Wild Strawberry Sense of Humor

Posted on January 25, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

Everyone loves wild strawberries. It’s a universal fruit with universal appeal. The flavor is always rich in gold. They are impossible to resist. Here grows a small perennial plant that effortlessly skips along the ground rooting as it goes through rocks, sticks and sand. Maybe you did not look for it or have some sort of grand scheme of creating a strawberry empire; it doesn’t matter. As plants grow, it is hilarious and like laughter, you cannot stop it. Strawberry is funny after all, nailing the punch lines one after the other. As you know, timing is everything and the wild strawberry has that ability to be there at the right time dropping its new plants one at a time into the soil below. It never misses a beat. From the ground up, the strawberry colonizes the landscape in a simple way. It produces runners which touch down and root which in turn create a colony. Each colony can be just one individual as it reflects and contains within it the other colonies in its region. It is a good representation of population level changes so useful in creating healthy foods for people and profitable crops for farmers that can be raised in this new world climate. It is easily reproducible and can be tweaked to produce high quality fruit just like its cultivated cousin. This is my journey with growing wild strawberries.

Lake Huron strawberry boulder field

Not long ago, I visited a large rock strewn plain near Lake Huron. After a long walk through the stones, I discovered a strawberry with superpowers outperforming anything I had ever seen. It had the ability to produce 20 ft. long runners in a single season.  It had a long string of runners emanating from the mother plant skipping over and around the boulders before touching down in the crevices filled with sand and stone.  Nothing else could grow there. Another place I visited on Lake Huron was on a small island of pure sand at the end of a peninsula that had a giant strawberry colony just over a small ridge protected from the waves and water. Here the foliage was rich and tall, growing over a foot tall. There was no fruit, but the plants were incredibly dense in the colony shading the sand. The leaves looked lush and free of spots or disease of any type in this moisture laden environment. There were only a few willow twigs established on this teeny island with a lawn chair facing east to watch the sunrise. Laughter could be heard amongst the strawberries. Nailed it.

Many of these examples became part of my wild strawberry collection experience of which I continued for thirty years. Primarily, I did this because I love wild strawberries. I knew I could build on it easily and people did respond with support by buying the plants in my nursery. They were often used as native groundcovers in mixed plantings of many types of landscapes. But it was no commercial empire and this did not matter.  I was able to capture that wild strawberry flavor. This time it was funny to me because  I soon began to draw the attention of people who are ‘in the know’ on strawberries. One person told me “Ken, no one has ever done that before.”  He was referring to creating wild strawberry varieties using non-hybrids. I was surprised at this. The ‘real’ wild strawberry was left behind in the process of cultivation. My type of selection process would be considered kind of simplistic by strawberry breeders who are on the upper echelon of plant breeding. Another person told me my wild selections are controversial. Here laughter could be heard for miles around. I did not know this.  “You see”, he said, “they might not be pure.”  

I remember taking my children to pick your own strawberry fields. It was quite a production to create these planting beds including using Bromine to wipe out seeds and everything else in the soil. I purchased several books on strawberry cultivation assuming it would enlighten me on its culture. It did. But there was no mention of the wild crop other than the original seven South American coastal strawberry plants that created today’s modern strawberry.  In this world the wild strawberry,  Fragaria virginiana, is hard to get rid of in the cultivated fields of domesticated strawberries. Apparently, it is not allowed to co-mingle with its brothers and sisters in the glorious exaltations of cultivated fields of the straw-laced plastic lined fields of strawberry human heaven with the slight fragrance of bromine.  Am I over stating it? A little.

“Let me take you down to my strawberry fields.” The Beatles

On a mission. Must plant trees.

For me it started as an experience on my family’s Christmas tree farms.  My father was on a mission to smooth out new areas on the tree farm removing old stumps and other vegetation. He did this by using a disc and traversing repeatedly on these large areas of sand and peat. No herbicide was used. Then the scotch pines were planted. This habitat was absolutely the best for wild strawberries to grow quickly. With no grass established and plenty of ground to hug, the wild strawberry took off with its omni-directional runners. It was here that I found the wild strawberry in great abundance and decided to make jam from these patches.  I had my sister help me pick. I was at home from college at the time. It was incredibly time-consuming. The horse flies were relentless. At home taking off the calyx was equally time-consuming. I finally had enough to make jam. The flavor was like a concentrated syrup of blissful goodness. How could anything be this wonderful?  I held this memory as a beacon. I returned to this exact location to collect runners and seeds two decades later.

Intensity Woodland Strawberry flowers

To replicate this experience, I wondered what direction I could take in terms of the strawberry plant characteristics. All I could think of was the flowers. I noticed the largest flowers with the most stamens. I noticed larger clusters of flowers with a greater number of individual flowers on each stem from the basal part of the plant. This is where I started. When I fruited the plants, it was apparent I was home free. The yields were very high to the point you could see red from a distance in the small three-foot square area. The turkeys noticed and ate all the fruit. This selection process is done in isolation from other strawberries as well as using only wild seedlings highlights the non-hybrid approach to genetic diversity, all of which is found in its wild state. Now my so called breeding efforts are not breeding only putting everything in one spot so I can keep track of it. The yields can dramatically increase, and it could be done commercially.  Now you need technology to catch up in terms of harvesting and use. Harvesting a wild strawberry at peak flavor is the only way. The berry is very fragile and not possible to store or ship. It is a very soft fruit which cannot retain its original form. This works for processing and making that glorious jam that I produced as a young college student.

As time went on, the story of the strawberry grew at my farm. We used seeds in propagation as much as we could while making unnamed seedling selections. We then created planting beds outside with these forms known for their flowering, running and fruiting capabilities. In a similar fashion, I looked for additional wild selections and seed sources including as many species as I could find.  Some of the best and most prolific finds were in Michigan. I found a woodland strawberry near my home in a hickory and oak woodland. It was a woodland strawberry, Fragaria vesca and had very clean fruit that hung high on a tall plant. The yields and fruit size were good for a wild strawberry. I eventually named this selection ‘Intensity’.  We grew this mostly from runners but sometimes we did it as a strain from seed. It was here I began to see a new type of structure to the strawberry flower and fruit scape. They became taller and more branched over time. Once again, laughter followed, and the strawberry responded to its care and its environmental situation under cultivation.  I began to see the light on why this plant is so successful in cultivation worldwide and why it still is the most selected fruit plant of all time. In a twist of fate and humorous side note, the hybrids from the modern strawberries I used yielded poorly if at all. I did keep one plant because it was such an unstoppable runner producer, it eluded my rototilling and raking for new crops. I still don’t know if it yields anything.

The Runner Runs:

It is easy and not damaging to a colony to collect a runner from a plant to grow in your garden. You can continue this line of selection if you think it is something worth establishing and harvesting from home. Look for large flowers with heavy clustering. Look for clean large foliage and healthy new growth free of spots. Wild things do not live forever.  Moving the strawberry helps in its future success. Some colonies die out over time due to the natural change of the vegetation. There was an article on strawberry breeding in the Smithsonian a few years ago and one of the breeders was having lunch at Burger King. He discovered a type of strawberry in the dry barren landscape where everything else was brown. He took a few plants back to the greenhouses to continue his work on drought tolerance for California and Mexico.  Wild colonies under cultivation can surprise you.  I am still am a little upset that I did not harvest a runner in a parking lot near the buffalo pen when we were visiting a county park. That was a good one. But relax, more are around the corner. It’s a strawberry after all.

Wild Strawberry flower at my family’s tree farm.

The Flower Attracts: Look for flowers with heavy pollen and stamens within the Fragaria virginiana groups. Almost always these are the heavy fruiting individuals. For the Woodland-Fragaria vesca strawberry this is not apparent in the way the flowers are structured. There it is best to focus on quantity of flowers and tall stems that hold the flowers up past the foliage. This characteristics makes harvesting by hand faster and easier.

The Fruit Fulfills: Look for the largest stems and branches of flowers. You can always see them from a distance because the flowers are above the foliage.  This highlights the flowers potential fruit set.

Isolation and Friendships of A Strawberry Nature:   It is said within the strawberry populations are dioecious and sterile pollen plants that are not capable of producing fruit. These are said to be common in plants separated over time from other populations. Often time they make up for it by increased runner production or some other evolutionary work around. Nature never sleeps. I once found a plant I named and grew at my farm called, “Kellys Blanket”. It was one of those heavy flowering types that was half the height of a normal strawberry. Its clusters were dense and tight on the stalk. Very little fruit was produced despite being surrounded by many other types of wild strawberries. Some of these low fruiting types make great ground cover selections. I found a similar one selection ‘Huron’ which was an island form which I grew to fruition at my farm. It was very strong in runner production. These sorts of variations of a theme highlight the value of diversity and the amazing strawberry plant.

Kellys Blanket Wild Strawberry

Every now and then I am on a walk somewhere and I will spot a strawberry. I have this whole dialogue going on in my head. Oh look at that one. It’s a good one. I know it is. It is in my vision and impossible to let go. I know the fruit tastes good. I am pretty sure the strawberry is looking back at me. I can hear its laughter as I walk away. Maybe I will collect a runner after all. I too want to be surrounded by laughter.

Intensity Wild Strawberry
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Yew and I Will Grow It

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

I have always been fond of yew. It was one of those species that inspired me to grow trees in my mind. Where in creation is yew?  For me it was only in photographs. Like the one above, I saw them in the thousand-year-old trees in cemeteries and churches in the U.K. that made me wonder the history of such magnificent specimens. Most landscapes today have yews within them. They are the standard of the landscape industry as an evergreen shrub with rich dark green foliage. Their spiritual nature has been sidelined but not forgotten. Instead, yew liked us and decided to move in closer. They live a long time and tolerate the worst soil and air conditions while being disease free. When I began to grow the yew from seed, I started to notice large specimens that were not trimmed in untended landscapes. They became wedged in my consciousness as a sort of immortal species with the same ancient reverence that others enjoy in stone architecture. There was one yew shrub that grew a large multistemmed top to 50 ft. in diameter in front of a large home near a park where I still visit. I told the owner how special that plant was and not to ever remove it. Normally yews are rooted as varieties selected for specific ornamental appeal. I was more interested in the fruit and the wood quality than anything else. Late at night sometimes I would hear the deer bump into my house as they positioned themselves between the deck and planting bed eating my ornamental yews. In spring most of the foliage was gone. It is interesting that a cow or horse can eat a handful of yew foliage and drop dead. With its dozen or so alkaloids, it has protected itself against the human livestock. The deer benefits and thrives from the yew. I moved several seedlings out to my roadside. One made it past the browse line and is now ten feet tall straight as an arrow. This was yew I was searching for.

Yew trees are often planted as a form of protection in churchyards. It was said to keep the owners of their livestock out of those areas. This growth is a response to cutting and then resprouting from the root collars and trunk. This makes them difficult to age. Ballpark-2000 years old.

The English yew is Taxus baccata and it has never been developed as a tree crop. There is interest in preserving it in its native habitat with various laws in place but nothing really in growing it throughout the world or expanding its habitat. It is not forbidden. It is just not thought of. As humans, we are busy creatures not really thinking of our future with yew. Yet in the past it was the human that destroyed the trees for fear of death of their livestock and over harvested the trees for weapons of war-the English long bow. One of the oldest spears ever discovered was a 400,000 year old point made of yew. My guess is yew is confused about humans with this love hate relationship we have for it. The American yew is Taxus canadensis and it has never been used as an ornamental. For that the Japanese yew, Taxus cuspidata stepped in. It is more adaptable and capable of being sheared in different shapes. The American yew is a shrub which produces large colonies growing and rooting along the ground.  I have seen many of these along the Lake Michigan shoreline wedged in between the dunes. Each of these species are unique in their own habitats which are distributed by birds. They eat the ‘arils’ and drop the seeds with a small package of fertilizer while scarring the seed with their intestinal flora helping ready the seed for germination. The intermediate forms of tree and shrub are Taxus x media of Japanese and English origin. These create some fast-growing hybrid plants of various selections. If you grow them from seed, you will see some amazing growth forms and patterns as well as the original forest type of English yew all in one population.  It was from this vantage point, I began to grow these yew selections from seed pretty much all by the force of one person who wants to remain nameless. He secured for me the crosses and the species from old arboretum plantings both here in the United States and overseas. I had no idea what I was doing other than to grow the trees. It was not a success in terms of its sales.  People thought of the yew as a shrubby thingy-doodle next to their home. My species of yews were not considered desirable from a horticultural standpoint. They were not the thingy-doodles most of us know. The market was flooded with yews with hundreds of varieties of them. To add another one is another flavor of ice cream. I finally had a massive sale to clean them out of my polyhouses. Then I began planting out some of the seedlings from these batches of seeds.

An old Hetz yew is a multistemmed upright shrub growing to 20-30 ft. if left unpruned. Here is one I found in my neighborhood. It is the common ‘tree’ yew found in Michigan and throughout the United States.

With evergreen species, you normally want a wide range of seed sources to see what suits your climatic conditions. This is akin to the seed sources for Scotch pine for Christmas trees where different geographic regions produce different forms and growth rates.  I did not have that luxury. I had Romania. Luckily, Romania came through with big dividends. It was immune to winter burn on the foliage and completely hardy in southern Michigan. Romania had minimal side branching with a strong growth rate. It takes roughly four years from seed to see what is going on within the population of yew. Plus, two years to germinate the seeds. Here the growth rate was uniform in nature.   

I did hit a few bumps with yew. My out plantings were put on a windy and sandy west facing hill. The dry soil conditions were rough on the trees. Yews will ‘drop their top’ if conditions are not met that first year and then resprout from the roots. This is a common characteristic of the tree which is why you see 2000-year-old specimens with sprouts all along the root collars which make it look like a giant hedge plant. They have what is known as epicormic sprouting and they do not mess around. It is like a dense pin cushion of sprouts not just a couple of sprigs like some trees. They can do this on very old trunks too which in itself is not common with most trees. These same plants sprouted again from the central leaders only to be nailed mercilessly from the white-tailed deer. They rammed the cages to get the greens within. English yew tends to be one of the most shade tolerant trees able to grow in the canopy of deciduous trees very easily.  For this reason, you will find it in mixed beech and oak forests in Europe. The Swiss beech and yew forests are said to contain a great number and diversity of trees.  In my case, I have them near shellbark hickory, hybrid American chestnuts, hican and black cherry surrounding a row of edible Autumn olive selections.

English yew seedlings at my farm. Taxus baccata ROMANIA

I still have hope for yew. Last year I fixed them up again. The fruit production could be a side benefit of creating a healthy cancer preventative fruit. Yet I am not sure anyone has looked at the composition of the fruit to see if it does have some Taxol or other compounds within it. The warnings on not swallowing the seeds are noted.

The wood is used for wood working for furniture today. (See below for link.) It is very dense and could be used to produce musical instruments. A luthier wrote about lutes that was made from this wood which was common prior to the use of Brazilian rosewood. The wood I have experimented with is very enticing. You would need several hundred acres of it to really get your foot in the door. Even if this sounds too pie-in-the-sky it could be possible to distribute small trees of it to farmers along farm roads here and there to test seed sources before committing to larger pieces of land. If the trees are tracked religiously for the next twenty years, you could create a marvelous seed repository and go from there. Pruning them would eliminate the knots in the tree and straight saw logs could be produced easily. It is possible that the epicormic sprouting would then kick in after cutting and you would have an established root system like black locust and popular which would continue the tree into the next cycle. In the right soil conditions the turnaround for a log could be at least 200 years. But under the right conditions and with the right seed and cultivar selection that turn around rate could easily be reduced to 75 years. Either way, it would not matter because you would hold it under a government entity owned by the population of the people who live there as an investment in their wood and lumber portfolio. The lumber investment would be compounded yearly as a form of wood earnings. While this is going on, the fruits and seeds could help pay the bills while providing cancer free human health in the process.

From seed: The seed coat of yew is extremely hard. It normally takes two cycles of cold dormancy to sprout them. The bacterial action of the soil along with the cold and warmth with the maturation of the embryo creates conditions to sprout. The best way is to put it in a flat of sand and peat and lightly cover the seeds. Then put hardware cloth over the flat to prevent pilfering from the mice. Move the flat outside to expose it to the elements. Make sure the screen is silicone caulked around the edges directly to the flat to prevent slippage and gaps. You can then pluck out the sprouted seeds of the flat and put them in peat pots.  This whole process takes about two or three years to sprout all the seeds.  The seeds are available from tree seed companies and other sources online. My experience is that they were often over dried. This destroys the embryo. The inside should be a bright white color not a dull opaque looking embryo. Soaking the seed will not change this. Ask what year the seeds were harvested and if they refrigerate their seed. The seed is designed for long term storage so it is fortunate that despite the mishandling by the people selling the seed, you will likely find good seed. Just do the cut test to make sure.  You can use the zip lock baggy method by placing them in lightly damp peat moss and then moving them from the refrigerator after 120 days to room temperature and then back again in the fall. This is the same natural cycle that will break the dormancy.

The edible fruit is produced in clusters along the branches but the seed within is poisonous. Even the sawdust of yew is poisonous with no known antidotes. I respect yew. The plants can be either male or female. The yew has the ability to change sex over time as well.

You may discover an old Hetz yew somewhere in a landscape that is very large. These were originally a kind of dense columnar tree let go and now its compacta nature is now more like a bad hair day. These once pyramidal trees make excellent seed sources. I know of three trees in a row in an open grass field next to an apartment complex. I am guessing they are 60 years old or more. The seedlings grown from these trees can be densely branched or sometimes not at all. They have strong central leaders usually because of the pyramidal genetics. In general, the mature Hetz yews I have visited always have had low yields of fruits. I am not sure why that is. The Japanese yews on the other hand can be prolific. One such group was near a strip mall parking lot. I have never seen so much fruit on a yew. Again, I am not sure why that is. Each of these selections hints at the possibilities of yew cultivation for fruit and wood. The seed sources are in front of us all the time. We just don’t notice them and view it as worthless other than their ornamental appeal. If you mention to a nursery person that you are growing a yew from seed, this is a hobby as well as a futile occupation. Nurseries only know the varietal selections from rooted cuttings. We do not understand their value to the health of the human family and the environment at large. The ornamental in our mind is stuck permanently in the planting beds near our homes in a comforting and controlled lifestyle where everything is kept snug and safe. This is a problem. Yew realizes it and plans a resurection and revival.

When yew breaks out, there is going to be beauty to be paid in health and well-being for the human family. These are the divendends of yew. Yew and I will watch from the side lines. It is all about yew after all.

Discover a tree by raising it from seed. From there you will see everything. Enjoy.

Kennneth Asmus

THE ENGLISH YEW WOOD AND TIMBER HARVEST

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Diversity Rises in the Forest: Wild Black Cherry

Posted on January 15, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

I did not grow the wild black cherry at my farm.  It grew by itself. Today it self-seeds freely under my tree crops. It is a native tree found from Guatemala to Canada. This huge range has great diversity. Almost all of it is not explored by horticulture. It is the kind of weed tree mentality that sinks great plant ideas. Yet it is not that hard to select better wood and fruit selections because by and large they are all over planet earth. It is not some sort of rare treasure. I was a great enthusiast of the tree and kept the few that I had in my pasture. Those five trees along with two black oaks made up my forest in the beginning.  I would climb them and put kestrel and screech owl boxes next to the trunk overlooking the pasture. This was successful and attracted these birds to nest on my farm. The idea was to lower the rodent population. I was planting a lot of food for rodents too. As the trees matured, it became harder to climb and put the nest boxes in stable locations where the wind would not blow them down. The last time I climbed, I lost the ladder and had to shimmy down the trunk while grasping the bark while clinging the trunk with my legs around the tree. Seeing the ladder fall with no one around within shouting distance made me rethink my love of predatory bird boxes. The Carhart pants I had on protected me and the future of my potential future family if you know what I mean. My back was stretched and out of whack so a series of Occupational Therapy treatments, medical massage therapy and yoga with a bit of Motrin thrown in got me to the other side free of pain and discomfort. I was always removing the lower branches of the trees to improve their form to a more Christmas tree shape with no lower limbs. They became unclimbable eventually. The image above shows one such tree that was one of the better timber-like wild black cherry.  I named it ‘Sweeta’ because it had very little astringency and larger than average fruit size.

I was left wondering if anyone had looked at the black cherry in the same way black walnuts are grown. I also began to wonder if there were some plants with good fruit to eat. It had potential both for its fruit and wood. I only knew one person at the time who was interested in its cultivation. Funnily enough he lived down the road from my farm.  He discovered by accident that the abandoned grape field he had purchased years earlier was soon the home of seedling black cherries that were dropped by birds while sitting on the trellis system, to the persistent herbicide strips below created by atrazine. Few plants can tolerate that, and it takes decades for the soil to repair itself. There in the dead leaves and grass the trees grew very vigorously. He had discovered that there were some seedlings that appeared super vigorous, and he began a process of selecting the strongest, apically dominant trees and removing the weaker plants. He said his major cost was buying a good pole pruner so he could do it from the ground. He was surprised at how fast the trees grew compared to black walnuts in this soil with minimal organic matter. As a wood worker and building contractor he also noticed at that time the price of black cherry lumber was equal to black walnut. Straight knot free logs were hard to come by. He also said that the selections he was saving seemed to be much better than the average tree either through cultivation or genetics or both.

This prompted me to begin a more thorough search of wild black cherry trees. Its interesting in that I discovered the tree far north of the range maps in the books. I noticed a few trees not far from Mackinaw City. There the trees were half the size of the trees in southern Michigan. I purchased seed of ‘Capuli’ wild black cherry from a commercial seed house. This was a native South and Central American form of Prunus serotina, wild black cherry known for its delicious fruit that could be upwards to one inch in size. Here in Michigan our black cherry fruits were around a quarter inch in size and barely edible in the ripened state. The Capuli cherries grew very well at my farm. They looked like peach trees with long willow-like leaves. Unfortunately, they did not survive the winter in Michigan.  I kept them for three years waiting for some sort of epiphany while they kept sprouting from the roots every spring enticing me with their beautiful willow like foliage. The epiphany did arrive and like all epiphanies it came from an unexpected direction. It was in front of me. I began keeping track of some of the black cherries that were growing on my farm when I purchased the land. Over time these characteristics of fruit and lumber became more defined as I kept more seedlings on my farm as well as visiting a local sawmill that harvested trees in the area for wood. I began to see what would be desirable should one make ‘improvements’ for the species itself if it was under cultivation.  Eventually I was able to find and grow a few trees I was searching for both for lumber and the quality of fruit. Did I solve a horticultural puzzle? Kind of, but frankly the mystery only deepened.

There was still something missing. There wasn’t a huge ocean of diversity. Wild black cherry is remarkably uniform. It was a pond of diversity versus an ocean compared to other species yet there was some wiggle room available to find and create selections. It turns out that the Wild Black cherry is an odd ball plant far different from other Prunus.  It has many chromosomes which make it a stable tetraploid. A stable tetraploid shouldn’t exist or be fertile in any way. Nothing adds up to why this happened and even today scientists who have looked at it are baffled. It does not cross with anything as far as they know yet it self-propagates itself quite easily. It is widely distributed throughout North America and Mexico ala all naturelle. And it tends to be very uniform in fruit and species characteristics. There is only one named form of it that I have ever seen listed called ‘Asplenifolia’ which has long clean leaves. There is mention of large, fruited types in West Virginia. Every now and then someone will take out scion wood out of an older horticulturalist’s private home who had hybridized the Capuli with its northern cousins. Yet today these are still not available in seed or scion. This is the way of the black hole repositories with no intention of ever making it available to the public. Once they collect and keep, the story ends.

We may never know what the two trees were that created the stable tetraploid we know as Prunus serotina. Yet when you see both the chokecherry and pin cherry, you get the feeling they may have had something to do with it. They do share many characteristics, yet they have never been replicated on a scientific level. No one is lining up to do that anyways.

I have a wild chokecherry in my forest that is so different than all the rest. It is straight and tall growing upwards to 40 ft. amidst the black oaks and sugar maples. For a long time, I could not figure out what type of tree it really was. I started growing pin cherry at my farm and was surprised at the large trunk sizes I found in the wild and the ones I created at my farm done with careful pruning. This variation signals potential for selection and use in cultivation. Yet to employ this on a large scale through the selection process is very difficult. This is the same case for wild black cherry. Even if you did create fertile hybrids of it within chokecherry or pin cherry who would really care?  If you build it, they will not come. It’s a novelty you are creating and discovering which is more art than science.  My little art project cannot be practically applied because it is too far removed from modern agricultural food production. This is a common experience for many who do these breeding and collection of food plants.

Wild Black Cherry and Sweet Black Cherry

The cultivated sweet cherry we consume and is well known and grown in the state of Washington also has its wild counterparts. These can be both from naturalization here in North America and actual real life wild forms of it found throughout Asia and Central Europe. They tend to have teeny fruit. Once while at a fruit conference, an award was given along with a wooden bowl made from sweet cherry. It was a beautiful deep rich reddish black color. I was surprised. I did not know this tree could be cultivated for its wood. Inspired by this bowl, (an art project by the way) , I began a process of using seeds of wild forms in Asia and elsewhere and planting them at my farm. They too have potential in this same ‘field’ of interest.  This too could be part of the overall cherry production using the timber forms found in Denmark as well as wild forms here in North America.  Once again, the epiphany is in front of us. We need a symphony of epiphanies as a spur to action. I hear a cherry bowl. What do you hear?

‘Sweeta’ Wild Black Cherry fruit.

Wild Black Cherry Fruit Flavor

I made jam using ‘Sweeta’ Wild Black Cherry following a Sure-Gel recipe for cherry. There was no astringency, and the flavor was like a super concentrated form of black cherry. From this experience you could easily see its use for syrups and flavorings. It was an intense dark purple color almost black. I found it heavenly. The problem was collection or harvest. I had to cut one limb to gather the fruit for the jam. That is not sustainable obviously. Under cultivation this forest giant would create a challenge to keep the fruiting portion of the tree using shaking techniques to drop the fruit. It ripens over a long period of time and each raceme does not ripen all at once so there are unripe fruits next to ripe fruits so you have to let it go long in its ripening period. At the same time if you are investing in a fruiting tree, you want to harvest the logs at some point and fruit tree structure is normally not lumber quality structure. It is possible to create at least one saw log of eight feet prior to breaking up the crown into a more vase shaped open central leader system. This would make it possible to maintain the tree for fruiting without narrow crotch angles as well as having limbs which would be more productive for fruit. Treat it as a large sweet cherry tree in an orchard setting with a saw log attached. It is difficult to combine both wood and fruit together because they are usually the polar opposites of tree structure.

Wild Black Cherry Wood

It is interesting that a certain percentage of any hardwood tree species will produce strong apically dominant trees. It is just a natural tendency. From hackberry to coffee trees, you see these trees all the time and not just the fastigiate and pyramidal selections people find once in a while. For many years, I would drive by one wild black cherry tree down a slope near a major highway. This tree had a strong apical dominant leader with a strong pyramid shape with symmetrical branching.  It was probably not the best location because highway living even 50 feet away is not far enough away to incur the wrath of safety-first tree removal, death by car or salt damage. For a brief time, a few nurseries offered an Appalachian form of black cherry. These were super vigorous and said to have very good apical dominance from seed with minimal culls. How did they find these? Some of the largest trees not messed with by human hands were found in this region where the tree can grow to magnificent heights completely knot free. These parent trees made excellent fast-growing trees easily growing 3-4 ft. tall in one year from seed. This type of selection is the nirvana of tree discoveries. What is not good is that no one had the foresight to make additional future forest seed orchards.  If you build it, will someone come?  I think it is the thought that maybe it is not necessary, and this is why the no show in seed orchards.  Black cherry is all over. Why would you want to increase it even more? It really is an ignorant argument. At my farm I did begin a new selection process using new seedlings. One such tree is now 20 plus years old, and it too maintains its strong growth even while fruting.  This tree flew by the hybrid pears I am growing for wood production and became a leave-it-and-see- tree at my farm.

Someday people will visit and wonder, “What is this?” Is it a pear, a cherry or something in-between? The answer contributes to this enigma of Prunus serotina. It looks like nothing we know. It creates a mystery within a mystery of its existence and life on planet earth. And you thought it was just a cherry tree with too many chromosomes.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Cactus Town

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment
‘Elaine’

I saw it first on a walk with my daughter near a sidewalk. As we rounded the corner, a cardboard sign alerted us saying it was  “Free’. There it hung on a bamboo stake neatly tied by a small piece of string.  Below the sign a cactus sat waiting for a new home. Unearthed in a green plastic pot, the cactus winked at me with its possibilities as I walked by. Afterall, I did have a familiar face. I have grown cactus since I was a child. It was the first plant I had ever grown located directly above my underwear and sock drawer on a dresser top. Today this sidewalk cactus became the cast away plant that a human no longer needed as a flowering perennial in a landscape. It proved too much of a risk. It had big sharp thorns. It had imperceivable small thorns which are almost impossible to remove. The bright yellow waxy flowers were a joy to experience yet there was a cost to this plant as a part of the back yard. It had to go. Maybe it was a new dog or a child. Maybe it was a new stabbing while weeding which then precipitated anger AND remorse. Who knows?  Yet, it was also too painful to throw out like other plants. You have some good feelings for the cactus.  You are attached to it in some way. I know these feelings of all-things cacti. I too had a lot of cacti at my farm. They ARE cool and so easy to grow. You want the cactus to be adopted by someone that has this openness to it and loves its natural traits. Is love too strong a word? Not for cactus. It’s accommodating and will grow pretty much anywhere. You don’t throw it out. You share it with the world. That is also the way of the cactus. It reinforces the value we hold for conservation and dissemination.  Human introductions are the joy of cactus. Let’s move it. Cactus can heal and provide food. Even today it is uncertain where the exact range of certain species of cactus is because it was used so much by people over thousands of years. Never leave home without a cactus pad. It soothes burns, stings and cuts and then can be planted to produce a fruit which also has strong health benefits.

Ecos Cactus

As much as I wanted to, I did not pick up the cactus and take it to my farm.  I left it for someone who has not yet experienced its wonder and glory. You see, I am still grieving. I lost my collection. All except one. Here is how that went down in my cactus town.

When I first started growing cacti at my farm, I did not have any living germplasm to draw on. I remember seeing a giant field of Prickly pear cactus on a biology field trip when I was a student at Western Michigan University. It was the largest patch of densely packed pads I had ever seen in Michigan then or now. It was easily a solid acre of cacti growing out of pure sand. Since starting my farm, I have been a big fan of seed production of everything. Cactus is easy to grow from cuttings, but I really was on the hunt for seeds. It turned out there are huge growers of cactus in the U.S., and some have the most wonderful seed lists I had ever seen of any genera. I started by purchasing seed from J.L. Hudson Seeds of different mixtures they offered. I grew them on a hill near a boulder I meticulously dug out of the soil in one of my planting beds. The plants began fruiting in three years. Some individuals within that seed mixture were not fully hardy into zone 5. I knew that when I purchased the seed, but it was enough to create my first from seed cactus. It was the edible fruit I was most interested in. I knew that cactus fruit called tuna could be used to make jelly and is said to have great health benefits like aloe vera.

‘Ecos’ cactus on the left and Plains Prickly Pear on the right.

Immediately I gave a pad of one of those seedlings to my mom who planted it next to the back door of her home at the time. There the cactus grew for the next 30 years.  My mom took care of my indoor cactus collection when I was going to college for many years. It made her laugh when I handed her the pad. She liked cactus too.

At the rate I was going, Cactus town was in a cycle of slow growth at my farm. It did have a low crime rate. There was no disease. Many species and subspecies of cactus especially the local prickly pear cactus were missing. I began purchasing plants from a few nurseries as well as eBay.  eBay came through in many ways because cactus pads are easy to ship, and you find them all over the country including the thornless-glochid free Nopal. Many people like the cactus in their landscape and sell pads off their collections in cultivation. It is easy and safe to do especially if you don’t have soil attached. I tried pretty much everything under the sun. I was trying to build up enough of a collection where I could produce seeds and grow them from seeds in my polyhouses.  I began using some of the prairie species from Illinois. Here in Michigan, several selections were given to me from employees who had them in their yard or knew of someone who had wild cactus on their land in some capacity. Finally, between eBay, seeds from collections and wild Michigan cactus, I had enough diversity to produce cactus from seeds. Cactus town was rapidly growing and the rows of them were akin to cactus suburbia. They grew well in southwestern Michigan even with minus 20 F in the winter occurring several times.

Plains Prickly Pear
Rafine Prickly Pear

To grow cactus from seeds is easy. You whizz the fruit in a blender and then strain out the seeds. The seeds are incredibly hard, and the blades of the blender do not grind up the seeds. We would sometimes run it in reverse to prevent damage on some seeds we did this way.  Be prepared for massive amounts of clear gel which is very thick. The whole blender mix would turn to a clear slime with only a handful of fruit.  After the seeds are washed thoroughly through a screen, we would put them directly in a flat of a 50-50 mixture of Canadian peat moss and sand. The flats were heavy after they were watered. The seeds were tamped in just under the surface of the soil. It took a couple of winter cycles outdoors in an unheated polyhouse before they sprouted fully.  The seeds I was most excited about were species of cactus found in cultivation. I was potentially hoping to find hybrids with good fruit production and with unique low or no thorn selections and large succulent pads for eating.  During this time, I found several specialty cactus companies with available seeds with distinct origins like the prairies of Alberta, Canada or the coastline of New Jersey. This combination quickly improved my cactus town in terms of diversity. What I wanted most was full seed production of cactus. This was now possible because the fruiting was complete and some hybrids began to show up in the progeny as well. Now we have cute little baby cactus.  When people who propagated for me began planting the cactus flats, they always remarked how cute the little cactus are.  They were very cute. Maybe not baby hippopotamus cute, but close in the world of plants.

Cute Plains Prickly Pear

I was not aware of a looming problem coming. At the time we were just doing polyhouse production of cactus and nothing else. This allowed the dry winter months to put the cactus plants into dormancy very efficiently. A dry winter cactus plant is critical if it’s going to survive long. The pads are shriveled and lose a large portion of their water.  As time went on, winters were becoming warmer with much more humidity in the soil and air. There was also less snow and little frost into the ground. This is the perfect conditions for cacti in winter and now it was in short supply. My stock plants outside suffered from a physiological disease called ring spot. Pads were dropping off quickly and soon I lost my ability to produce seeds. Even the plants in the polyhouses were affected because the cold weather was not dry. This was the beginning of the end of my cactus town. One by one through seven different plantings all in different locations died out completely.

There was one bright spot. The cactus pad I gave my mother survived. On one of the last days of closing the family farm, I took a pad near the house and moved it to my farm. Now it was the lone survivor and there it thrived unnoticed by me until I closed my nursery in 2021. Now cactus town had a spokesperson of the glory years and the great times we had together. I named it ‘Elaine’ after my mom. Today it sits under a few holly trees along a road. It beautiful clear yellow flowers take center stage in the summer but few fruit are produced in the fall. The few that are produced are a light green color with no seeds inside. It has no thorns and very few glochids. It looks a bit like a succulent of unknown origin.  It has foot long, crispy looking pads that even the deer with take a bite out once in a while. It reminds me of my mom and our beautiful family farm.

Every now and then I get a hankering for increasing my cactus collection again. It’s always the yellow flowers in mid-summer that I see through the grass. I take notice of the colonies along the highway not far from my home. For a while, one prominent thornless planting caught my attention every time I approached the stop sign near it. It was in front of a home and took up a 50 foot long bed. The next year it disappeared when the house was sold. This is the way of human and cactus interaction. Not everyone is a fan. Just last year someone discovered a prickly pear in the upper Peninsula of Michigan. Over the years, a few people have told me about cactus sightings in the upper Peninsula of Michigan. However, no one likes to share their locations because it falls into two equally destructive categories. One is the ‘not very bright idea’ when people want to destroy the colony because it does not belong and is considered not native. Number two is also a ‘not very bright idea’ but it has ‘extremely rare and desirable’ stuck to it. Here you do nothing and leave it alone. Either way it is the end of the colony.  I tell them not to tell me. I don’t want to know. It’s a secret. If you really want biological diversity to continue, you must move it. It shouldn’t be held as a secret by those in the exclusive club of botanists with hands-off attitudes.  It’s the cactus way to move. It can heal. It can save. It can provide nutrition. The cacti bring life to places where very few things grow. It’s a leader. Cactus lead and people follow their way to cactus town. Eventually we all meet in the middle thorn free and rich in life. That is cactus town and why everyone wants to live there.

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

‘Elaine’
Brittle Prickly Pear Alberta Canada Strain from Seed
Elaine serving coffee to her mom and my uncle.
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Wildlife Camera 2024 Images

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment
Deer-Moth
2022 image: Eating the Remaining American Cranberrybush Fruit from the variety ‘Movin to Montana’

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Peach Nirvana: Peaches from Pits

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Biologicalenrichment

The very first peach I had ever seen on a tree was from a backyard gardener next to my family home in Saginaw, Michigan. Peaches were not common there because of the late frosts and cold winters. My neighbor was using the Ruth Stoudt method of gardening with six inches of thick straw mulch on the surface of the soil. Looking back at that time in the early sixties, he was the first organic gardener that I knew.  He was a builder and bricklayer by trade. He said he needed this food because he thought most food was deficient in flavor and nutrition. One of his peach pits he threw out sprouted under the mulch and he let it grow into a tree. It was filled with delicious peaches. I remember thinking how spectacular this was and if it could be replicated in some way. To me it seemed like a miracle. There it grew by the brick grill untended surrounded by straw. This location may have increased the late flowering due to the thermal mass of the grill and the dense thick straw. Years passed and finally I ended up in a large peach orchard in southwestern Michigan during a fruit growers convention. In this modern orchard system, there were large herbicide strips under the trees making the ground completely devoid of any vegetation. There were no grills or straw mulch.  Peach trees are short lived trees I was told. After 20 years you need new trees. This orchard was fading with a lot of missing trees. It is a huge expense to replace the whole system. Not long afterwards I met a peach breeder who had several selections grown throughout the world. He filled me in on the peach agri-business and the large landowners who own thousands of acres of peaches in the southeastern U.S. . There they frequently sweat it out every spring over cold nights dropping below 32 F when the trees are in full flower. It was a brutal financial reality tough on human and peach physiology.

At this time, it became apparent to me that you could pretty much grow any peach in any manner you wish. No one would stop you because the thin line of success is so well defined in commercial peach culture. Anything you do outside of this is gambling with mother and human nature. My idea of peaches from pits is kind of laughable. It is not considered a serious idea and is not the normal peach culture. To make the odds in your favor you need to follow only the tried-and-true methods. You are free to do any sort of peach growing gymnastics. The house in this case is the standard fruit industry and its love of uniformity and creating a similar ‘product’ over and over again. Small furry peaches all grown from pits is not on the menu. But certainly you are free to do it.

Let’s suppose you want to grow peaches for eating directly from pits. Maybe in the process it is not needed to graft and you find a new culinary nirvana. The reality is you are now growing something that has never been cultivated. It is not a variety that is recognized. In fact, it is not a variety at all.  It is Prunus persica but it is not be thought of as a peach selection. It would be a peach relative or a peach species and viewed mostly as worthless seedling peaches by almost all modern horticulturists. It would create confusion as this does not equate to peaches to the rest of the known world of peaches.

This is what I wanted to experience. I wanted peach nirvana but without the hoopla. I don’t want patented. I don’t want a new variety. I want to share my pits not scions. I felt the pit idea was sound. I viewed it the same way as growing a red oak from an acorn. Having a tree on its own roots, easily propagated and easily replicated immune to insects and disease is a good goal. One mature tree could easily produce 10 acres of peach trees with its progeny in just one year. A small orchard could produce an industry wide effect in a given region easily. You could throw out the nurseries in the process and lower the cost to a few cents per tree.

I did find a small group of enthusiasts with peaches from pits. Many of them seemed like they down played their seed sources as experimental or rootstock plants. They had what is called in advertising as ‘weasel’ statements in their descriptions saying it is only for the hobbyist and cannot be trusted due to the variation from seed. The first one I grew from pits back in the nineties was from the Seed Savers Exchange where there was an Iowa white peach available from a member. He said he found it in a ditch. At the turn of the century this selection was done both from pits and grafted trees all from Iowa. Iowa would be Mars to any other peach tree grown in the United States so quite an adaptation in that region. From there I met a botanist who obtained what he thought was the original Spanish peaches in Texas self-replicating themselves from pits in the wild. A lot of times botanists would not pay attention to human introduced plants as if it was some sort of curse or disease. Remember they would say, it is not native. Thank you Sherlock. I was happy he thought it was of value. Eventually a few people sent me heirloom peaches which were pit grown with stories included. Michigan, Wisconsin and a few from locations where peaches were self-replicated by seeds in mountainous regions of the world were added to my plantings. I had an intern working for me who was an assistant for the state experiment station scientists that do fruit tree and peach research. I wondered if they would like to replicate my plantings there. The note came back as ‘this is not what we do here.’ A quick glance at their research projects includes hundreds of thousands of dollars devoted to evaluation of pesticides for peaches supported by the companies that manufacture them and the state of Michigan. Peaches from pits are not on their radar. Meanwhile, I began to create very small plantings at my farm from several heirloom peaches including the Latvian purple peach and the Mackinaw peach.

Latvian Purple Peach-Very uniform population.

As time went on and they began to fruit, I grew very fond of these seedlings because they were very immune to insects and disease. That was a surprise because untended peach trees that I knew in peoples yards were always riddled with insects and large brown splotches of fungal disease. Frankly, I think it was the fuzz. Praise the fuzz. You need thick fuzz which ironically has been selected to be minimal on peaches today. They could be grown organically AND from pits. The quality was very good. Did I find nirvana? I think so. Yes. Every time a new fruit ripened for the first time on a tree, I yelled out in great joy, “Are you kidding me?” as I tasted them. How is this so good?  The peach ripening on the tree is the only way. The small variation is less of concern.Equally, there is less selection pressure by humans for the desired traits of modern peaches which are highly refined. The peaches from pits flavor was let go in the process in finding a stable from seed tree with good fruit set. This highlights a common research and development goal for all those who have a small planting of fruit trees. I need a larger grow out to test, refine and prove my selections and increase the pit production. Ten acres would be ideal. Maybe if I pony up at the table with the chemical companies, I can chip away at those magnificent funds they compete for from the state of Michigan.  Even if my selections were rooted or grafted to put into an orchard, a true from pit population is stable enough to do it commercially.

Wild Texas Peach-Very uniform population of peaches that ripen in October.

Like all tree crops, it will be the seeds of the peach that will propel us forward to a more successful peach culture including the removal of the toxic chemicals used to cultivate peaches today. It will require a living collection to capture the changes going on in the environment to store that information for the next generation of peaches. If we arrest that evolutionary process, then we slow down the progress of peaches within our collective cultures across the globe.  If we keep using the older varieties as well as selections from these older varieties, then it will weaken the connection between human and peach. The peach has to ‘collect this knowledge’ or genetic information one year at a time and then act on this new knowledge in the form of a seedling tree. The peach is a student of the climate. Clonal selection can only hold them in place. We should be swimming in varieties outside of the commercial world as well. Currently, we are not.

The peach is ultimately saying, let me go brothers and sisters. Throw my pits out into the rough and tumble real world. I can take it. Just give me a chance. You don’t have to put me in a row. A human is searching for nirvana in all things peachy. The peach can help with that. All living plants bring benefits to the human race. The peach has a clear voice we can all hear and understand.

Mackinaw Peach: Named after the Seinfeld episode. From northern heirloom selections.

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

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Regeneration of the Land

Posted on December 29, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Regeneration is a slow but sure process. Like this eastern box turtle found at my farm, once the environment becomes conducive, diversity arrives in ever increasing numbers.

USING THE LAWS OF NATURE FOR MAKING DIVERSITY SPONTANEOUS

My 13-acre nursery was a very tiny island amidst the retail oceans of the plant world. I wanted to expand it to larger proportions but that was not possible. I always remembered the farm my family owned that had over 400 acres of Christmas trees. To me that was the perfect size. There you could grow Christmas trees in great abundance and sell wholesale to land far away from Michigan where evergreens were not grown.  I loved the openness of that land. It had huge diversity of plants and animals. I loved the swamps. The ditches created through the farm were teeming with life. There was always American Bitterns within them feeding and hiding in their stealth pose. They waited until the last minute to fly away when you drove by them with the tractor in the morning. You always hoped they wouldn’t ‘drop a load’ on you in their startled state of mind as they flew over. Fortunately I escaped the drop bombs. My nursery property was way different. It was hilly, rolling land frequented by bobwhite and meadowlarks. It was created from a field just like my families Christmas tree farm, but it was compact with an intensive garden design. It became a springboard for hobbyists and edible landscapers wanting something new to grow and eat. This put me in a specialty place in the mail-order market. As cool as it was, it had little practical application in terms of large-scale agriculture at the time.  People appreciated my quest for all things edible. My customers and colleagues did not know the backstory of my farm and the issues I faced while running it, but this did not matter.  My nursery specializes in a market where plants are generally plentiful and inexpensive. Yet at times I felt I was getting bombed from the American Bitterns of the world which comprised everything from regulatory, theft, low wholesale prices, state run nurseries, trespassers, over production, employees with mental health issues not to mention the U.S.D.A. But this too passed.

It’s funny in many ways because I was so small in comparison to everything else around me. I thought my farm was not diverse enough and I needed to expand. Once my plant inspector said I was very famous now and people in the state government wanted to know what I was growing. It was an odd request because everything I grew was already on line with my website plus they came twice a year to do the inspections. They must of thought I had a secret plant operation going on. I was confused. Certainly there wasn’t fortune tied to this fame. It appears TINY has the same issues as CONGLOMO but without the resources to deal with the problems. But lucky for me the plant diversity sprang forth in greater amounts as time went on in a relatively effortless manner. Nothing slowed it down or stopped it. Everything from edible acorns to yams, I found a beautiful world full of delicious foods filled with fruits, nuts, vegetables and grains. This continued uninterrupted no matter what was happening to my small business. Finding and creating plant diversity is incredibly easy, frictionless, successful and a joy to do for me.  In many ways, like music and creativity, it flows outward as if the plants were my form of art. Everything else was chiseled out of Quickbooks cold and calculated in reports and forms of endless numbers.

Eastern box turtle near my Callery pear-Asian pear-European pear hybrid seedling plantings. This area is now mostly devoid of grasses and is filled with seedling pears, American basswood, River grape, hackberry, black walnuts, multiflora rose, American cranberrybush and Amur honeysuckle to name a few. This area is frequented by cedar waxwings, red and gray squirrels.

It was this same diversity that was also noticed by the wildlife at my farm from the biggest to the smallest. Even the new plant life that arrived from outside my farm responded to this greater diversity I was adding. Keep in mind, my farm was a pasture harvested for hay before it was let go a decade before I purchased it. There were no woody plants in the pasture except a few black cherry, black oak and ash.  I kept witnessing greater amounts of wildlife from box turtles to bobcats, all of which benefited directly from this diversity. Even woodland flowers appeared. I did nothing. American beeches were seeding in along with American basswood. I couldn’t for the life of me establish American beech. I did nothing to remove the so-called invasive species or weed plants. You could clearly see their benefits. As the shade increased, the pasture grasses decreased. A couple of years ago, I was pruning my persimmon trees. Underneath one of the trees was a pile of Amur honeysuckle fruit neatly stacked. The fruit was meticulously cleaned of its seeds. About two weeks later, I visited, and the fruit was consumed by something else. It was this combination of seedlings growing from my mature trees as well as plants outside of my farm that created this tapestry of amazing diversity within a neatly organized structure.

Spring Beauty seeded in under the hybrid chestnut canopy and multiflora rose.

It was from this vantage point that I began using wildlife cameras to capture this beauty. This allowed me to see a wider range of animals including birds of prey and my neighbor’s cats with the coyotes close by. This is the real world of integrated plants and animals all thriving and surviving on a tree farm wedged in by grape farms and homes where people live their lives. People, plants and animals visit. Some stay. Some are invited. Some are not. There is no department head to ask permission to exist on my farm. It just happens and so does the ecological integration that follows. Nature makes no mistakes.

 Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Peaches From Pits

Posted on December 27, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

One of my local customers told me about a peach in his front yard that had a lot of fruit on that he did not want. It was horrible tasting he said and filled with worms. Perfect. I was very interested. When I got there, most of the crop had fallen to the ground where they sat fermenting. This was a peach he purchased from a large mail order company. It was a seedling peach of some kind and he was unaware of the species or variety. It had semi-double white flowers. I picked up the gooey mess on the ground trying to avoid the yellow jackets. Jackpot. In my mind, I was in business with the world’s peaches.

I brought them back to my farm where I cleaned them and began the dormancy procedure. The barn was filled with a great fruity aroma that day far more pleasant than the pile of rotted fruit let on.With peach pits, it is a good idea to let them dry down a little on screens before putting them into a lightly damp peat moss mixture. It is best to store them at room temperature until December before refrigerating them from 34F to 39F for 60-90 days. The warm period continues the growth of the embryo which allows the seed to mature. Sometimes a portion of the peach pits take two years to sprout. Part of this is due to the incredibly hard pit and tight suture and the other is the immaturity of the embryo. To over come this, we use to put them on a bench grinder with a coarse grit wheel to remove a portion of the suture on one side. We would hold the pits with Vise-grips as we sanded away one by one. That was my ‘good idea’. The pressure to pop that pit must be immense. In the evolution department the ‘good idea’ of peach pit survival tactics is to spread out the years of establishment and go dormant for long periods of time if the conditions are not conducive for growth and reproduction. This is exactly how and why peaches are spread out in the wild in the southwestern U.S. and how they were moved by humans throughout time. Peaches are loved everywhere and the pits were pitched by people on the move. There are peaches in Germany moved by the Romans. There are peaches in the United States tended by Native Americans moved by the Spaniards. Peaches get around. And to think it all started in China.

My plants in my polyhouse were very vigorous and twiggy. They began flowering in two years from seed. Obviously deep within its constitution was the precocious double red flowers. Despite being a lone tree in the front of an old farm house far from any peach tree, this tree had a story to tell of its past. The image above shows the surprise. The trees produced small, white and coarse fleshed mis-shapened peaches. They ran in size from 1-2 inches and looked like miniature furry tennis balls. They were pleasant to eat but they were not familiar in terms of their overall peachiness. They were the peaches with minimal peach flavor and maximum floral characteristics. It was like eating the seedless green grapes in the grocery store. This peach was also selected by humans who loved the flowers and did not matter what the fruit was. Jackpot. The value of the plant is its ability to comfort humans. The flowers bring happiness. This is a great goal. It is food for the mind. Could it be possible to create a forest of peach trees where you could just walk around and marvel at the glorious flowers in the spring while imbibing the essence of peach? Absolutely. Why aren’t we doing that? Whoa. Not too fast there agri-buddy. That peach pit needs more grinding on the wheel of human intellect and creativity before it sprouts.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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Diversity Discovered: The Wild Goose Plum

Posted on December 21, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
“Wild Goose” plum variety of Prunus hortulana grafted onto American Plum rootstock

North America is filled with wild plums.There is no shortage nor threat to the wild plum. They can be increased in number very easily. There are seeds available from many seed companies and individuals who love to find them as if they were a secret treasure. Each region has its preferences. You will see the seedlings grown in both the wholesale and retail nursery trade. As far as cultivation goes, there are no indigenous North American wild plums in cultivation for fruit production in orchard settings. They are in the conservation industries ‘to do’ list but no one has 40 acres of them for people to pick and use in some way. There was a fruit farmer who was a customer of mine from northern Minnesota who was using my beach plums for a U-pick operation. He put florescent tagging tape on the plants to let people know those were the shrubs with ripe fruit ready to be picked. He was the only farmer I knew in the history of my farm where he took seedling plums into cultivation directly to the public in an orchard. He lived in a region known for its jam makers so there was a demand for wild fruit that made this retail loop possible. People were also willing to pay for that convenience rather than tough it out in wild while on the look out for bears, ticks and bald faced hornets. Not to mention trespassing on private lands or violating some sort of state or federal law that prohibits fruit collection finding the best spots is a challenge. Today road side fruits are not in the most pristine environments where herbicide use is the wild plums greatest enemy. Even if they miss the foliage, the plants roots and stems absorb a portion of the herbicide damaging the plant. In my county the green protoplasmic removal companies get huge contracts to spray things that appear to be bad. I see the carnage because I’m one of those people looking for wild plums in the late summer.

Seedling of Prunus hortulana Wild Goose Plum.

Not every plum species is available in commerce. There are gaps. Part of this due to the isolated nature of the plums in areas of the country that has no collectors. Few people are aware of the wild plums anymore. One of these species was the Wild Goose plum. The species is a mixture of midwestern and southern strains spread out over several states where they exist only in fence rows, abandoned rail lines and other forgotten unmanaged places. I could not find a source of the seeds. One of the scientists who had a part in the plum group of the North American Fruit Explorers sent me scionwood of what he said was the original ‘wild goose’ plum. I did not know there was an original and soon I had the scionwood. I was hoping for the seeds, but he insisted I did not want that. He said the seeds were not reliable. He was a fruit researcher and in that universe everything is cloned. The other plants are worthless seedlings. At my farm we grafted the scions onto the American plum roots as seen above. The trees did very well and I moved them to my outback planting in one of the most exposed hillsides to wind and sun. There the top soil was thin. The trees flourished yet there was no fruit production. Every now and then over the course of a decade I would check the trees and see nothing. One year in late July, I noticed crows in that area landing underneath the trees. That caught my attention. I thought something had died there. I went over and soon found seven pits each carved out and cleaned of the fruit by the crows. Thank you crows. I did not get a chance to taste the fruit, but it looked delicious. The crows said it was good. I grew the trees from these pits and planted them right next to the grafted trees. As they began filling out and flowering the grafted Wild Goose began fruiting in much greater quantity. I had created a fruitful population while increasing the fruit set of the grafted Wild Goose plum. Wild Goose was not the most productive plum tree but it was delicious and juicy. No wonder people cultivated this variety prior to the cultivated plums we eat today. Now I had a group of its siblings and each tree began fruiting in great abundance. This was the population I was searching for with each plant contributing to the population.

Prunus hortulana variety Wild Goose. The grafted form of the Wild Goose Plum variety.

It was from this vantage point, I began to see an outpouring of diversity like nothing I had seen before. It reminded me of my hybrid oaks at my farm. The road was getting wider with each generation with greater possibilities to select from as well as finding the most vigorous trees with clean foliage. It also created new plants that could potentially be used as a means for cultivar development as a wild plum. The issue was what do people like in a plum? The answer to that leads straight to the supermarket of Japanese plums in large sizes and colors with apriums and plumcots in tow. This was a land very different than wild plums. If that was the market my little wild plums would go up against, it’s the end of the world as we know it. It is just too radically different in flavor, texture and size. But certainly the flavor profiles allow for processing and development as a fruit crop as it exists in the wild however we define that as a whole. When I started looking into this further, I soon found out that the fruit industry has no clue nor cares about wild plums other than rootstocks. Even as a rootstock, those are slowly being phased out. If you say, lets grow it from seed and create a diverse mixture of flavors, then most fruit farmers walk away. This species is not allowed to be grown in California, Oregon, Arizona and Washington. The regulations are based on what it ‘could’ contain not on what is actually found. No science is involved. So if a virus infects something, then the best solution is to ban it entirely. But so far, the seeds are allowed and you could potentially grow it if you lived in those states from seed.

Chickasaw Plum ‘Mini-Chee’ variety Prunus angusitfolia

It is a very common experience of growing plants from seeds that every plant creates its own diversity by using its seedlings to build on its existing characteristics. It expands its ecological adaptibility within its evolutionary framework. That is what I wanted to find for the wild goose plum. In the process, I discovered the heirloom fruit used by early Americans and a flavor not found today in the supermarket of plums. In my plantings, I had several types of plums producing near the wild goose including beach, chickasaw and an American x beach plum called Dunbars plum. The normal overlap of flowering in each of these does not necessarily equate to successful pollenation. It could be one is flowering while the others are long gone. There is little or no overlap. This creates an illusion you know what is going on. . It is the population that is created as the result of this diversity. It could even be self pollenated. This is the surprise and joy of growing a plum from seed. I would try it if you have doubts.

The crow knows.

Kenneth Asmus

Wild Goose Plum-Variety ‘Wild Goose’
Morning Sun Wild Goose Plum
Morning Sun Wild Goose Plum

WILD GOOSE PLUM SEEDS

in stock periodically after harvest in October.

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Canopy Closure: A Hickory Tree Makes That Happen

Posted on December 14, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

The first trees I planted outside of my nursery into the pasture were hickories. It was in the early 80’s that I acquired the property and began my nursery. The snap shot above tells the story. At that time, people shunned the hickory genus only because it was hard to establish due to the tap root. This led to a high failure rate when transplanting. Finally, with the advent of tubex tree shelter, the hickory tree was very easy to grow in my pasture. The pink tubes gave a sterile hospital vibe to the land. The tree tubes allowed for the slow regrowth of the tap root after cutting it off while digging the tree while at the same time protected the small emerging leaves in that first critical year. The warm, moisture and carbon dioxide rich environment in the tubes speeds the growth of the hickory and prevents dessication. I did not know this at the time, but the foliage of shellbark hickory has a wonderful nutmeg smell to it in the spring. It is this aroma that seemed to attract deer to the plants which would then munch on the leaves from the newly emerged sprouts. Eventually the trees grow past past the salad bar browse line. In the area shown above, the wind off the treeless hillsides was brutal making everything drought prone. The tubex shelter eliminated that problem. I was very fond of the Shellbark hickory, Cara laciniosa and most of my plantings have this species interwoven with its hybrids and other hickories. It was also one of the easier hickories to grow from a seedling. The tubes you see in the front row are Long Handled Almond or Prunus pendunculata. The others are all hickory.

Prunus penduculata or Long stalked almond is an oil bearing desert shrub hardy into Mongolia and Northern China. It has never fruited for me except once I did harvest a couple of seeds from the plants which are more like a large cherry pit. It is a distant relative of the almond we eat today. My plants came from the late Clayton Berg of Montana. Today these plants exist in the shade of the shellbark hickories.
Shellbark Hickory- Carya laciniosa

The overall purpose of my hickory obsession was to create a seed repository which would allow me to collect the nuts in a timely fashion and use them for nursery stock. It did work. But it was much cheaper to buy the nuts from other growers who also had a hickory nut obsession. There was few wild trees to collect from in southwestern Michigan. I did find three trees. It took exact timing to drop the nuts to prevent the squirrels from hauling them off. When a shellbark hickory nut falls from a tree, the speed of travel to the top of a human head can be significant. It is a large nut with a hard shell. With or without the outer husk, it is quite a knock on the noggin. One Dodge truck I was using by putting a ladder in the bed under the tree suffered serious dents in the hood as the nuts came raining down. I decided to go to a hard hat after that realizing my whole scenario of a ladder in a truck bed collection method was dubious to begin with. Should I fall in the process of my love of all things hickory, it would leave others wondering of my mental state. It certainly would make a good story. The police might treat it like a crime scene. Why the ladder in the pick up truck? Why the nuts? Who in their right mind would do this?

Eventually I went to shaking the nuts by climbing the tree or using pole pruners. When the nuts hit the ground it is like drums from a distant land all beating the praises of hickory. Collecting nuts off the ground allowed me time to understand and ponder the genus in terms of cultivating it and potentially finding varieties in my plantings. I did notice that it was extremely rare to find other species of hickories throughout the world. I did not have the luxury of travel to places where I could collect or reach out to other countries. It turns out North America is rich in hickory so I did not have to look far. I began to read more about the genus in the great manuals of Charles Sprague Sargent, Manual of the Trees of North America, pages 176 – 200. Here hickories were plentiful and rich in history with great diversity of subspecies. I began to explore growing them at my farm including the black, sand and nutmeg hickory, lecont hican and many other natural hybrids. Despite their southern origins, they grew very well in Michigan. I think many of these species had larger ranges at one time and show remarkable hardiness far greater than in their native ranges suggest.

Shellbark Hickory Carya laciniosa

As my shellbarks began to flourish and fruit, I would plant others of their kin near them and begin the process of pruning and maintaining the trees. The shellbark self seeded into other areas of my farm while creating another population randomly spaced. One area in particular was my ailing hybrid chestnut planting which was getting a hickory make over. I let them go. Now I had a self sustaining population of them filling in where other trees failed. It was the perfect forestry scenario of letting my so called ‘improved’ selections create more improved selections of all types. The hickories were expanding on my farm and the now the dominant species is hickory. I did not plan this. I did nothing. I saw those fox and gray squirrels run by very fast when I went out to collect. They created the hickory forest of which I started by using good seed trees. I gave up live trapping and moving them out of my farm. I found ways around them and their natural tendencies. Of course, they still got a few nuts but their value can never be underestimated. I often wondered if whole landscapes could be planted like this using the natural tendencies of squirrels to create forests. It seems very easy to do. You would plant the seed trees and leave. It would only take 40 years.

There are many different crosses of hickory that you can grow from seed. Some of the best I found were natural crosses of the shagbark hickory of which this is one.

One such hickory hybrid is the lecont hican. It is a water hickory and pecan hybrid cross. Carya aquatica x illinoensis. It has an amazing speed of growth far greater than any other hickory I have grown. You could easily grow a four foot tall tree in one year in a small pot. For a hickory tree, that would be considered a miracle of science. Yet, a fast growing hickory tree was not jumping off my shelf in the retail nursery trade. I grew this plant off and on for twenty years. As much as I loved it, my ethusiasm did not equate with sales. It was a lone tree on the dusty plains filled with other nice ideas of retail sales. Few wanted it. The great thing about was its hardiness as well as its growth rate. To this day, I have not idea from the trees I have established what the nut production is like. It was completely hardy to at least minus 20F which was kind of shocking to me since I was getting the seed from Louisiana. I currently have mature trees of it at my farm. They maintain strong growth with a central leader and no narrow crotch angles like the pecan has. The population is very uniform when growing them from seed. Without a doubt faster growing selections could be made for a form of hickory lumber that could be developed making sizable trees in half the time of other species we currently harvest. Planting was done in my polyhouses using 10 inch deep bottomless containers with straight sides. The trees take a year off after transplanting but then grow quickly again. It is easily limbed upwards to create a straight and knot free lumber just like black walnut. This particular selection of hickory was harvested at one time and sold as Bitter pecan. Bitter pecan is lecont hickan and is a naturally occuring cross fround in the south where wild pecans and water hickories grow. No one really knows this selection much but I did find out that each year I purchased the seeds, they were different in size and shape. This is normal in hybrid populations. Some had smoother shells and others were rough like the water hickory. One thing they had in common was the tannic tasting nut.There was no way you could eat it. It was very similar to bitternut. It takes several minutes for the intense dryness of the Sahara desert in your mouth to disappear. It is very oily and could be used as an oil crop. This particular hickory highlights a situation that relates to other tree crops. Even if you develop something very positive and useful for the future of agroforestry and other forms of forestry, it may never see the light of day in terms of practical applications. It highlights the slow moving ideas in conservation and agriculture where everything takes too long to work out the details. It would only take a hundred acres of this cross and you would begin to see miracles of science take place. In some ways it is like creating a solution without a problem. The problem is not clearly defined or doesn’t exist. Without a problem, no action is taken. There is no money or energy to give it the lift it needs in terms of practical applications. Meanwhile back at the farm when I round the corner in my truck, I give them a mental high five and think of all things hickory.

A note on Canopy Closure: Canopy closure is used today for soybeans or other annual crops. For corn and soybeans a certain density of plants per acre plays a role in achieving this state where the ground is shaded by the leaves of the plants. If you were to create a canopy of pure shellbark hickories and you want it solid hickory and nothing else then the normal 40 by 40 ft. spacing used for pecans is too tight but it would create canopy closure must faster. The real issue is that shellbark hickory is a much wider tree with lower limbs that spread outwards. It has a broad spreading open canopy. I was fortunate to visit a shellbark hickory tree in a yard that a ninety year old farmer had planted when he was 16 years old. He dug it from a nearby swamp. The tree was huge and was dropping nuts on his house making for quite a racket in the fall. At night it interrupted sleep, so they did some pruning to directionally train the limbs. Judging by this tree and others I have seen in peoples yards, a spacing of 80 x 80 would be ideal. If I was developing it within mixed plantings, I would go to 100 feet apart. If you were planning on doing the squirrel thing like I mentioned above, I would plant 7 trees per acre.

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