of the Syringa vulgaris selections are done from cuttings. The common lilac was very prone to mildew so I looked for species that were immune to this weakening disease. I was particularly interested in the Himalayan, Preston, Late and the Korean species from seeds not clones. I scattered small plantings of them throughout my farm often in the worst locations where even the grass struggled. Typical of its olive family relationship, the Genus Syringa has very dense fibrous roots. This makes it very efficient at capturing water after a rain fall. If I had to do this again, I would of planted more lilac. The fragrance alone plays a role in calming down the human part of this equation of two story agriculture. I have been planting the northern olive look alike, Chionanthus virginicus, Fringe Tree and its Asian cousin, Chionanthus reticulatus hoping I could recreate the lilac effect plus make olives from the fruit. Chionanthus is much slower to establish in my ‘non-garden’ areas yet it has held up remarkably in those locations with reference to drought and competition from grasses. Three years ago a few started flowering after a fifteen year juvenile stage. No fruit so far therefore no experimental olives to experience. For now, I am going full lilac and plan to harvest seeds this coming fall. In the meantime, I continue to dream olives. Everyone has olive dreams, I am sure.

The hill featured in this story is in the background and goes to the right of the image. At the base of it was a large colony of Staghorn shumac. The mowed relatively flat area was the beginning of my nursery in the mid 1980’s. My father took this picture for me.

You could design and implement any number of combinations of two story agriculture with rich diversity. From ground up it could be wild tomatoes and white clover, plum and crabapple. It could be comfrey, wild peppers, neosinte-wild corn, plum and edible acorn oaks. This spring I am planting one now that uses comfrey and potato as groundcovers. The second story is cornelian cherry, Cornus mas. The third story is Chickasaw plum with shellbark hickory as an overstory. In this same area I am using a new form of Tree Lespedeza bicolor called Treefolia also known as shrub clover as a nitrogen fixer while direct seeding mixed species of yucca to help loosen the soil which will allow better water percolation. Even by acccidental or intentional human introduced associations, plants integrate and become the community of all inclusive possibilities in a two story system. My nearby Paulownia tomentosa selections for wood are slowly becoming engulfed with the Chickasaw plum colony. The Russian and Kansas selections of wild bergamont make up a portion of the groundcover as a flavorable tea plant. It is a guild with infinite variations where all tomatoes love carrots scenario. There are no weeds.

Tree Crops-The Way Out and Two Story Agriculture for Level Land. A few words is all I remembered. That was enough to help me fulfill my life with trees.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Exploring Diversity: Creating Flavor Forests With the Species Apples

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

The Oikos Tree Crops Farm-My experimentation in my nursery led to a repository of species level food plants created by using seeds from around the world. I turned this pasture that was being used as a hay field into a global food repository. The apple genus is very diverse species wise yet few people grow apples from seeds. I needed to find as many species as possible and create an apple forest rich in species diversity. No grafts allowed. Clonal is not ideal in this application.

From the time I was a child, I loved to grow plants. I threw a pit of a prune near the back door of my home. A tree emerged and I quickly put it in a pot. How could this happen? The seed did not look alive yet it produced a living tree. This was a straight line to growing trees. I have a few hand tools. I have an open field. And soon, like my father before me, I will have a tree farm. My land was devoid of trees. It was too small to be a commercial operation of a single species or cultivars. I did not have the resources to create a fruit farm. My nursery idea began in college when I would go to the library and read the reference books of Hortus, USDA Woody Plant Seed Manual and Brooks and Olmo Register of Fruit and Nut Varieties. As reference manuals go with their black and white images, they brought to life the great variety in nature. Often this variety was lost over time to the point where only a tiny fraction was used in modern agriculture. It was a mind expanding experience for me because I wondered where did the other plants go. There were many ‘castaway’ food plants that fell in the minor camp. This meant they were insignificant in terms of use. I wondered about culturing a few of these plants and how they could make a positive influence in the world family of farmers.

This indigenous North American species of apple is called Sweet Crab, Malus coronaria. If you grow a few thousand of these seedlings and fruit a few of them, you will find many that do not require the usual boatload of sugar to tame the tartness and astrignecy so common with crabapples.. At the time, it was the only apple I found with zero worms and always had clean fruit. The bright green fruit was like a mini-Granny Smith apple in flavor.

My younger self didn’t realize that farming in general is highly segmented and specialized. It needed diversity yet didn’t want that in its production systems. There everything has to be the same plus it can’t be far outside the familiar tastes that people enjoy. Like my apple growing neighbor, you could have 30 varieties of apples, but the small tart green apples are not what people eat or desire. Having a collection of diverse species didn’t mean it would be put to use on a larger scale. Recently with the advent of small scale syrup and cider making for flavoring, the species apples have some great possibilities. Here was a way to harness these incredibly concentrated and complex flavors.

Woody plants take time and space to create a ‘grow-out’ to assimulate new genetic combinations. Ideally you would grow these non-clonal apple seedling collections and put them on public land to further test their capabilities in farmerless fields for long periods of time. There would be no spray or herbicide use. It would test the limits and explore the possibilities of no spray apples and the crabapple as well as create a means to developing timber form apples for wood quality. The public would then have access to new flavors of fruits and get inspired by the unlimited possibilities of the Malus genus and its variety. These public lands should be protected the same way a state park or federal land is. Instead of the native flora, these fields protect the global apple flora as a means to improve agriculture free of the breeding restraints put on the plants by humans who desire only the six genes that currently dominate the market. It is only by the cultivation of the species in a non cultivar way that these ideas will stay alive and integrate with our diets and lifestyle changes. This may sound like an apple pie in the sky but it is easily done. We have all the resources to make it happen and it’s inexpensive to do even on large acreages. We have the tools. We have the open fields. We even have the seeds. Toot my own horn here. Toot toot. This is the future of tree crops and research in agroforestry in general. It is using the world’s flora to solve the world’s problems.

Apple Stories Come to Life

Here is my brief run down of a few species apples grown at my farm the last four decades describing their traits and possibilities in cultivation. All were done from seeds. Each one has a story to tell in its population and individual progeny.

The Manchurian Malus baccata

Normally, you would avoid pea sized apples filled with strong bitter compounds. It is considered the world’s hardiest apple able to take minus 60 F. Biting into the teeny apples and chewing them into a paste is too aggressive and best to call it ‘chunkage on deck’ as they are so repulsive. Waynes World reference in case your’re wondering. Yet a few years ago while collecting seeds of them late in the season while competing with the cedar waxwings, the flavor was much more mellow and less astringent. I would let the fruit float in my mouth one at a time as I hand harvested the fruit and let it dissolve slowly. This improved flavor is due to the successive frosts on the fruit. This is a common characteristic of many crabapples where long ripening times improves their edibility. The Siberian crabapples contain very high vitamin and mineral rich fruit as part of their chemical composition. This is the ultimate apple a day to keep the doctor away. My particular source came from South Korea on Mt. Kyebang where the apples were found growing in a very rugged, rocky environment. They are a very uniform non-hybrid population with some individual plants showing great vigor. They are free of fireblight, scab and rust. The species is very distinct with its bright clean light green foliage and large pure white blossoms. The fruits hang in the trees and rarely drop free on the gound on their own. The fruit quantity is usually high. This is the first apple species to blossom at my farm and does not hybridize easily because of that. Its compontent of the apple forest is for a vitamin rich fruit for supplements and health products.

The Virginian Malus virginiana

I took a short cut by buying a grafted tree from Edible Landscaping called Hughes. I planted the graft union below the ground to encourage it to self root. The Virginia apple is a loosely defined crabapple from the southeastern U.S. Over time I desconstructed the grafted form to its species level by growing out many seedlings and selecting those with the most vigor and clean foliage. This type of selection process created clean and heavy fruit production ten times more than the original grafted tree. The seedlings were much more uniform than I thought they would be with all of them producing a one inch red apple in dense clusters. The trade off was the fruit was smaller and much tarter. The seedlings took on a timber like growth habit with broad spreading branches and a height to 40 feet or more. I limbed them upwards near the hybrid oak plantings. It would be a good tree to root from cuttings to maintain this vigor in orchard settings. The fruits can be shaken out of the tree easily by early October and harvested by hand on tarps. The Virginia makes an excellent jam and jelly. Its compotent of the apple forest is that of heavy fruit production for syrup, jelly and cider for adding flavor to other sweet and bland apples.

The Russian Malus pumila var. niedzwiecka

This particular species apple is a small apple species coming from the Russian apple forests and other species mixed in over time as it traveled throughout the world. I received seed of it from an overseas collection which said it was one of the original crosses. The seedlings were quite uniform but with larger fruit than the original seedling. I only had one tree of it. What I noticed about growing this particular crabapple was its red flesh and heavy yields. After 30 years, it continues to crank out large volumes of small crabs that if nailed by a few frosts taste very good like a concentrated berry. It still needs the sugar molecule to calm it down, but the flavor is super apple. The red and pink pigments are very pleasant to see and you can see why this species is used for adding anthocyanins to other larger cultivated apples. People back cross the apple to get red fleshed apples. I started a secondary planting from this one tree. They are all very vigorous and clean. This compotent of the apple forest is that of a berry and its ability to produce large volumes of clean, small red apples high in anthocyanins useful for food supplements, creating new flavors while preventing human illness.

The Russet Malus domestica

For a while I was buying apple gift boxes for Christmas to friends and relatives. This is when my dad quietly told me “We liked it…but don’t do it again.” Often these boxes are filled with russet apples like Grimes Golden that look like baked potatoes on a stem. My father was likely thinking this was not an apple and Ken is feeding us weird stuff again. I began chiseling out the seeds from these boxes and growing the seedlings. It happened that the thick skins on the russets comes through quite strongly in successive generations. These tend to repel insects from breaking through and destroying the fruit. Even codling moth seems to be blocked to some degree. Some of the apples are very funky in shape with weird protuberances looking like mini-volcanoes on the surface of the apple skin. The Russet became a means to discover completely no spray apples. Apples are sprayed 16 times a year. This is our way out of this apple nightmare for the apple and its human counterpart. This component of the apple forest delivers healthy fruit for fresh eating rich in nutrients and free of insects and free of all spray. Others have also discovered this work around in the search for developing unique cider apple varieties.

The Prairie Malus ioensis

This species created a heavily ladened stolon producing tree rich in bright yellow fruit with strong astringency impossible to eat fresh off the tree. Jam from it turned it into a superball condensed nuetron star like mass impossible to put on toast without shredding the bread into pieces. It was true from seed and few if any hybrids are found in the population. I was surprised at how the main trunk was short lived. Evidently, the species tends to use the stoloniferous root system as a means for regeneration much like Staghorn Shumac. The colony is extensive. When I lost the original tree I could see the sprouts in the shade of hybrid American chestnuts and hybrid oaks over 40 feet away. It’s a traveler. The density of the fruit along with its bitter and astringent compounds provide a challenge for taming it into a syrup. Like quince, it could be boiled in sugar. You have to view it more like an olive or quince plucked off the tree. I did make one selection from the seedlings of roughly 2000 individuals. It was free of cedar apple rust and black spot on the leaves. One winter the deer browsed down all of the trees in the original planting bed except this one. So I obviously had to plant out the one the deer left alone. This compotent of the apple forest provides is a quince like characteristic rich in pectin and dark matter like possibilities where even light does not escape. Is that an over the top description for the prairie apple? Not for the apple.

Found not far outside of Rogers City, Michigan this Michigan M-68 highway apple highlights the value of wild trees and their value to the humans that use them and the animals that thrive on the fruits. This was a clean one.

The Wildings Malus domestica

Pretty much any wild apple tree found as a seedling is useable for something. The problem arises if the fruit is filled with worms and other destructive diseases lowering the quality to the point of no return. But what if you had a field of similar seedlings each selected from other wild populations where fruit integrity is captured not as clones but as seedlings. All of a sudden your apple forest opens up into a wild population totally capturing the laws of nature in that region. It becomes local and native. And surprise, it does it through its exotic origins. This is integration ecology. I began noticing a few of these uniform populations in northern Michigan on vacation. People use them for deer food during hunting season. In a few of the locations, the apples even out over time and began producing apples very similar to the parent trees. It is not a common occurence but it does happen because of the limited genetic diversity to begin with. Today these apples represent some of the older storing apples that people grew for eating in the middle of winter. When I grew out a planting of the seedlings produced by a customer from the Upper Penninsula of Michigan who sent me seeds from their orchard, I was over joyed at the clean foliage and large leaves of the plants. Many were super vigorous growing to 3 ft. tall in one year from seed. This is always a good sign. I still have not fruited the selections yet but to see such healthy plants gives great inspiration to those of us who grow apples from seeds from a cultivated setting. This compontent of the apple forest draws from wild local apples which will go back to its orchard origins while focusing on ecological adaptibility, creating tall, healthy and long lived trees.

On My Way Home Apple

A few weeks ago, while driving on my way home from my daughters, I spotted a crab apple with the most immense crop I had every seen on a tree. The whole tree was coated with one inch dark red apples to the point you could not make out the individual branches. It looked like a dark red entrance to a cave with the branches hanging to the ground in great profusion. At first I did not even recognize it was a tree. It looked like one of those science fiction portals to another universe or time. Wow, man……When I came back about a month later to photograph it, the fruit was completely gone and consumed by birds and deer. I have seen this before where an apple grew next to a chain link fence. These types of seedling trees have their origin due to a small mammal or bird. They eventually work their way up into the canopy of nearby trees. Every now and then someone unaware of what the tree is or could do as a food plant, cut them down and herbicide the stumps and surrounding area. Lets face it, nothing says wire fence like abandoned herbicided parking lot. They seem to go together. This particular parking lot tree was used by truckers and let go when the business closed down. In the meantime, the cracks in the pavement became a means for seeds to germinate into the soil which in turn broke up the pavement further. These emerging forests contain the fruits of the animals that needed them the most to survive. Autumn olive, honeysuckle, multiflora rose and calllery pear are the first to arrive to create this new climax forest parking lot. The popular trees blow in to help with the whole project. It is such a joy and truly is a work of art created by the laws of nature near this off ramp of Interstate 94. Without any effort on the human front, this is a glimpse of a global apple forest respository via expansion of a plant community where nothing existed before.

This compontent of the apple forest starts and lies within our state of consciousness where it can freely grow before it expresses itself in novel ways shared by the Malus genus.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Thoughts From the Bean Warriors

Posted on March 4, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment
Vessel Depicting Assault of Bean Warriors: Chicago Institute Art 100 BCE-500 CE Ceramic and Pigment

Thoughts from the Bean Warriors

Archaeologists                                                                               Bean Warriors

Archaeologists: The jungle was inhospitable.                                                      

Bean Warriors: We made it hospitable.

Archaeologists: They grew lima beans.                                                           

Bean Warriors: It was the protein that didn’t run away.

Archaeologists: Small bushy annual plants that needed constant tending.

Bean Warriors: It was a perennial vine that grew high in the trees.

Archaeologists: During harvest season, it required a huge labor force.       

Bean Warriors: The pods twisted open in the dry season. It rained beans from the sky.

Archaeologists: They stole the beans from the commons to control.                       

Bean Warriors: How can you steal from that which is not possible to possess?

Archaeologists: They wore armaments and carried vicious weapons.                      

Bean Warriors: Those were planting tools.

Archaeologists: Here is an axe, so sharp and ready to kill those who dare.             

Bean Warriors: That is a mattock. It relieved the tension of our clay soils to accommodate the beans.

Archaeologists: Here you see sharp spears ready to pierce. Three at a time.         

Bean Warriors: That is a dibble. We throw three seeds at a time. Each of them land in a drill in a row created by our three dibbles.

Archaeologists: Look at their helmets they wore so strong.                                        

Bean Warriors: Those are cotyledons protecting the root from washing free of the soil in the spring rains.

Archaeologists: Their noses were exposed.                                             

Bean Warriors: That is the radical which is the first root to create the bond between earth and sky.

Archaeologists: Their eyes and faces were painted in a dramatic frightening fashion.

Bean Warriors: Nature created the patterns on the skin of the bean. The beans spoke to us. We responded in an honorable way.

Archaeologists: Who knows what they were thinking?

Bean Warriors: There were no thoughts. We met at the junction of human and plant consciousness.

Archaeologists: Today we experience the story of a time gone by.                        

Bean Warriors: Today we experience a time still alive. The beans have left our home feeding hundreds of cultures across all of space and time.

Archaeologists: This clay vase tells it all.                                                  

Bean Warriors: We stored the mother of lima beans in there.

Archaeologists: The bean warriors                              Bean Warriors:    We are not.

Archaeologists: Come alive. Bean Warriors: Talk to the beans.

Kenneth Asmus

Vessel Depicting the Assault of Bean Warriors

Date:

100 BCE–500 CE

Artist:

Moche
North coast, Peru

LINK ART INSTITUTE CHICAGO

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The Plum From the Beach Comes to Visit and Plans to Stay

Posted on February 27, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

Beach Plums

I always wondered about the range maps of plants found on the USDA Plants Database.  Is the line of demarcation a real and genuinely smooth line or was it purchased directly from the Sears and Roebuck botanical books of yesteryear? And why couldn’t a plant like the beach plum just skip over a few counties inland?  The answer to those questions as it relates to the beach plum is very simple. It never got a chance either through animal or human vectors. I was told years ago, there is a beach plum leaf sample in an old early 1900’s arboretum collection from the shores of one of the Great Lakes. No one knows much about it.  Scientists want to know if it is natural and a lucky chance of nature or anthropomorphic. To the plant there is no difference. Fortunately, all plants are willing to travel to work elsewhere and this is what makes cultivation possible. The beach plum is not an exception despite its narrow range map along the eastern seaboard of the United States. It can move with the help of humans who desire its fruits the same way people eat Montmorency cherries which originated from France. For the beach plum, there is no difference between Nantucket and Paris. I applaud that.

When I started growing beach plums, I began to wonder if this plant ever grew in the dunes surrounding the Great Lakes. It is tempting to try it. I am sure it would flourish. It turned out, it is very easy to do at my farm because my farm was the beach of Lake Michigan thousands of years ago. I am roughly thirty miles from the beach today. Close enough the beach plum says. It was from here that I began growing out of thousands of plants for the mail order trade along with testing my own jam making abilities with this plant. It was easy and a joy to do. The plant is naturally at home in Michigan flowering later than any Prunus species missing all frosts. Although there are natural hybrids of it with the American and Wild Goose plums, even without breeding the plants are insanely productive with huge clusters of fruits produced all along the branches. You could easily produce an orchard of it without cloning.  This type of sweet fruit production via Prunus is only possible in the worst soil and environmental conditions for a fruit farmer. Even the frost pockets could grow the beach plum. Each plant is genetically different, making the orchard a wild population. When previous growers failed at cranking out clones of beach plums it was only because they were not a fan of isolation. A genetically different population saves the day in terms of yields. This is difficult for horticulture to comprehend where everything is neatly selected in a uniform and tidy way. You can’t just have wild with everything radically different. Oh yes you can, and this is how the beach plum rolls. It’s not about you. It’s the beach plum way.

On the beach, there can be a lot of competing interests of humans and plants.  If there is development pressure along the beach front or a change in the way the beaches are managed in some way, then the beach plum is not likely going to continue in that location you are fiddling with. No plants that I know are bulldozer resistant. Beach plums are very sensitive to herbicides. Bark transmission happens easily with this species. Early on in my career, I found out about this the hard way. This shortens their life and can kill the plant entirely in one season.  If someone has the whacked idea of burning the vegetation while polluting the soil and air, then the beach plum will disappear entirely. Its retreat is the result of the sensitivity to changing conditions within the beach soil with its perfect balance on a microcosmic scale. Sand is soil although we don’t think of it that way.

“Nana” beach plum in full flower.

You want a lot of insect activity including flies for pollination. Anything that interrupts this is going to be bad for the beach plum. After 40 years of growing them, I am still at awe at the vast array of pollinators that are attracted to its flowers. It is never just one insect. Sometimes I see nothing and am confused at how the fruit is set to begin with. You need to camp out next to the blossoms to witness this miracle of flies and bees.

 My biggest mistake growing them at my farm was mulching them with rotted hardwood wood chips. That finished off the older plants within two years.  People experience the beach as a wonderful world of sun, warmth and frolicking. In reality, the beach is brutal in terms of fluctuating temperatures, wind and humidity not to mention soil you can fry an egg on.  There is no volleyball or suntan lotion for the beach plum. There is no cool drink to sip on while basking in the bright sun. Yet not far off this scenario is a breathing root system deeply imbedded in the dunes going deep into the moist sand below. The soil is devoid of organic matter and their roots are exposed by the shifting sand. The beach plum perfectly reflects the laws of nature in that location.  The wiggle room of cultivation is possible but think beach when growing them.  Some people report a light salt spray on the leaves reduces fungal attacks.

Rings tell the story on the beach.

 

This seed strain called ” Plum Island” is roughly 25 years old before I did this trimming. At this age, the plant weakens and discontinues fruiting. This is the ripe old age for the beach plum. You can see within the last 10 years of its age really decreased in growth rates.

Realize that the beach plum after fruiting for a decade or two will die completely. It is a short-lived species unless you allow sprouts to occur near the base of the plant and use those as your new plant. Some plants have the ability to sprout as they skip along the ground as a sort of modified stolon. This beach plum tendency was discovered in one of my seed selections called ‘Plum Island’. Even with the fading of yields after a decade or more of cranking out loads of fruits, the seeds you produce are easily germinated in the field within your orchard as it continues its multi-generational progeny in a smooth transition from old to new. This is a new orchard of the future where it continually replenishes itself in a way that directly benefits the farmer with lower cost and healthy fruit without spray. It is a diverse, every expanding always adapting in an evolutionary and ecological way.  Now that’s an orchard.

Maybe we are just frolicking along as well following the path of the beach plum in making the world more fruitful and abundant with or without the beach.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Making Your Way Through the Storm

Posted on February 22, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

When I first purchased my land in the early 1980’s, there was plenty of information in the books on conservation and ecology. I kept some of my texts from college like Fundamentals of Ecology by Eugene Odum and Shrubs and Vines of Northeastern United States along with all the botany books. What was missing for me was actual living collections by farmers in agriculture applying the ecology without the phytoxenophobic goals we see today. It would only be natural in that what comes out of these living food collections can be applied on a broader ecological and agricultural scale. The tree crop farm provides its valuable resources using plants from a global perspective keeping up with the demands of the modern world climate by producing progeny adapted to the new norm. On the level of ecology if you build it, they will come. The native plants arrive in greater abundance without a human planting it in a controlled time release way. I like that some of my favorite plants are seeding in from great distances and in an effortless manner. You don’t need burning or herbicidal applications. You need patience and that by itself is of short supply. I have some very delicious mulberries and sweet cherries that have seeded into but my favorite are the woodland flowers and many unknown plants which I cannot fully identify. I remember discussing this with a customer of mine who had a collection of 4000 plants in Florida. His name was Ken too. “Ken, this is Ken” is how he would say hello on the phone. His messages on cassette tape and later voicemail where quite long winded but never boring. He told me that new insects never before seen by modern science were being discovered in his plantings along with new plants he found he could use as a source of medicine for his personal health. He said diversity breeds diversity and there is no way to stop it because the plants are ‘calling out’ to everything around them to bring all life in to this type of ecological novelty. Like a beacon, plants stir the pot of diversity. I wasn’t entirely on board at first but now I get it. Ecology takes time on a quiet human mental level as well. You plant seeds and wait to see what sprouts.

Spring Beauty-Claytonia virginica Seeded in under a multiflora rose which seeded in under a hybrid American chestnut tree. That tree was cut for lumber. Near the Turkey Oak, Quercus cerris and Paulownia fargesii trees. This was all a pasture cut for hay.
Having a tree farm doesn’t mean you do nothing. Many times the simplest solution is the best. Here it is harvest time for these wild plums and apricots where I will go to ground level with a weed whacker to make harvesting faster and easier. In this process, I get a chance to scout for box turtles ( I found one here before) and new plants seeding in as well as the runners of the plums which I save and limb upwards. A few are removed to allow light in. Without new runners, the plums would perish and disappear entirely. The box turtles are found here frequently now and between this and the Callery-Asian-European hybrid pears has the greatest density of male and female turtles.

The prunings stay on the ground as fertilizer along with the whacked into green protoplasmic grass. Wild oregano of prairie origin is established here but it is not thick as other areas of my farm. That seeded in from 400 ft. away from a planting I did around 20 years ago. The existing Timothy and orchard grass are mixed in with some quack grass which is now fading over time to the point it is a minor concern as far as lowering the yields of the plum or apricot. Shade is a great equalizer in this arena. Patience is also needed for that to arrive to create that effect on the ever expanding plant community level. In this particular planting, there is one very large multiflora rose and amur honeysuckle that seeded in the shade of the plums brought in by birds who require the fruits to survive. When you prune the plants to the ground, the high protein sprouts become a favorite of white tailed deer and rabbits. Their manure is evident in this area which in turn feeds my plums with fertilizers. This in turn lowers the vigor of those plants and eventually they fade entirely. Both of these species also have viral infections which show up periodically and reduce and sometimes eliminate the plants entirely. Just another normal day at the tree crop farm.

You know what I feel guilty about? I wish I could produce my own fuel for my weed whacker. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like I’m in the Judge Judy courtroom of nature. Look at me when you say that! I had a friend who tried creating fuels for his truck during the seventies with a still. He loved using Jerusalem artichokes the best. It exploded at night when no one was around. The explosion brought in a lot of police cars and fire trucks to an abandoned barn. Luckily he did not live there, but he heard later the neighbors who gave him access were not happy with his biofuel project running amuck. It may have caught the barn on fire. I’m not sure. As a social worker who was used to calming people down; he went back to the gas stations after that trying to keep a low profile. Just getting some non-alcoholic gas here. Move along now.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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The Young and Evolving Oak Tree

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

I was surprised to read this descriptive terminology of the oak genus and related families by a taxonomist many years ago. It really stuck and I have used it many times in writing about oaks in my catalogs. Usually cold and without life, plant descriptions are written only to fill the pages of the journals of botany. The “Young and Evolving” is not a soap opera on oak trees. Although it could be, it really tells the story of the great diversity of the oak genus AND its ability to change overtime very quickly. Here you have a sort of fluid plasticity to the species concept. Of course, there is sex involved including outside the norms of plant society but it is not in the human world. It is the wide crossing of the oak genus and species defying what is thought of as impossible or normal in the process of creating progeny unique in attributes carried through in succeeding generations. This was exactly what I found with all the thousands of oak seedlings I grew. They WERE young and evolving. We think of oak trees as slow growing and unable to change. We view oaks as stubborn, slow and unchanging over time. Thanks to the poets, they are the oh-so-slow immortal oak trees after all. Yet at my farm the changes could be seen within the first generation and continued unabated with zero boundaries of cross pollination. It was like a dam of diversity broke and huge rivers of infinite progeny opened into vast deep pools of genetic resources. Dramatic! This is at the end of the season show with the big reveal where the whole cast cries. Cue the woodwinds!

The big question becomes what is the value of this type of diversity and how can this be harnessed both as a population and to create cultivars from. More than ever we need the oak tree. It can do so much. The diversity was so large in my grow outs, it was  ridiculous to think there was one plant better than another so common in the nursery trade. To top it off, I had supporters who helped me immensely with my acorn habit which was growing exponentially as I grew thousands of seedlings at my farm. I created a backlog of trees and soon I had to jump the hybrid oak ship. That’s right. Few people were buying them to keep up with my production and I had to get out the saws. Yet, I kept meeting people with a similar mind that the oak tree had huge potential for food from acorns as well as selections for lumber with unique colored sapwood and heartwood. Even today people show an interest in hybrid oaks. Unfortunately, it is mostly within the wildlife food-habitat hunting circles that have stuck. There is little about acorn bread for the most part other than the foraging movement and zero about increasing the timber production of oak trees. This could be a direct route for the young and evolving oak tree. Now you have an opportunity to harness the oak tree on a bigger scale which is needed to make it practical. Oak trees inspire us to go big anyway.

Here are two examples of me trying to go big in all things Quercus while discovering the small and subtle aspects of the oak and acorn agriculture.

Quercus macrocarpa x robur Burenglish oak

Burenglish Oak

This particular hybrid was discovered in a cemetery in Illinois. It was not something you would find normally as a chance seedling let alone in a cemetery. It is rare as a natural hybrid. There were two very large trees cranking out huge volumes of acorns. Before the trees were cut down for unknown reasons, I purchased a few hundred pounds of them from a friend who discovered these trees by accident. One of the trees with the largest acorns I grafted at my farm. “Invincible” came from this place of rest for the weary.  This particular hybrid produces very uniform vigorous seedlings. I planted some of the fastest growing trees in my outback selected from roughly four thousand trees. Selecting from this group was not simple because all the seedlings were fast growing with minimal differences. These same seedlings today are now have trunk diameters over 18 inches. They proved to be incredibly healthy with large leaves and moderate acorn production. Burenglish oak would be a good timber hybrid. The pieces I have cut from the trees have very distinct growth rings with dark brown heartwood. It combines the best of bur oak and English oak in terms of its wood quality.  Its growth rate is twice that of white oak and could be further improved from my populations. Forty acres would be enough to create a seed repository of this cross while using all seedlings selected for speed of growth.  Other hybrids from this same cross from Utah did equally as well but are much higher in acorn production. That particular group appears to have more of the English oak within it.

Heavy acorn production can lower growth rates. In the off years, vigor is increased to make up for the production of nuts. It is in the off years that applying fertilizer will bring it back into production much faster than doing nothing. I’m a big fan of layering fertilizer like manures as this slowly breaks down and little is lost in the process.  My dad’s cure all was triple 12. “You need triple 12 Ken,”he would say. I would respond.  I need poop dad. Pelletized chicken manure. These types of fertilizers are perfect for the oak only because they take time to release their nutrients and come with calcium which aids in nitrogen absorption.

The burenglish oak has a potential to be used along corn and soybean fields as a lumber tree while doing double duty as a shelter tree and acorn producer for animals. The acorns could be processed as well for flour. This type of area where it is free of shade and heavy in wind into zone 3 would be ideal to establish repositories of this particular hybrid. Because of the fast grow in a wide range of soils, it would not be disappointing to the farmer. The shade produced would be minimal into the field of crop plants which would not diminish the yields. It should not exceed 1 percent of the acreage to do this either because the greatest biomass is in the air not the ground like a prairie planting. It is much more efficient.

Quercus macrocarpa x turbinella Burlive Oak

Burlive Oak

When I see the extremely dry and hot climate affecting the hills of southern California in the form of fire, I do wonder if an oak forest would help in some way. Could an oak tree slow or suppress fire in some way?  Is there too much leaf litter? And would oak trees help retain soil moisture compared to other types of vegetation?  What could you add to the existing ecology to mitigate the problem in a fast, economical and efficient way? Here is where this oak could step in. You take a few acorns like the fictional “Man Who Planted Trees” and begin reforesting the hillsides with oaks. You plant 20 acorns per acre and slowly but surely make oak trees within the rocky soils. It could easily be done with a stick and a small canvas bag attached to your belt. Harvest acorns from the University of California. Check. Hire a work force to reclothe the hills of California. Check. Give California life again and help those who need it most. Check. When these plants fruited, you would let the birds and small mammals distribute them to fill the valleys with oaks. You need vigor, thick waxy leaves and extremely deep roots to create a rock hard wood able to hold the soil and air humidity around the trees themselves. The desert oak hybrid bur and shrub live has these genetics which are perfect. The burlive oak would fit into an agroforestry scenario for hot dry climates yet retains a tree form which increases shade. Shade equals cooling. The great shrub live and bur oak cross with thick dark green leaves makes it happen. Most of my crosses came from Utah and California as the Cottam hybrids. A second batch came from selections from the late oak breeder Miguel Marquez in Texas. To this day, the heavy acorn production along with its durability over time could easily fit into these hot and dry times ahead.

Seed selections from the amazing Shrub Live oak Quercus turbinella include: Asmus Oak Quercus garryana x turbinella, Englishlive Oak Quercus robur x turbinella. These particular crosses thrive in heat and drought and work in areas with higher soil and air humidity compared to pure Shrub live oak which perished here in Michigan within 4 years. The reason for a hybrid oak is not because it is better in some magical way. It just has a vigor greater than the species alone has. This was not a cross done in a controlled laboratory setting. In fact, intentionally crossing species of oaks is difficult to do. Yet in nature, it happens effortlessly. It is an effect of two young and evolving species of oaks exploring and creating diversity in novel ways outside of what ‘normal’ biologists think of as the immutable species. That is dramatic.

Cue the strings.

Oh-its-Natural grafting. Red oak at my families farm.

Asmus Oak Quercus turbinella x garryana

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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A-Salading We Shall Go with Viola

Posted on February 11, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment
Ecos White Violet-One of the best flavored and productive of the Viola Genus

Crop Diversity: Perennial Greens-Violets

Growing edible perennial greens is part of the edible landscape movement. It was born with the idea that an ornamental plant can provide food. The edible greens created by a violet can be harvested as a source for salads while doing double duty as a groundcover. The violet can be planted in part shade under and around other plants and its perennial producing greens year after year. To further refine this Viola ideal, I began a search for wild species of violets in Michigan as well as the named selections from flower seed companies. I was most interested in the flavor and amount of foliage that could be harvested. This meant taste testing a lot of violets. Flavor is never mentioned in the plant descriptions, and it was not in the radar of the floral industry where Violets are produced by the millions in the bedding plant industry. That was a strictly look-but-do-not eat universe.

After the final chomping, it was the Manchurian violet, Viola mandshurica with its long leaves that had the best flavor and most succulent texture of the dozens I tested in the raw state. This species is more biennial than perennial and faded quickly in the woodland garden we planted it within surrounded by hybrid oaks, ginseng and ginger. The potential exists for all violets to be used on a larger scale yet no one is rushing to grow it as an edible green adding it to salad mixes or dried down for the powdered green drinks. Many violets are high in mucilaginous compounds. The texture of a violet leaf makes it easy to consume moderate amounts compared to aloe vera, chia, psyllium or flax seeds. This polysaccharide is well known for its treatment for burns, inflammation and a digestive aid. People use a form of these seeds or the pure thing for improving digestion. I had a friend in college who was into this purification diet of which flax and psyllium seed was on top of the list. The drink was like a clear viscous gel rich in mucilaginous compounds. I used to tell him it was suitable for fixing the cracks in the sidewalk out in front of our rented house. On Fridays, he would treat himself to one beer as a reward to the torture he experienced the days before. He thought it paid off for him in spiritual dollars. He even found a book about this diet which I started to read. It was filled with all sorts of majestic cosmic experiences once your body was aligned properly. I had my doubts until one evening late at night I saw ethereal lights above our septic system. As I lit some incense, the explosion could be seen …… Okay, just kidding on that. Luckily violet leaves are not as brutal. The violet creates this same path to enlightenment with the added benefit of it being a delicious salad green rich in vitamin C. In this whole process of discovery of violets to produce at my nursery, I became hyper-aware of violets wherever I went. This is a common experience where you begin to see a familiar sight as you focus on one thing. This was how my collection began and continued over a decade while growing them at my farm.

Violets are a common lawn weed pitching seeds and doing its underground reproductive strategies. It survives where grass cannot prevent its introduction. One lawn in particular I spotted was in Shields, Michigan. It had a dense carpet of violets where grass was missing entirely. No one was a-salading there but nothing else could grow in this location and the owner just let it go under the Norway spruce trees. To me that was the perfect lawn: one that didn’t require mowing.

Few know about edible violets. They are a small but powerful plant with a sense of urgency to colonize if the conditions are right. When I dumped them into a crevice created by a plow from the previous owner of my farm, they slowly but surely filled in as the grass died due to shade of my hybrid oak and chestnut trees. The violets had a plan. I did nothing. Today that violet planting measures over 100 ft. across and is pretty much all violets. The deer show up in summer and will eat the foliage prior to the plants going semi-dormant during the summer months. All of that was solved in one Viola swoop. The plants originated from a lawn I was working on in my early landscape business which was filled with moss and violets.

Here are a few of the species I discovered in the process of going a-salading both in the wild and under cultivation as species and selections. All of these provide an edible green worth cultivating as an edible landscape plant.

Kidney Leaf Violet

Although the leaf production was low, this little plant was a good rhizome producer and created clumps of dense foliage. This species was found on my families farm growing on an abandoned farm road in an oak woodland. The population was extremely small to the point it almost disappeared entirely. This was one of my favorite groundcover types.

Edible White Violet

This was a form of the common blue violet discovered as a chance seedling under an oak tree at my farm. It has very mild flavor in the foliage department and a good yielder. It is easily digestible and not fibrous. It self seeds and comes out true from seed.

Purple Leaf Violet

This super northern arctic species is not a heavy yielder but looks spectacular in leaf. I did another planting of it last summer in a new location hoping for better results. It was very low yielding but has such bright foliage that it would be interesting to hybridize it for that alone. This is considered a North American species but it is circumpolar in real life like many plants and animals when we were all one giant supercontinent. Apparently there is some controversy of its identification within the botanical world.

Huron Sand Violet

Huron Sand Violet

This discovery was on a giant flood plain on the shore of northern Lake Huron. Nothing but rocks, stones and sand, this species has spread voraciously over many acres in this beautiful location. There were millions of plants in this area like a dense green carpet. The next year the lake rose to the point this plain was completely underwater. I wondered if the seeds would remain dormant in the sand below the water only to sprout when the lake recedes again. The foliage was very succulent, vibrant green and delicious. It was very early in flower and produced good yields in the spring.

Freckles Violet

From Jellito seeds, this was a good one in terms of its clumpiness and yields. It wasn’t the most flavorable but it did remain in good condition late in the season. A lot of violets fade in the summer heat.

Magenta Violet

From Jellito seeds, this one was a great performer in terms of its yields out producing almost all the selections and species I have. Fairly drought tolerant, it continues to produce through the summer. The tall plant is dense in foliage and easily harvested. The flowers are a bonus as they stand out above the foliage.

Lawn Violet

Of all the violets people know, this is the most common. From my subjective experience, this species is high in mucilaginous compounds. It is a very durable species and the rhizomes are persistant in competition with other plants. This species and Magenta create the best groundcover types and could likely be the next green drink to enlightenment if you know what I mean.

Unknown Species Violets

Like the lawn violet in Shields, Michigan, there are many species I just cannot identify. I am winging it as scramble through those damn botanical texts with funky terminology. When my father began a project involving a lawn service, he gave them access to drop grass clippings in a ditch and around a road at our farm. Within this hodge podge mixture of celluose lied dormant seeds which sprouted and grew in the road way. This was one of them. What I liked about this species was its fast growth. I thought it could of been hook-spur violent. I could be wrong because I am not fluent in funky terminology.

Appalachian Violets

This was one of the most unusual violets and not edible as far as I know. It is odd in that it spreads vigorously but then disappears entirely only to be found elsewhere on my farm.I think it might be biennial in nature more than perennial and the seeds stick to my rototiller. The plant responds to soil disturbance. It is the tallest of the violets I grew and very beautiful in flower. But then it disappears only to reappear somewhere else without fanfare. I like that.

Yellow Violets: Like the yellow snow, don’t eat it. All the books say they are poisonous to consume. I am not sure of the details but I am going to pass.

SUMMING UP VIOLA: Dense Carpet of Perennial Green Violet-Omni-directional All Space Filling Violet-One Beer on Friday Violet-A-Salading We Shall Go Violet.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Cuppa Tea?

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

Anyone that has worked for me or comes to my farm in any capacity, knows I will ask them if they would like a cup of tea. I would always ask. There is a Kinks song, I would sing to myself once in a while when I was harvesting trees called ‘Have a Cuppa Tea” from the Muswell Hillbillies album.

If you feel a bit under the weather,
If you feel a little bit peeved,
Take granny’s stand-by potion
For any old cough or wheeze.
It’s a cure for hepatitis, it’s a cure for chronic insomnia,
It’s a cure for tonsillitis and for water on the knee.

Have a cuppa tea, have a cuppa tea, …….Hallelujah Rosie Lea.

The Kinks, 1971

Tea is my number one drink for the last 50 years so it was only natural I would try to grow it. Funnily enough it grew in Michigan quite well. I began to look at tea culture and tried to understand why no one in North America has ever grown the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. Later I did find one person in Florida who was selling plants and had a bona fide tea plantation of some size. After some serious seed searches I began purchasing seeds and plants as well as exchanging seeds. I had a lot of tea plants. People knew this beverage and the plant too. It was impossible to produce enough of them. It turned out that my ambitious program of trying to establish the tea plant outside was too much for the plant to survive a normal Michigan winter let alone a real cold one. But within that polyhouse window, the plants not only survived but flowered too. This shows the great potential of taking a crop which is grown thousands of miles away and producing it a ‘non-tea’ environment like Michigan. But having the plant grow here in a hobbyist sort of dream like mine is a teeny fraction of the whole tea story. There is processing and harvesting and finding the seedling populations as well as creating cultivars capable of minus 20 F. I visited the Washington, D.C. Camellia collection at the U.S. National Arboretum. This same idea is needed for the tea plant. You need a collection and a population of diverse genetic seedlings. Having a ornamental hardy Camellia is not quite the same as having a hardy tea plant. But it’s very close and doable.

For a while I also grew the Tea Oil Tree, Camellia oleifera. This species was very slow growing but durable and tough to fluctuating temperatures. I was able to obtain a very hardy seed source which was close to my climate. I had roughly 50 plants that survived very nicely in the polyhouses for almost a decade. Unfortuantely at the end of my nursery, the plants were exposed to dry winds in February which took them from lush and green to crispy and brown by spring. It is possible it could grow in a moderate zone 6. To me that was a hallelujah moment.

This is more than just a hint that it would be totally possible to develop and find full Zone 5 tea and tea oil plants for Michigan and other temperate areas. The issue becomes scale. You need a much larger population with diverse seed origins to find and create a hardy population especially with Camelia because it is usually clonally propagated as named varieties. You need to step away from that to find the treasure of diversity. Actually, that is not too hard to do. I would guess somewhere close to 100,000 plants could make that happen. Think of it like a bridge. Like all engineering projects, you want safety first and you should over engineer it in terms of finding and planting large numbers of seedling plants upwards to a quarter million. This may seem like a lot, but tea is easily grown from seed. The seeds are available on an international scale too. It would only require a place near the lakeshore of Michigan and sandy well drained soil. Tea loves sun and sun may be the limiting factor in its commercial production. Michigan is not sun drenched. We have fresh water oceans, but there are no dolphins. Sunlight is filtered through the clouds here. Tea could be produced in the continental United States but the price tag might prove very high because of the labor involved and processing. That part is the great unknown in agricultural circles but that too could be engineered. Let’s say you were magically transported to a land grant college or one of those fancy non-profit agroforestry organizations to talk to students and professors about your amibitious tea project. First we have to pretend they would listen. During your talk, the chuckles and negativity begin to drown out your ideas. This is ideal. Here is when your back up plan will kick in. It’s time to shine. You serve everyone tea. “This is pretty good”, they will think. “Why didn’t we think of this”,they will say. “Maybe tea is the future!” Hallelujah Rosie Lea.

Enjoy. Kennneth

Tea in the morning, tea in the evening, tea at supper time,
You get tea when it’s raining, tea when it’s snowing,
Tea when the weather’s fine.
You get tea as a mid-day stimulant
You get tea with your afternoon tea
For any old ailment or disease
For Christ sake have a cuppa tea.

The Kinks, 1971

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The Island of Plant Production: Small Nursery

Posted on February 1, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

When I first started my nursery, I soon found many nursery people who were in the plant business from their family. They had large farms devoted to plant production. Some were connected to the Christmas tree industry while others came later in the form of landowners with both production and large cold storage capabilities. They were the big wholesalers here in Michigan. We have this dune like sandy soil on the southwestern side of the state which is ideal for this type of production. That model and system would allow huge production as well as having human resources for shipping them throughout the country. They are in locations moderated by the climate of Lake Michigan.  They have several hundred employees to do the harvesting, processing, counting and grading required. They were often workers from Mexico traveling to the United States following the crop harvests in different sections of the country. I was fortunate to meet one family who worked alongside me in one of the nurseries I was employed at. The father of this family told me of the reality of his existence and all the places he was employed at over the years. No one really knew his backstory. The small retail nursery also had a back story. The owners were not farmers and usually had little knowledge of horticulture other than reading a few books. I began to ask them what they did for a living and what they were most interested in. These were the ministers, police officers, engineers, degreed in history or the arts, schoolteachers, multi-millionaire and oil magnate. Some were retired from the car industry and worked in manufacturing. Each of these individuals was part of the retail nursery industry and had found themselves in the sale of nursery stock. That is not an easy row to hoe. They shared one trait. They were short lived.

Today the nursery business is even more challenging. A small or backyard nursery is not sustainable unless you are using social media, and you are an educator and entertainer at heart. If you are a minister career wise, use those talents to spread your message of your plants as well as your life without being too preachy. Tell people your back story. Use your current occupation to showcase your talents related to your life experiences and why you are passionate about plants. For me I used the catalog system. Today that model is not used much at that level. Remember you are up against non-profits running nurseries, state land grant university nurseries, state level government run nurseries who regularly ship out of state, conservation industry wholesalers, low minimum order wholesalers of which most of them are already, as well as uncertified nurseries with no inspection or license to produce or sell nursery stock. It is a field of producers and sellers that is tough to weave through. Some companies are partially funded by government grants. This is particularly true of native plant nurseries that almost always have plant removal programs or bid on contracts for native landscape material for infra-structure projects. On the removal side of what is caught in the net of invasive species, I find it disheartening only because these same nurseries are being ecologically misled and exposing themselves to known carcinogenic compounds.

My model was the mail order business. This is not the same as it once was partially because of the costs of printing and mailing. People do like to read catalogs if they are well written with good images. The catalog is like the vinyl of the plant business. This is not J. Jill or the fashion industry.  The plant profit margins are tight.

The best aspect of the small individually run nursery is the ability to capture traits found in plants on a regional scale. It’s poor in terms of producing a profit but fantastic in its ability to do a turnaround on finding new plants, selecting them with new possibilities and then releasing them to the public. It is especially true with food plants. Most people ignore this category of nursery stock unless it is grafted trees. This broad stroke of selection, release and dissemination is critical in the years ahead of plants that are not known to be used in any current agricultural setting. It can include a vast array of exotic plants throughout the world including many unknown indigenous plants. The small nursery can fiddle with that because it has time and is not tied to any one single philosophy or idea entrenched in an ecology or agricultural textbook on the shelf. It is not commercial and scientists in modern agriculture will pretty much ignore you. You’re on an island. It is by designing this system of low budget, free of grant money trajectory allows you to leap tall buildings in a single bound. This is the nursery business model of tomorrow.  How that translates is yet to be seen but likely it will be advertising and social media that will help propel it into the future with success. Yes. People will respond with support for your mission and message whatever you decide to create and discover.

This wild apple was found on a peninsula far out into Lake Huron isolated from all other apples. It produced delicious large yellow fruit free of insects. It grew around the balsam fir on soil that was limestone shale and sand. Imagine the wind that comes off the lake hitting this tree over the years. It’s exposed on all sides.

An Example: Improving the Apple Via Small Nursery Style

Apples are everywhere. It is the ‘cosmopolitan escapees’ that show the greatest promise. Here is a domesticated fruit, highly valued, which has ecologically integrated into the environment and roadsides. This type of selection is easy to harness in a small nursery. You collect a few bushels of fruit, process the seeds and plant them. A 50 ft. long by 4 ft. wide bed could easily grow a thousand seedlings. These seedlings spaced in 6 rows 8 inches apart are the future of your apple. You look for clean foliage as they grow. You look for a fast growth rate. At the end of the third year, you tag the plants that are well structured with clustered limbs, clean foliage and strong growth.  This is what is needed in the apple. Who cares if your bed of trees becomes a tangled mess of apple trees. You can leave them there if you wish or just plant out the ones you want. You can remove the weak plants in the row to space out the good healthy trees in the process. You only need a pair of lopers. Maybe your new apple bed will be a blockade for light and sound in your yard. Maybe it will become a giant floriferous hedge filled with bees and pollinators of all types. Maybe it will create a huge mess of apples all splatting the ground in one giant load of saucey goodness. It does not matter because you now have a future with these trees and soon you will share it with the world. It could be grafted or maybe you will save the seeds of the best selections however you decide what best is. Best is best for you.

 These trees are the beginning of your “breeding program” all done in a small nursery setting. No one cares about your apples at first. People may say it is a one in a million chance. Someone may ask you if it is native. It does not matter because your goal is to find no-spray apples. Your goal is a nutritious apple for syrup and cider. Your goal is to finally grow an apple free of bugs. This is only possible in your nursery because you care about the apple and how it grows. No one else does it like you. This is your island and soon it will grow to continent size if you harness the power of social media and finally disseminate your discovery. All of this is part of the small nursery industry and your small nursery while combining it with your life experiences. It’s a story for you to tell.  It’s not a hard row to hoe.

Try it. You will see.

Enjoy. Ken

A small roadside tree found in northern Michigan. Perfect for the small nursery.

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