Explorations of Diversity: The Sloe Plum is Not That Slow

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Within the first decade of my tree farm  I planted many wild seedling fruits on my farm. Some of these are the wild crop relatives of sour cherry, sweet cherry, plums and apricots as well as species that are wild collected and not in commercial agriculture. I grew everything from seed. I knew that the genus Prunus had many untapped species that could be used for food and drink. I was particularly interested in the jelly, jam and syrup fruits. These would be fruits that would require cooking with sugar or processing in some way to be edible. I knew from my readings that many had potential health benefits. I thought of them as a treasure chest of nutrition that could be spread on a piece of toast. One of these plants was the sloe plum, Prunus spinosa. It was not available in the nursery trade. I began growing a selection from seed called ‘Plena’. ‘Plena’ was a clone known for its heavy flower production. Sloe plum was not found in North America as a wild plant. The arboretum seeds that I received were a welcome surprise from a friend here in the states who sent them to me. I originally produced about 25 plants and planted them on a hill that was sand with two inches of topsoil. There in two foot tall Tubex tree shelters, the sloe plums made their debut in North America. After several years, small flowers were born in clusters followed by a few fruit. This continued for another 10-15 years. By then I began to see larger clusters of bright blue fruit and the spur type sharp thorns. The thorns are a common characteristic of the plant and gives it its second common name:  Blackthorn. It was one durable little shrub. Picking fruit one by one is a challenge without getting stabbed. It requires very thick gloves and a methodical movement within the thicket to prevent blood shed. It’s a dance done with canvas carharts and rubber gloves. Be nimble my friends.

I began creating new plantings on my farm with the seedlings I was growing. To be honest, few people had knowledge or even knew what this plant was. I began asking others if they had any personal experience. One person told me ‘It was invasive’ and another sent me a fruit recipe which included vodka. Another person shared with me how to make a shillelagh with the canes of the plants. When I investigated the claims of invasiveness, it was turned out to be completely false. It was based on its habit of growth. Sloe plums are stoloniferous and like many plants that have a running root system away from the central plant, this tendency is a strength not a weakness.  You can use the plant’s root cuttings to propagate it and distribute it further. As an orchard plant, you can use it for creating a fruit planting of the best selections bypassing grafting. Grafting is very short lived compared to in-ground clonal root systems which can go on essentially forever constantly regenerating itself. That’s a big plus especially for sloe plum because the fruiting canes fade with time after a decade or two and need new sprouts from the roots to replace the older parts of the plant.

At one point, someone said I had the only planting in North America, and it was of great value in terms of its use for flavoring. I was very happy of the results of the plants. But I was still in this la-la land of no disease or insects when you first grow a new species. Unfortunately, a disease called black knot showed up. This is a very common wind-blown fungus which infects the branches. It is a disease which completely destroys the plants ability to transmit food and water to the leaves. It encases the stems and the plant eventually dies. My planting which had now stoloniferously spread to an area 20 feet away in all directions from the original plants retreated dramatically. I lost over 90 percent of my plants. There was little left except for the burnt looking scab infested knots on the branches. Another planting I had done about a decade later did much better, only loosing 50 percent of the plants.  The black knot fungus is a great equalizer and removed the weak plants in the process.

Another not mentioned characteristic was the mouth numbing flavor which makes it nearly impossible to eat fresh. The incredible tartness and astringency has to be processed to enjoy. Yet this too is part of the plant. If someone were to eat it off the bush, they would clearly state it was not edible. Of course the 5000 year history of it being used says otherwise.

Eventually those few plants showing zero signs of the disease despite being in the middle of it all, took over the area previously occupied by the diseased plants. It even grew under the trail road we had near the plantings and continued into the nearby hawthornes and evergreen oaks. The disease is still there but it does not infect the seeds which cannot pass the barriers within the seed. Every generation starts new with no black knot disease. Seeds purify and maintain the germplasm so each new generation retains its place in the population free of disease. Once you have the disease, it is too late for methods of control. The spores eventually whittle the tree down despite pruning and spraying. I called this immune variety “Ocean Blue” and now both the population and the original selection or individual plant is used for growing sloe plums.

Ocean Blue Sloe Plum Prunus spinosa

Today a few sloe plum plants are being grown by distillers and a wine maker. They purchased a lot of the seeds and plants when I grew them. The astringency and sharpness of the tart fruit made me wonder how it would be possible to process. In Michigan, the fruits ripen in July and will remain on the bush in good condition through August or later. There is no frost on them to any degree to improve the flavor. The green interior and astringent blue skin is very distinctive part of the fruits flavor. It probably also protects it against insects and disease. The fruit has no problems in cultivation and could easily be grown without sprays. Nevertheless the plants cannot be shipped to California, Oregon and Washington all based on outdated or out right inaccurate scientific information. But the seeds are allowed.

One unusual seedling popped out of the population that surprised me. It is a unique hybrid plant I cannot entirely identify. It is a small tree with runner capabilities as well as incredible floriferous tendencies. Every year I am stunned by the beauty of this tree and its dense flowering. Bees flock for miles around to visit. Yet there is no fruit. To solve this problem, I have to go the extra mile and bring in other individual plants that are genetically different yet not too different and await fruit set. I have some new sloes from other growers that I plan to use right next to it. Some of these diverse populations are crosses with plums known for their larger fruits or have a unique flavor profile and are naturally occuring hybrids of Prunus spinosa. They too are all grown from seed at my farm. My lone hybrid plant needs some overlapping flowers of related species that will be compatible. It would be best to just use the sloes on my farm by planting a few seeds with a dibble a few feet away from the trunk in all directions. This surrounds it with neighbors that will help each other in their fruit production creating great abundance in its wake. If you help one plant, then all will benefit from the diversity. The lone unfruitful plant will become fruitful and the others will respond with greater yields too as the pollen from the lone unfruitful plant may be useful too. It does not mean it has sterile pollen. This is the nature of the Prunus spinosa population all done in a sloe manner. I like the sloe way of life. One helps all and all helps one.

The foliage of the sloe plum plant is sparse so the clusters of fruit really stand out on the outer perimeter of the bush. Pruning is done in the winter to address branches that cross and allow more light to penetrate the hedge like crowns. You want plants that are accessible for picking yet not too dense to make a fortress of thorns. The thorns are actually fruit spurs necessary for flowering and fruit production. Cross pollination is not necessary as far as I can tell. However, no one has grown a single plant isolated to see if it benefits in terms of yields from other genetically different plants. It would be a good idea to have several plants as this plant likely has the same pollination types as beach plum where a diversity will increase fruit production. Some strains may have developed this on their own in isolation over time in the mountainous regions of central Europe.

A book worth exploring: Cornucopia II A Source Book of Edible Plants by Stephen Facciola Kampong Publications, Vista 1998.

Not slow

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Structure and Function of Future Plants and Forests

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

One of the the great events of my family farm was the sand mining operations that left two large distinctively different ponds. In the process, it also created a completely different landscape. It was one we fully enjoyed as now the ‘swamp’ had swimming and fishing. The image above captures the vegetation 100 percent created by a bulldozer over 50 years ago in the process of pond construction. The bulldozer in its bulldozer way eliminated all the vegetation by crushing and burying wood of all sizes. The peat was stock piled and the sand was extracted. The peat was put back and leveled as the trucks drove off with their sand. Meanwhile the plants came back slowly while surrounding the moonscape reseeding themselves in great abundance. I use to go there and look down and wonder what will happen to this land. It was not pretty. Today is another story. With the images displayed, you see the red stems of the seedling blueberries in front followed by the white birch near a road and ditch which was installed to drain the swamp and lower the water table. As that dried up, the birch really took hold in the new black muck and moist sand. The white pines are seedlings that were directly planted by my father and his partner in business when we purchased the farm in the 1960’s well before the pond construction. The bulldozers went around them. The seed repository that was surrounding the land quickly filled in the vegetation. For that I was grateful as diversity only increased as time marched on. A small apple seeded in within this framework thanks to a bird that dropped the seeds years ago carried from a nearby neighborhood. It is the exclamation point of ecology at the end of the sentence of evolutionary history in a chapter filled with biological novelties.

One thing about diversity in plants is that it does little good to keep it for yourself. Whether you sell, exchange or give it away, the seeds and plants are restricted with limited effects with no benefits to the humans that need it most. At my farm while I was running the nursery, we decided to create packets of seeds and tubers that people could easily order and obtain in a timely fashion at a low cost. Saying goodbye to my Jerusalem artichokes was sweet with the help of the U.S. Postal Service. The fulfillment aspect of it creates an excitement in that you are finding and creating new types of food plants not found anywhere and putting it directly in use by those receiving their ‘orders’. I tried to find other companies interested but no one seemed positive of its potential. In fact, some found it repulsive. Wherever my little packets went, they are now part of that landscape and could potentially become established beyond the garden. I hope so. One customer told me,” Ken. Compared to anyone else, you have more artichokes than you can shake a stick at. That is nothing to be ashamed of.” I found that very amusing.

“Tell me more. Where is this delicious fruit you speak of? “

Without a question, the white tailed deer is one my favorite animals at the farm. I was always surprised how many people wanted to ‘take care of my deer problem’. I did not know this problem. I only saw a solution. When I first bought my pasture-farm, the original trails through my farm were small in number but hinted at the movement of deer in the area. There was not many of them. As my tree crops grew, so did the legend of the sweet high density fruits at the tree crop farm including the persimmon and pear as well as the nut crops of acorns and chestnuts in the deer community. Word was out. Certainly the deer could provide food for someone. I have nothing against that. But removing a plant or animal never creates a magical utopia. The deer provide a direct benefit for my tree crops and create diversity in their wake. The evidence is over whelming. It is difficult to explain because it turns out that it is highly complex. My wildlife cameras capture them eating different forage and I am always surprised about their diet. Even today there are few deer that reside on my farm full time. Most come from outside other adjoining properties and locations far away. I see where they sleep. I saw the birth of a deer. I saw the death of a deer. Sometimes I think they followed me around for a while because I would look up from planting and there they would be staring. I think deer are naturally curious and so am I. We share that in common.

Forages include star thistle, timothy, Queen Annes Lace, quackgrass and the ever so popular Ken’s favorite mulberry and apple trees.

You do not have to look far to discover beauty in art. The above drawing was done for one of my catalogs by Rob Lawson. It was taken from a slide image shot in the cemetary in Springfield, Illinois. The original is very nice but this drawing says so much more. It shows the structure and intelligence in nature far greater than the image I shot using Kodachrome 64. You can experience the structure of the oak and the function of the acorn because the drawing magnifies it. It is more than just an oak and an acorn.

A farmer nearby told me of this cherry dump on his property. This is where someone had to dispose of fruit quickly that did not have a market and it was dropped at the edge of a field. It can be several tons of fruit. It starts out as a pile of brightly colored fruit smelling like fresh berries before passing the wine stage quickly and then going to a kind of swamp gas aroma. Only the seeds that are not fermented or heated in the compost conditions make it to germination. Those that survive are in the position to grow fast to stay within the canopy. There is no way to recreate this. This sweet cherry-sour cherry forest structure tells a story of waste, reclamation and crop biodiversity. The birds cloak the tops of these trees. The chipmunk colony below benefits as the seeds drop one by one. A neighbor drops by to harvest the fruit for wine. I’m harvesting the fruit for tree seeds. It’s busy at the dump where structure and function meet.

Time to plant ideas. Who knows what will sprout?
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Diversity Explored: The European Chestnut

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

When I was first introduced to the European chestnut, I found it as a shrubby and stunted tree barely able to cope with Michigan’s cold winters. It was on top of a dune overlooking Lake Michigan near Grand Traverse Bay. The view was spectacular. It was a cool late October day and the cold wind off the lakeshore left me speechless. The tree’s size was further highlighted by an American chestnut next to it that was in pristine condition growing ever so vigorous and strong. I knew that this particular species of chestnut was probably not adapted to Michigan. I collected two nuts from under its branches thanks to the owner who helped me find them. It wasn’t easy. Deep in the grass, we pryed open a few burrs only to find those two precious nuts.

No matter where I looked, I could not find the European chestnut tree or seeds for my nursery. I need a batch of them for propagation. I knew this tree as the traditional chestnut of European origin used for centuries. I could buy them in the grocery store in a net bag imported from Italy. I knew they were also disease prone and not hardy enough for Michigan. For orchard production, the Chinese chestnut was the best selection and widely adapted to Michigan’s climate and soils. When the seed sources from California opened up a possibility of growing it as seedlings in my nursery, I was all in. I quickly changed my mind when I saw the massive one ounce nuts. My first purchase of 50 lbs of seed led to complete disaster producing only two trees that survived the winters of minus 20F. In my typical nursery fashion, I tried it again. And of course the effect was the same. I still have those two trees in my orchard. There was a tiny gap with sunlight streaming through and I was going to find the source. I saw the light!

Great Chestnut of Mt. Aetna 1700’s. Still alive today. Castanea sativa

Back at my farm, I tried another direction. I used hybrids. These are naturally occurring plant hybrids of mixed parentage created by someone, somewhere spewing out selections overcoming the disease and hardiness issues of yesteryear. As part and parcel of that hybrid population is your European chestnut. Often the American and Chinese are combined in the population of unknown percentages. One such group, was from seed I purchased from nut grower of the late John Gordon. He had the Simpson seed. It was perfection in so many ways. It was from Ohio and considered one of the most prolific. Other seed included the ‘okas’ of which most came from the late Gellatly at his British Columbia farm. I also found another nut grower here in Michigan where I purchased these hybrid nuts in small quantities. I even found what appeared to be the ‘Paragon’ hybrid grown commercially for a brief moment in time. Each time I did this, I was overjoyed at the vigor and health of the European hybrid seedlings. They had beautiful large dark green leaves and a straight growth habit. At the same time, the real world winnowed out the weak plants quickly. The one characteristic that surprised me the most was the immunity to chestnut blight. The callus material when it occurred was substantial. All trees produce callus when injured whether it be a snow storm or blight. Some trees are not able to keep up. Others quickly grow around their wounds. Old trees like humans have difficulty recovering from tramatic events. Blight is one of them.

This particular specimen of Castanea sativa has some blight on the bark but not enough to damage it to the point of no return.The three trunk formation here is the result of damage done early in its life in a tree shelter which was never pruned off. Instead I kept all three sprouts because in this area the wind was very strong making tree establishment more difficult. In short, I needed foliage and vigor to compensate for everything else going on in the environment.

I was not overly focused on nut production. It was not breeding but finding vigorous trees and creating from seed populations. Blight was a big motivator in these populations. Initially these were tiny groups of trees scattered throughout my farm. There was quite a bit of variation within the European crosses and what appeared to be the pure species types. By growing the progeny from these fast growing seedlings I thought I had tapped into the hybrid popular effect where things ZOOM UP. It was by letting them self seed that further enhanced my forest by creating greater shade and replacement trees if the others succumb to chestnut blight. On most trees, it took a decade to realize this potential. It was the back up plan to the back up plant. Now I had my forest. The European types although small in number were disappearing into the genetically different populations. In the meantime, most of the originals still produce at my farm and contribute to my chestnut forest. I was selecting for one thing only but in reality I was creating the healthiest trees to reproduce themselves loosely based on my subjective experience. In the grafted varietal world, you select one tree out of hundred and then destroy the ninety nine trees. This time the possibilities express themselves on a real stage of ecological theatre where one tree creates ninety-nine trees all of which are kept. It’s reverse orcharding. Selections can be done now or not at all.

The smooth bark with small ridges indicate the species Castanea sativa.

Even in the most traditional landscapes, tree crops need greater diversity to thrive. It has to come from outside to get the full effect of a population. The European chestnut in Greece is struggling. A leader in chestnut production, Greece has experienced a huge loss this year due to extreme drought and heat leading to a drop in 15,000 tonnes or 90 % of its average yields. In relation to its cultural importance, the European chestnut in Greece could disappear without the help of humans in some way. Dragging out the irrigation pipes is not much of a solution long term. The people who live in these mountain villages harvest and maintain these trees and forests. Without them the mountains would be deserted. The late Dr. Dennis Fulbright from Michigan State University use to show the nut growers in Michigan some of these wonderful slides on the European chestnut and how it was propagated, used as a tree crop and processed into delicious food. Today the desertification going on in these mountainous regions along with a failing economy tied to the crop and the families that make a living from it are in peril.

This seedling was grown from seeds in its native range and is likely not a hybrid.
The 5 year old tree to the right is Castanea sativa. It is surrounded by pawpaw. Korean nut pine and oaks.

This is where creating new seed populations could replenish the lost trees while propelling the tree crop forest forward. You need deep roots. There is a fig tree in a mountainous region of the Sahara Desert that goes down to 450 ft. deep. They found it in a mine shaft deep beneath the sands of the Sahara. It is considered the worlds deepest roots of any tree. It would not surprise me the chestnut is doing that now. It too is a mountainous tree species able to wind its way past the rocks going deep into the subsoil and rocks to catch the rain and snow melt of winter. Grapes do this all the time. My farm is surrounded by grape fields growing out of sand dunes with almost no top soil. Chestnut has the side branching and hair roots that develop along the forest floor. It has several deep structural type tap roots and that go very deep to extract moisture to fill the nuts in the fall. This occurs right at the end of the season where they all fill at once. If there is no rootstock limitations to interfere and slow down the seedling growth you then have a tree able to harness water far greater than before. New hybrid selections as well as existing trees that appear impervious to drought could create the new chestnut forest. This is exactly how Gama grass selections were done. You look for green healthy plants that thrive in the heat and drought in the worst of conditions. Even at my farm with my limited resources and few seedling selections, you can see the chestnut has this power within it. It is obvious in its growth and production of nuts as well as its thick and hairy leaves and stems. If you dig a chestnut seedling up it has a strong deep tap root. If you cut the root, more deep roots follow. How far does that go down? If any indication of the seedling trees I have, the equiavalent of a mature tree would be at least 100 ft. down. This is how hybrid vigor is ZOOMING DOWN into the deep layers of rock and soil underground. A back breeding program is too slow. The best trees already exist. You are solving your own problems while leaving a doorway open for others to follow. This is where the light shines in.

One of the ‘okas’ seedling of Layeroka. Gellatly.

This is the European seedling grown from the nut mentioned in the beginning of my story. Although it rarely produces nuts, the nuts it does produce make very nice seedlings some of which are growing nearby. It has a lot of dead wood in it but the tree has continued its life at my farm finding a portion of the canopy adequate surrounded by hybrid Burenglish oaks and butternuts. The light is bright.

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Explorations of Fruit Diversity: Black Mulberry

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
This Central Park, New York, NY tree hints at the food possibilities of the black mulberry.When I visited this tree, I had the “we’re gonna need a bigger boat’ realization on what to expect.

The range of any plant can vary tremendously from high to low elevations, across whole continents not to mention human introductions. With many woody plants, these are not entirely reflected in the selections available in the nursery marketplace. It was this winter hardiness factor that interested me when I grew palm trees in Michigan. The Chinese Windmill Palm had a large range of adaptability and did survive here much longer than I expected. I was wondering if other plants had a broader range of hardiness and where I could find those. One of those was the black mulberry. It was considered a Zone 7ish plant and not hardy enough to survive Michigan. There are no wild black mulberry trees to draw germplasm from. The species Morus nigra was never used to any degree in the United States compared to the well-known species of Russian and White species which were staples of the conservation industry. They were the windbreak and fruit bearing trees for wildlife including the trees used for silk production which never came to fruition. I initially started growing black mulberry from the grafted varieties. I found four Pakistan selections with huge fruits from a nursery here in the U.S. only because that was all that was available. They are also food selections bred for human consumption.  I think anything with ‘Hunza’  attached to its name sounds mystical to me. Maybe I can live to 100 years old too if I eat mulberries. The selections grew vigorously. I loved the large lustrous leaves. When winter came and went there was no live tissue left. Only a brittle stem remained.  I remember walking by the sprouting trees below the graft union thinking at least I got a rootstock out of it. A week went by, and those sprouts disappeared via white tailed deer. Maybe not. Time to move on.

I began to look more closely at the Morus nigra species to find what is considered a good mulberry as far as cultivation goes. There was a lot more than I thought. I knew about the fruit variation found in wild mulberries in southwestern Michigan. When I had a social media account for my business and posted something on mulberries, a few people had very strong opinions on mulberries. The native plant movement had greatly exaggerated the claims on red mulberry as well as what was considered the proper identification. The cultivated mulberry that people consumed worldwide was the black mulberry. It was considered the best in terms of flavor and sugar content. A close second were the hybrids of it and certain selections of white mulberries known for their heavy fruit production. Many viewed mulberries as weed trees with no inherent value. That was me at the beginning of my farm. I cut down several smaller trees which were growing in my pasture. Before I became more knowledgeable about the Morus genus, I had no idea of the value of this crop and its importance to wildlife and people. It was the fence row tree growing into the wires and fusing with the metal that made me rethink the power of this plant.  I was impressed with the galloping mulberry, making its way across landscapes because birds survive on them for food.  Removing them does not create environmental health where better trees will grow. It is the mulberry that can grow in places where few things will grow, and it does it with great ease. The cracks of cement contain mulberries. This is the superpower of the mulberry. It will be the new fruit plant in the coming years of fluctuating climate. It’s not going anywhere, and we need to harness that fruit’s power into something wonderful for people. There is a huge repository already in existence in the wild trees. We could make use of that if we wanted. I began to wonder why there were few if any varieties of the wonderful black mulberry for zone 5.  For that, I would have to create it myself

Morus nigra grown from seed at my farm.

It was during a seed grown population that I finally got a chance to explore Morus nigra in its full glory. The population had the dark green, large round and sometimes lobed leaves in perfect formation. I was very excited when I was able to verify the seed source from a seed company here in the U.S.  Having a means of growing the trees in bulk would eliminate the need for grafting. I could remove weak and less hardy seedlings. I created a population to select seedlings from to develop a fully hardy zone 5 seed source with the fruit quality that people love in a mulberry. It cannot be too watery or insipid and it must have a flavor a little bit like a raisin with a mellow taste. My population could provide additional cultivars for fruit and wood quality. The mulberry wood is very beautiful with an orangish red hue to it. I have a plank I bought from a local wood lumber company of which I am making a table from.

Morus nigra at my farm.

The first batch of seedlings I grew were very nice looking. When I moved them out to one of my hillsides, I lost four of the five trees in the winter. What was I doing wrong? I discovered that overly vigorous trees in this species were not desirable. The plants growing late in the season were not adjusted to my climate as the wood never hardened off completely. They grow five feet in a single season. They died five feet in a single season. It was ruthless out there. The second time I expanded production upwards to the 2000 mark in pots in the greenhouse. This created a more uniform population with equal care for all plants under irrigation and protection. After two years, further plants were put out in the orchard based on leaf structure and fast but not too fast growth.  The plants from the second population didn’t have the southern long season take your time growth patterns that were in the first generation. I finally had a stable from seed black mulberry population.  In the last few years, I began taking better care of the trees for seed production. Deer do love the foliage, and it requires protection to make growth happen. I noticed that racoons and opossums were climbing the trees and eating the fruit. I am pretty sure woodchucks were up there. Their weight will sometimes break the branches at the crotch near the main trunk. This breaking is not completed so the cambium is attached still. It creates a wide branching pattern on the tree eliminating the narrow crotches and improving the fruit set allowing for greater production of fruit. What was great about this in my limited knowledge of mulberries is that all of this was done from the seedling level. There was no grafting. I named one selection and began to think about what to do in the future with the plants. This was one of the last tree crops I put in my plantings as seedlings. Today one tree is producing delicious small fruit that is like a drop of sugar. Another seedling with deeply cut leaves, in a location outside of my farm produces a white fruit that is sweet but has no flavor. Each of these trees are very distinct in growth habit and could be used as shade trees rich in fruit production and a joy to consume in the summer.

Now the Central Park tree was not just a magnificent giant but a real-life expression of the Morus nigra in its wide range of adaptability and success in a climate that is equally part of its heritage. Without the seedlings of its species, I would never have made that discovery. The seedlings led the way.

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‘Michigan’ Tree Collard: Annual To Perennial in Nature

Posted on November 29, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

If you were to grow broccoli or brussel sprouts you might discover by accident a few plants that resprout from the soil level the following spring. It’s a common experience. It is not a reliable means of propagation waiting to see what winter brings but it does happen. When I started growing tree collards and kale, I noticed this type of regeneration. Collards in particular are often propagated this way using stem cuttings. This is done by refrigerating the cuttings in the winter and planting them in spring. Leaving broccoli or brussel sprouts in the soil for the second year highlights their biennial nature. After flowering and setting seed, the plant usually dies. This is common with kale. The tree collard on the other hand can grow large and thick with trunk like dimensions for many years. It is considered an annual only because we have cultivated it that way. It is much more reliable via seed on a larger scale.

Out of a population, I found a few ‘winter hardy’ tree collards. These were seedling collards left on their own in my Zone 7ish polyhouses that grew vigorously and continued their growth from their root mass. In the polyhouses the plants would freeze solid too but it was a slow dormancy and not the normal up and down of real world weather conditions. They flowered but often did not produce any seed. The ratio of surviving plants was roughly one plant per hundred. As bad as that may sound, it was quite encouraging to me as the odds were much more favorable than many of the plants I had experimented with earlier. A lot of perennial vegetables were short lived in my climate. What sort of plant physiology would be required for long term growth outdoors and how you would measure that? For a while I kept attempting at establishing Sea Kale. Sea Kale, as cool as it sounds, was not long in this world. For whatever reason, it rarely made it past three years before disappearing into the land of mulch. Maybe I needed a sea. It was a seashore plant to begin with. The seeds were very expensive and hard to get from overseas vendors. Sea kale was also very bitter likely requiring boiling in a change of water prior to consumption.

Eventually I moved my tree collards outside and decided to do cuttings of one selection. That selection was both vigorous and had good flavor. After the minus 27F winter, I finally had a perennial bridge to create populations from as well as a variety for cuttings. I named it: ‘Michigan’ I gave it to the Tree Collard Project in San Francisco to distribute and sell. They provided me the original seeds that they were offering as open pollinated tree collards.

How do you measure hardiness in an annual plant? Tension and compression with a pair of lopers. The hardness of the stems of Michigan was like apricot. Very difficult to cut. This hardness equates to hardiness. Wood is good. You need a lignin rich Brassica stem that protects the delicate water and nutrient transportation systems within the stem. It turned out that winter hardiness was related to the stem density. The ‘Michigan’ collard did this easily not only because of its growth but ability to grow a lignin type protective sheath surrounding the succulent stem. We often think of winter hardiness as some sort of magical find deep within the genetics of the plant which says either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to various environmental challenges like cold temperatures. This time the Brassica plant creates it’s own physiological response to cold. Wood.

The Collard Rules

Here grows a leafy vegetable full of vigor and health. One leaf invigorates a culture. Agri and horti combine feeding cultures across the globe. Now I have a whole leaf. The leaf is the answer. It has order. It has structure. Collards find and transport the nutrients deep within the soil. A perennial collard increases its ability to do this every year of its life. You can seed it. You can use a small cutting and stick it in the ground. The collard rules.

Kenneth Asmus

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The Timber Apple: An Opposite Value Rises in the Forest

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

All fruit trees contain within them their original blueprint of the forest environment that they were originally found. There are apricots, plums and apples throughout the world that are part of the forests around them in some way. When these fruits leave their homes, they are methodically selected over hundreds and thousands of years to grow into the orchard system we know today. I am sure there are still 100-foot-tall apples somewhere with trunks three feet through. But where can you find that type of tree?  It’s highly improbable. I wondered if it could be possible to create or re-create a robust apple capable of reaching new heights in a forest like environment? I did not have a specific direction to follow because I did not know where to look. It turned out it was hiding in plain sight.

Is it possible to find an apple tree that grows like this sugar maple in my backyard?

Apples are pruned, put on dwarfing rootstocks and bred to be squatty with thick wide branching trees to support huge amounts of weight. Everything is grafted. There are no seedling apple forests with tall vigorous trees rich in fruits way at the top of 100-foot-tall trees in North America. But there are components of forests that contain apples as part of their composition. Often these are cast away fruits along the roadside. By great fortune, I found some of these species that were hiding in plain sight mixed with Russian apples originally found in these ancient wild apple forests. Only this time they were in the curb lawn of a retirement community planted over 60 years ago. I began wondering if they would show up in a population of them if I grew them from seed. They did and here is how that went up and up.

The forest apple is small but powerful. It currently lives in Michigan but is willing to travel.

I started from seeds. You grow everything from seed, and you start with selecting seedlings for their vigorous growth, clean foliage and small amounts of side branching. I have two trees of the same age in one of my plantings. One is 5 feet tall. It is thick with spurs like a pin cushion with thorns. Each thorn has thorns which produce loads of flowers and fruits every other year. Just a few away is a 30-foot-tall apple of the same age. It rarely fruits. It has only a few branches at the top and no branches for the first 20 feet. I did prune it a little but only directionally to accommodate the other nearby apple trees.  Both apples have a wild apple counterpart within them. The dwarf spur type is indicative of a very cold and windy climate with little vegetation. It is from Siberia and Alaska and is said to be the world’s cold hardiest apple able to take minus 40F or more. It is the Ranetka crabapple selection. In a different environment, the tall apple must reach the canopy as soon as possible and cannot waste energy on fruit production. It took many of my selections of timber apples 20 to 30 years to fruit whereas the spur type fruited when only 4 years old from seed. Both selections are essentially the same seedling type of apple free of a graft union. They are growing their best in my untended forest planting next to the shellbark hickories, American hybrid chestnut and walnuts. Within this same population, I found several spur type apples all of which produce small fruit in dense clusters. This heavy fruit set slows the apple tree down and creates a compact tree that is a natural dwarf. This time it is likely related to the nearby pollination of the Chinese crabapple that was also in the planting. Apples are great outbreeders. The bees do their jobs very well.

Oak like in growth, this apple tells a story of its past.

The retirement community apples were off the charts in yields. The grass was layered with them fermenting under our noses. Other people had come to collect them for bait piles for deer hunting. We took them back to my barn and crushed a half a truck load of the two-inch sized red and green fruit with sledgehammers and soil tampers cleaning the seed in a blender and screens. Eventually this produced around 3000 seedlings. From this group roughly four plants had extremely fast growth, clean foliage with hardly any fruit production. This was the forest apple I was looking for. Obviously, these are the apples that people do not desire. They are small fruits with low yields of tart and astringent tasting fruit. It was not relevant to the human population as far as cultivation goes. Once again I think I created something that no one wants. Or not?

Timber apple on the rise.

This population approach to breeding apples is very common in that you are making selections from a large population, winnowing it down to those individual seedlings which produce the most or taste the best. When I visited Cornell University once with the North American Fruit Explorers and met Roger Way, he described it as a one in quarter million shot of a good apple for eating. This time you select the apples that look like oak trees using seed from the best timber like selections. The odds are more in your favor only because it is based on the natural propensity of the apple to grow fast and straight. It is not a rare flavor profile almost impossible to find for a large population of people. People have narrow tastes usually and are picky. Plants are broad and expansive.

You can graft the best timber selections (see the website for details) but only for making additional seeds. You want to avoid grafting at all costs for the seed orchard. You want the seed tree to be free of graft union incompatibility and the results of stunted growth. It would be preferrable to grow the timber apple quasi-isolated for the best effect. That could be difficult because ornamental crab apples as well as wild apples are everywhere and the pollinators they attract travel for miles effortlessly.  The apple is best represented by seedling trees from the forest and not the orchard. You have moved it to a different ecological system. From the botanist G.E.Hutchison, I call it the theater where evolution is the play or driving force of its future development. This is where you begin to step aside and let nature handle it in many ways. Your appearance is for guidance from time to time only to reinvigorate and enhance this opposite value you have discovered. These selections along with their seedlings can produce additional seeds which could be refined and improved further to the point where all the trees would be the forest giants of apples. Each tree can now reach the canopy quickly and produce a clean knot free lumber as well as a rootstock for apples where vigor equates to immunity to disease, deep rooted drought tolerance and fast growth to the scions put onto them.

Weaving its way into the canopy.

The possibilities are endless in the forest. Even in the urban world the forest apple has a place free of low hanging branches that interfere with pedestrian traffic and pruning to avoid wires easily with wide branching.  Putting it into production is quick with existing technology and techniques within the nursery industry too because after all, it is an apple. The selections you see on my website Timber Apples are not etched in stone. That is the starting point. Another generation or two of growing out the populations will only get better before leveling off at some unheard of height for an apple tree.

It only took 30 years to come to fruition. It is not quite the sugar maple mammoth I envisioned. But one step in this journey is half done in my overly vigorous seed strain. The apple forest is alive and well at Oikos Tree Crops. At this point in time you don’t have to crush apples with a sledgehammer or the use an old Vitamix to pulverize a wheelbarrow full of apple pulp.  There are easier ways to improve the world’s greatest fruit. You start with seeds and then ask yourself is this the beginning of the giant tree I have been dreaming of?

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

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It Happens : Growth.

Posted on November 16, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

2024 was a year of surprises. Here are a few from my farm where anything is possible.

My Green Cover Gourd population went gangbusters this year taking over the pokeweed climbing to new heights. This white type is a good sign and may have what I am looking for in terms of edible seeds. Something that is not painful, I don’t have to snap my head back to get down or have to dial 911 in a near state of unconsciousness would be nice. Growth and change are good.
Having pecan trees was probably one of the best tree crops to grow at my farm in Michigan. The short season genotypes from Illinois and Iowa were made by using unselected seedlings from a larger population based soley on ripening period. Here you can see persimmons in front of them. The growth rate is off the charts and they are now one of the tallest trees at my farm used as a hedgerow compotent. Growth like this within the hickory genus is off the charts good. ‘Michigan’ and ‘Michigander Prolifico’ are two varieties which are heavy and reliable producers developed on my farm.
Oh the soybean. You are so good and so powerful. But why is the flavor so, so, soy like. Oh that’s right. You’re a soybean. When I drive by a soybean field in the fall and see the dense clusters of beans on the stems I know that thousands of years of selection has made you what people want. Enter the lima bean. Its in the mixed vegetables in the freezer section and that’s it. The growth rate has to increase along with the flowering and yields. I don’t care. I’m copying the soybeans. Its a visual bridge for me to my lima bean dream of perennial in nature, heavy yields and over the top growth. This seedling lima selection was a stand out in the field this year. Dare I say. Its soy like. From the Cloud Lima selections.
Its three purple lima beans in a pod. You would think I invented cold fusion. I didn’t. But I did find three purple lima beans in a pod. This was the holy grail for me only because the selections I kept growing from seed never produced three per pod. It was a random mix of one per pod or none. The growth of this vine produced early dark purple three in a pod beans. Seriously it was my aha moment in lima beans. Interesting in that at the coffee shop no one will talk to me anymore if I bring up my purple bean stories.
We had a volcano grow in our driveway. The perfectly new asphalt driveway had a bump form looking like a giant zit. After a few calls and $750 lighter, we got to the bottom of it. A type of fungus was growing out of the packed gravel and pushing up the 4 inch thick asphalt creating a mini-volcano type of effect. If you think about it, what sort of pressure did it take to crack and break 4 inches plus of solid asphalt fully hardened? You cannot stop growth. Just saying. Mother of God fungus.
For years I grew the perennial and forever self replicating hog peanut. I only wanted the tubers. Oh the tubers of the hog peanut I would say are the best over and over. This year I started an experiment testing the seed production. It was a shocking surprise worthy of telling everyone in the coffee shop. By now they are use to it and run when they see me. It was shocking only because the vines grew to 5 feet tall and flowered like no tommorrow. This flowering created huge seed production. I had no idea that the seeds were edible or even possible to grow. This was a eureka moment of growth and happiness for me as it was something totally unexpected. From Crispy Snack variety developed on my farm.
This clustery red potato was not a new discovery. Instead it was more like variations of a theme. Here the growth was small, diminitive, innocent, quiet and subtle. The vine was barely a foot long. Growth is the most powerful on that level because it is closest to its source of pure energy and unboundedness. The full effect of this particular seedling potato will be in the field next year with all his friends surrounded and tended by a farmer who cares for him as if he was the last potato on earth.
Trees can respond immediately to changes in the environment. It may not be a Broadway Musical event but it does happen fairly quickly with callus and sprouting. Its a visual cue that things are being fixed on a cellular level. My hybrid American Chestnuts show both the limitations and overcoming limitations all in one swoop of dynamic growth. Here we see a sprout which is becoming the new part of the plant. Normally sprouts are removed in orchard settings. At my farm removing sprouts would be damaging to the tree while interfering with its new growth strategy of overcoming obstacles. On the other hand, humans as an obstacle are not easily overcome by plants because by nature they are our allies and partners in our success as a species. It happens. From the Douglas hybrid American chestnuts developed further at my farm.
I’m pretty sure the coffee shop folks have not listtened to my stories of pin cherries from the Two Hearted River region yet. Maybe they will not run away this time. “Wait!” I will say. “I’m not done.” I really find it super intriguing that Prunus virginiana can get to maximum size so quickly. It is a clonal plant by nature usually fading like shumac after 20 years or so. I kept at my pruning only to realize the inside of the log was hollowing out and rotting. In the meantime, callus tries the work around solution to keep the growth going. The solution is more sprouts which then becomes the new tree. It was not that hard to do. I moved a few of these sprouts to my home and they too made beautiful fast growing trees to 40 ft. tall. People think they are junk trees. Junk trees is a sign of ignorance about the potentialities within the species and how beneficial they are to the world at large. There is no such plant.
Everything is connected. The deer find solace at my farm and a place of refuge filled with good things to eat. I find solace at my farm as a place of refuge with good things to eat. Growth can be maximized here. Unobstructed. Free of barriers. No limitations. A joy to experience. This is the new ecology.
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Diversity Explored: Serviceberry

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Juneberry-Amelanchier lamarckii in fruit at my farm

At the time of my early nursery life in the 1980’s I was well aware of this beautiful flowering ornamental plant with delicious fruit. Sometimes in the nursery profession, you would not want to use the word serviceberry. It made you look botanically inept a little if you said that. Instead you would use the genus name Amelanchier and nothing else. This is exactly how we would call each other by our last names in high school. It was only your close friends you did that with. The same with Amelanchier. It is everyone’s close friend. The nursery industry focused on two species, Amelanchier laevis and canadensis.These were usually multi-stemmed small trees grown from seed by the wholesale seedling nurseries and put into production for larger landscape balled and burlapped material. Between this tree and white dogwood, it was the most produced and well known flowering tree. Parking lots, churches, schools, strip malls, residential homes, office parks are great places to discover Amelanchier. There is no place that is missing Amelanchier. Serviceberries in flower in the spring are seen in the untended and wild landscapes prior to the oaks getting their leaves on. Birds are the friend of the serviceberry. They love them more than people and consume the fruits in great abundance distributing them wherever they go. Always expanding, always on the move, people can join in if they want but not a problem if they don’t. There are vacancies to be filled and serviceberry is going to find them. Even the racoon plays a role and will climb the trees and break branches to get the fruit. This too will pass. As the seeds spread far and wide in forests and shrub filled fields under the multiflora roses.

I was trying to figure out how to grow it from seed. The answer was to treat it like an apple seed. It requires a small dormancy of 90-120 days of cold and moisture. It was not too hard. I liked the plant but not because it was native or some sort of magical rare fruit. It was delicious and like all fruit trees there is this beautiful variation found throughout Michigan. I had the thought to create seed orchards of these unique individuals that I found all by accident. The discoveries occurred during a bike ride, a family vacation, my family’s farm, jogging along the roads in southwestern Michigan, a failed fishing fiasco, the campus of a nearby college and parking lot landscapes at strip malls. This variation of fruit was due to slight genetic differences within the genus. There were distinct species of Amelanchier but there was also many subspecies being plastic like in composition. Some thought it was nothing but hybrids of the hybrids of the hybrids type of thing where your split ends have more split ends on a population level. It was subject to interpretation when taxonomists try to figure out these slight variations in leaf and flower. To me, I did not care about native. I did not care about the taxonomic species. I would say to them, “You go ahead and argue with each other.” While they are busy with that, I will grow the trees from seed from the trees I found, create a seed orchard and enjoy the fruit. This was my straight line to cultivation. It was from these locations that I began my seed collection to produce both plants for sale as well a seed orchard for further production of seeds at my farm. It was then I began to appreciate all of the taxonomic aspects of the fruit and tree including its indigenous status and how that would taste in the fruit department at my tree crop farm. Native in relation to Amelanchier on the other hand, I found to be a very bitter drink within a wavy taxonomic category of strong opinions and bad ideas. Yet Amelanchier is sweet, delicious and full of life. I like choice number two.

Northern Juneberry – Amelanchier gaspensis

Many years ago, I took my family on a vacation to another country. Canada. My older daughter felt that we betrayed her by saying we were traveling to a foreign country. We drove along the northern shore of Lake Superior in Ontario camping our way along the shoreline all the way to the town of WaWa. At one point, we camped near a bay that I thought would be a good place to fish. It was a protected location with easy access to the beach. I got up real early in the morning and started casting into the bay. What I didn’t realize was this bay had large deposits of wood and jagged stones on the bottom making it the land of snags. Soon my Rapalas were hung up and lost. Frustrated I gave up fishing and began putting away my fishing rod when I saw an area up ahead filled with blue rocks. I went to investigate realizing it was a large tree type of serviceberry tree dropping huge amounts of fruit on the rocks. With help from the birds, the rocks were highlighted in paint splatters of blue and violet. There was a nice bear print in the sand between the rocks near the trunk of the tree. The fruit was large and juicy with large clusters. It was heavenly in flavor. It was like no other Amelanchier I had ever eaten. Pure water, pure soil, pure air, a little bear fertilizer and the overall feeling that bear is coming back soon, made me appreciate this location for the short period of time I had available to pick the berries. This particular seed source like other Amelanchier, carry with it a certain proclivity to be apomictic and true from seed like the parent trees. I grew these trees at my farm and began producing the seeds and trees under the name, “Pancake Bay”. It was true to seed. “Pancake Bay” was a giant in stature with large leaves and heavy fruit set. It was adapatable to my southern farm. Amelanchier are latitude sensitive. This is a common characteristic with many types of northern plants where cultivating them a couple of hundred miles south under different conditions will make the trees succumb to disease, be unfruitful for no reason and lack vigor in growth. Latitude sensitivities are very high in another Amelanchier called the saskatoon. The selections called Northline, Pembina, Smokey and Honeywood were a major problem for my farm because of the high amounts of humidity and heat which then brings disease to the leaves and fruits. Because Amelanchier is such a huge genus and found all over it allows you to discover plants that remain clean of disease with heavy production of clean and delicious fruit. The ‘if and only if’ in this formula is time. You need to look at the plants over several years to hone in on clean fruit with minimal damage with scab disease. It was fun to find these trees hoping in the years to follow it would look just as spectacular in fruit the next year. Some did not. I focused on those that did. Over the course of two decades I began finding many unknown species in the wild including my family’s farm in central Michigan. Impossible to ignore, I also found several very nice trees in planted landscapes that I used as well which had fantastic fruit quality worthy to grow on a larger scale. In my growing of all the different seedlings the Amelanchier canadensis and laevis has just as good fruit as the selections people had made in Canada with Amelanchier alnifolia. It was a new fruit of a new species that could be used on a larger scale for fruit production.

Pancake Bay Serviceberry

Other seed sources included ‘Two Hearted River’, ‘Whitefish Point’ and ‘Keweenaw’. And never forget ‘My Cousins Methodist Church of Which He Was a Pastor’. Oh. That was a good one. “My Old College Dorm” had a good one out front. It was consistent fruiting buried in landscape rock on a traffic island. I found several European selections like the Juneberry and hybrids found in the nursery trade and arboretum system that I slowly added to my plantings all in the name of fruit. Praise the fruit. What I didn’t know was that deer ate the foliage of these plants when they were the most succulent in spring which stunted the trees right when they started to flower. The deer would walk directly to the plants and consume them to the point of stunting the trees. Eventually, by tubing the trees and mulching with sawdust and grape pulp from Welchs, my trees began to make headway past the browse line. In the early years, I used herbicide and found out that the Amelanchier were sensitive to the damage done to the herbicided grasses next to them. They took in the herbicide through their roots sharing the herbicide but only stunting the trees. I quit using Round-up herbicide, went to poly and cellulose mulch mats and switched to sawdust as a mulch. The trees flourished and grew very fast after that. The fruits were just as delicious as when I collected them wherever the location. The heat sensitivity part was rough on the fruit production. It was particularly pronounced in drought and if it was a hot spring. Sometimes the fruit would just drop off as a dried raisin. This is a limitation found within these latitude sensitive trees.

Wild untended in a wetland in central Michigan Amelanchier canadensis

At the same time there was a bit of wiggle room in terms of adaptibility to attempt to use plants outside of its botanical range. The wiggle room was not etched in stone but it was enough to find specific trees that under cultivation would be reliable in fruiting in terms of what may be needed in terms of an orchard setting. This is much more critical if you want commercial production or a good home orchard tree. I had found the seedlings in populations of Amelanchier laevis and canadensis and these were every bit as good as the western species but much more forgiving to my climate in terms of fruit production. The big plus was they could be grown from seed. Knowing the fruit industry they would likely shun that but at least there is a variety that can be maintained and improved upon as a population of plants.

Amelanchier canadensis x laevis New Jersey source

It was just by chance I purchased Amelanchier from an east coast nursery called Hess Nurseries from New Jersey. They produced from seed a tree called Amelanchier canadensis x laevis. The trees were very vigorous with large healthy leaves. I began making seed selections of this unknown cross fruiting them through three generations. I put a few of them surrounding my barn and along a hillside for later fruit production. This hybrid vigor did translate to a large tree type with excellent tasting fruit clean of disease. It was very different because this was the forest tree of Amelanchier straight and tall and free of side branching.When you grow them, you find out these variations in real life and are able to navigate the populations like you would any fruit tree. I began focusing on other single trunk large trees at my family’s farm for a while. They were also very distinct and worthy of propagation. It was very interesting in terms of wild crop diversity. The world of serviceberries is wide open. No one I knew was doing these from seed populations. It was either a cultivar or nothing. That could be the problem. We just don’t know what is out there.

Regent Saskatoon-Amelanchier stolonifera-Blue or dark red for this selection is good to consume.

The skin of Amelanchier is not like the blueberry. You cannot put them in a quart basket or something to be used later. The fruit is soft when ready to eat.The berries have to be harvested fully ripe on the tree and then processed or frozen. The processing reveals a hint of almond due to the seeds being cooked along with the pulp. It has a smooth almost gel like consistency. I made several batches of serviceberry sauce using the variety ‘Regent’ at my farm. This selection is Amelanchier stolonifera and widely available. It produces well in Michigan but can suffer from scab in high humidity and hot summer years.

Catalog cover for Oikos Tree Crops David Adams painting Amelanchier alnifolia flowers.

I love the subtle flavor of Amelanchier. I love the flowers in the early spring. They are such a joy to see in the spring after a long winter. I love watching the birds eat my crop while I’m in the middle picking away. I love everything about the plant. I have a walking stick I use made from Amelanchier from my farm plantings. I am wrapped up in this cocoon of warm feelings about this plant and its healthy fruit. Yet, in a brutal sort of agricultural reality you need a bear behind it. Once the bear returns, decisions have to be made quickly on the run. You need practical solutions to fruit problems otherwise it will remain as the edible wild only. Your feelings about that do not matter. Taxonomy does not matter. What are you going to do with that fruit and can it be shared to others? The bear is coming. He too loves the fruit and depends upon it for survival. He has large white teeth. You can see them glistening in the sunlight bouncing off the Lake Superior shoreline. The bear will speed us along in this discovery. I know that the Amelanchier walking stick I made is not going to be enough. It’s too small.

Pancake Bay seed trees at my farm. Amelanchier laevis.
Amelanchier canadensis x laevis New Jersey Seed Source-‘Heavenly Blue’

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Diversity Discovered: The Wild Gourd

Posted on November 9, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

One of the blessings of growing plants is the unknown progeny produced by cross pollination. This twist of fate brings huge benefits to the plants as they change. The species is plastic and changes over time to help adjust to its new environment making the plants more vigorous and productive. In some circles of plant breeding and botany this is a crime scene. To me its a glorious divine exaltation worthy of a trumpet fanfare. Ta-Da!!!!!! To others the germplasm needs to be destroyed because now it is not what that person wants for some reason or doesn’t fit into the native realm following the botanical rules of taxonomic engagement anymore. Wa-Waaaa….This is the case for the Ozark gourd and wild pumpkins from South America that I grew at my farm.

My goal was to find a species member of the squash family avoiding all varieties that would grow untended and become a vine like weed growing over the pasture grasses while dropping seed rich gourds or squash in the grass throughout my farm. I thought it was a good idea both as a wild plant potentially rich in nutrition for humans and a wildlife plant. The whole genus seemed to be missing in action to me. It was very hard to find these seeds because no one would grow the species. They were viewed very oddly as unimportant and remnants of wild species with no inherent value. No one needs them anymore. They were also poisonous to eat. So that may have added to it as far as wanting to have self perpetuating colonies of it. Yet the goal is within reach. Let’s face it. It’s a squash. Anyone can grow it. Yet it was one of the most difficult things I attempted to do at my farm of which I only partially fulfilled even today. Here is what happened.

I gave up trying. This spring I drove over some squash and gourds which were produced back in 2022 and sat on the ground near on my packed gravel driveway for almost two years. The vines started on top of my wood chip compost pile-driveway and grew up and over the pokeweed and onto the driveway taking up quite a few parking spaces. I let them go. No one was parking anymore. The gourds sat there as they dried over the winters. It was funny in that prior to my crushing gourd experience, nothing was happening. There were no new seedlings from the 2022 crop. The gourds just sat there in their entirety. No animals drilled into them. No one was tempted to snack on them. No bird pecks. It looked two incisor marks were on one fruit. It looked squirrel to me. Nothing for two years. After crushing them with my Dodge pick up truck, the dust and seeds spread out on the ground in great abundance followed by massive amounts of seedlings many of which grew right into the gravel. I began to think what would help in this conversion for the species. I am sure the squash plants were asking ‘Where are the cars when you need them?” Obviously the snow, the freezing temperatures, the massive spring rains and lots of animals wandering by did not touch the gourds or seeds. There the seeds sat protected and locked into their shell type universe while riding out their quiet life until I drove over them. Why could I not replicate this before?

This genus of these two species combines a certain resilence to both groundhog and deer browse yet it is not completed yet in terms of its population. One year I took a hundred plants and moved them to my outback far away from my barn. Within a months time the plants were nailed mercilessly and then regrew. No gourds were produced. Last year I moved several plants to my home near an oak woodland to test against shade tolerance. They too got nailed. However in that batch a few did not. The light shines on those with the deepest faith I am told. Its a nice ideal but in the real world they say action is needed for enlightenment. For that I would need only a few plants that had the right smell and chemical compotents to resist browse. That was the direction I took but I am not sure I am at my destination. I see the browsing has included some gourd consumption too as well as foliage but this time it is light which allows the plant to fruit too.It is not one or the other. It includes the browsers as part and parcel of its life cycle and does not block them entirely. Complexity is the key to success.

At one point during my grow out of heirloom pumpkins and squash we made several attempts on my farm at wild grown edible pumpkins. This entailed using the failed tree planting locations and mulch mats to establish them untended by direct seeding and hoping for the best. This method was not very uniform but it was a joy to see a Howden Alaskan pumpkin sticking up in the middle of a grassy field. It was like the vine creeped along the ground to avoid detection and then a pumpkin emerged. This method was not reliable only because the plants were not drought, bug, disease and animal resistant to do that on their own. The direct seed method also attracted thirteen lined ground squirrels who must of thought they hit the Creators popcorn mix of seeds. They disappeared fast so few areas took. We tried replanting but by then it was a bird feeder effect. They knew where the good stuff was.

I did find one particular hybrid plant with insane off the chart growth. This deep self rooting vine produced dozens of buttercup squash sized fruit on a 100 ft. long vine. The orange squash turned out to be completely void of seeds. I found a seedless squash totally incapable of reproducing itself. Every year I would test small batches of seeds hoping for some breakthrough. Most of the time it was just small plantings done along the paths where I would walk. I was tempted to spread them to the barren islands surrounded by pavement like at my nearby Menards home improvement store. But frankly, people who manage those areas don’t need more work of which they would likely apply even more herbicides to remove my experiment. For that reason, I am hanging with my buds in the gourd patch for now.

The next test is likely going to be the most painful. I must taste the seeds to check for edibility. It happens that the ozark squash is poisonous. Someone once told me that it is nothing but a crooked neck edible yellow summer squash and you could breed it like that. Not so fast. Crooked neck squash has several thousand cumulative years of breeding behind it. Ozark has none. It is not edible and same with the wild Andean pumpkin. There might be some variations found within them as they are grown out over time but it is far from snack time. It is entirely possible the seeds could be harvested and eaten. But it is equally possible I could get sick and die. This would only add to my tombstone, “Ken: Thought He Was Immortal.A Squash Took Him Down Much Too Early.” or shortened to: “Don’t Consume Bitter Alkaloids was his last words.” On the other hand, it’s fortunate the flavor is incredibly acrid. It is impossible to consume even a fraction of a seed. A taste test would have to be very small.

This year a new form of gourd emerged that kind of looked like a spaghetti squash but densely packed with seeds. It had been around earlier and came and went in the population. The deer and groundhogs did consume a portion of the fruits too. That is unusual and a good sign. Maybe they were just hungrier than normal this year. I’m not sure. I could start there to check for the bitter alkaloids as a larger mammal had a role already in selecting it and so far no one that I could tell died in the process. It looks like the groundhogs were eating most of them and one currently lives under my office where he vacations during winter. During this consumption process, the fruits are only half eaten meaning it too would self regenerate the following year without a truck driving over the top of it. That is a great benefit in many ways helping in distribution. You could imagine using the plants as a sort of soil stabilizer in the mix with wildflowers shading perennial plants as they establish. In the end you want a stable end game to the whole dynamic population. This will allow then for greater diversity to emerge if it has to happen in different environments. I found out that the mildew produced on the leaves slows the end of the vine and hastens ripening of the fruit. This signals the season is over for the plant. Each vine does root on the nodes to which further increases it drought tolerance, immunity to vine borer and general overall vigor.

Of course you could try to hybridize it with the Naked seed Austrian pumpkin or other edible squash. But sometimes its the wide unexpected crosses that yield the greatest diversity of which can be totally unpredictable. Unpredictability is a joy to have because now you have distinct options to follow where before it might just be small steps of changes. This particular Styrian pumpkin does appear 100 percent immune to the squash vine borer plus the deer so far have left it alone. With that knowledge in tow, I will have to attempt another grow out in the outback puting it in the presence of small and large mammals and wait for their response. Will my faith be strong enough to accept whatever happens? Will the evil thirteen line ground squirrels show up ready to dine? I think so.

I kind of have the feeling that the gourd patches in my field free of cars will continue along waiting for the perfect moment to drop their seeds. They will be ready to spread weed-like galloping over my pasture free of stupid humans like me trying to taste the seeds. That is the dynamic solution. I’m going with that. I have no choice. Thankfully.

GREEN BLANKET WILD GOURD

Seeds of the selections listed above are available harvested in the fall of 2024. These are a mixture of types all produced at my farm with no care applied. The seeds are easy to grow in a wide range of soil conditions but are especially prolific in herbicide damaged soils similar to what is used along roadsides and conservation easements. Green Cover grows in low organic and drought tolerant soils. It is shade tolerant to a degree able to produce gourds under the shade of oaks. The vines spread up to 25 ft. or more rooting as they grow. Plants have good tendril capabilities able to use the support of other shrubs like honeysuckle and autumn olive as support for the weight of the fruits. Fruits ripen late from September thru October. The fruits can lie on the ground for several years maintaining good seed quality within the shells as pictured above. These can then stepped on to release their seeds and grow into new locations. View the gourds as ‘seed balls’ like the ones people make for roadside distribution of flowering sunflowers or coated seeds with clay. Packet contains 300 seeds. Free shipping for this product.

The Gourd by Kenneth Asmus

I was hit by a dried gourd today. Nothing happened. On impact, I became enlightened in an instant.

What is this gourd I speak of? It is empty inside yet contains the seed of all possibilities within its shell.

If you shake it, you can hear them rattling around in there.

I have a thin shell saving my ideas for later deployment in a world filled with expansive capabilities.

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Diversity Discovered: The Atlantic White Cedar

Posted on November 7, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
The Atlantic White Cedar in Michigan-Chamaecyparis thyoides

It is always a surprise to me that a wetland tree found only in swamps, back waters of streams and lake fronts will grow outside of it’s specific low oxygen and high moisture location into the front of the average home. In Michigan, we have white cedar swamps filled with rich black soils and huge amounts of decaying logs and peat moss. There in the midst of rotting wood and high water tables white cedar, Thuja occidentalis, thrives like no tommorrow. However, it is also very easy to collect seed off these trees and propagate them in open field conditions that corn used to grow. There is a range of adaptibility within these species trees that make them ideal ornamental trees. It says alot on how many varieties there are of American arborvitae. It can grow pretty much anywhere and is easy to cultivate as nursery stock. For a while I tried growing many species of larches following this exact same scenario and ideal. I tried various American larch seed sources here in Michigan including one massive tree I climbed up on vacation. I made it to the top and and collected a bag full of cones. Larch are quite prolific in cone production. American larch also inhabits these wetlands where few trees survive long if at all. It is very specific in its soil requirements. No matter how I amended the soil or took care of my American larch, they failed transplant long term. It would be like trying to grow cattails in a desert. I knew that not all wetland trees had this wide range of soil adaptibilty needed for widespread cultivation.

It was with this knowledge, I proceeded cautiously with the Atlantic white cedar, Chamaecyparis thyoides. Not related to the white cedar here in Michigan it too was a wetland tree with very specific soil requirements or so I thought. I was given the seed from an arboretum collection in the midwest and grew the trees in my polyhouses. My polyhouses were very inexpensive to build but high maintenance in terms of managing a crop. Not everything grew well in them. The polyhouses were 96 ft. long and without fans. Prior to using shade cloth, it was super hot in there with insane moisture levels in the summer. You couldn’t just waltz in there during July where it frequently would peg the thermometer to the top of the 120 F mark. One sashay through there and you looked like you went for a swim. Yet it was from here that the Atlantic white cedar seemed to thrive. My employees not so much. So we put limits on when to go into the greenhouses and picked cloudy cool days in the mornings. Although I did kind of have fun taking people in there on purpose and waiting to see what they would say. People were like trees too. Some did not seem to care with rivers of perspiration running down their face while others had that look of Jesus-I-need-to-get-the-hell-out-of-here-before-I-die in their eyes. Apparently this east coast U.S. species has a very narrow and spotty range in the wild and is only found in wetlands and bogs rich in the same soils that Michigan white cedars grow in. I was still skeptical that it was a long term tree crop because it was under irrigation in the mega sauna polyhouses with help from my nearly passed out employees giving them water and fertilizer on a regular basis. Relax, no one died in the growing of the Atlantic cedar trees.

Eventually I relenquished and took a few of the best trees to my outback and placed them at the base of several hills that I have at my farm. There the top soil was deeper being nearly triple the depth compared to other locations. The exposure to low minimum winter temperatures was very good here to at least minus 27F once plus drying winter winds. Never underestimate dry winter winds when it comes to evergreens. They thrived and continued their growth in a very uniform and stately evergreen fashion. I was home free and so were they. Michigan works for them and so did the non-wetland soil conditions I had them in. With only a sprinkling of sawdust, the trees began to fruit and set cones and we started collecting the seed. The seed was extremely tiny and difficult to get it to pop from the cones. This tight winter opening cone allows the seeds to be slowly dispersed as they land on the black low nitrogen soils and organic material found within their wetlands. In the meantime, we we struggling to clean the seed properly despite all sorts of screens and drying proceedures. I noticed for a while the national cost of the seed is over $2000 per pound. It’s not easy to get either. The trees are not safe or easy to climb like larch or spruce. It explains the cost.

The germination takes place over the course of three years. It is the normal cold dormancy but few plants pop the first year. It is during the second year, the seeds sprout in great amounts. The seeds sit on the surface of the soil and wait. I think this might be due to both a chemical based dormancy as well as the embyo has yet to fully mature. This would be the reason for the first dormancy to start the growth of the embryo to maturity and then the second cold period to overcome the chemical compotents of dormancy. One of my tree friends told me ‘heck with that’ and he froze his seeds in a block of Canadian peat moss and water. He said that really kick started it. When I looked at his propagation bed it did appear more came up the first year but I was not seeing that many trees out of the gate. So I think the second dormancy is ideal for the plant to succeed. I have seen some seeds go into their third year as well if conditions are not met. This is just a fantastic survival mechanism yet frustratingly slow if you are a nursery person.

The Lakey Flake Test

Being in southwestern Michigan means having snowstorms of the lakey flake type created by Lake Michigan and its moisture rich air driven high into the sky and unloaded with great abundance up to thirty miles inland. This can create massive snows which can be light and fluffy as well as sticky. A few times I visited these trees during the lake snows and found the normally 15 to 20 ft. high trees bent to the ground barely reaching 4 ft. tall. I thought for sure they would not survive. It created a type of tree by pruning where half the tree would split at a narrow crotch angle. Many of these trees showed this propensity which is very unusual for evergreens because most tree folks would call that a weakness and to get out the pruners. This ‘errant’ limb would still be attached to the tree but would now be parallel with the ground with branches that would cover my pasture grassses. It is very tempting to want to prune those too but I kept one that dropped all the way to the ground to see what would happen. The result: More upright growth on the parent tree and new ‘trees’ emerging from the stem growing in an upright position. It looked like a line of new trees attached to a log. This is how the tree survives the east coast storms from the Atlantic. It likes the wind. It helps the plant reproduce. I am sure in a wetland envirnoment the limbs would root into the wetland soils and mulch. It thins the crown and makes the tree stronger. This is quite a wonderful solution to wind and snow born events. The other aspect to this tree is its needle thin foliage. It is not a particularly lush rich evergreen tree with massive amounts of dense branching. It is meant to let the wind blow through while at the same time produce copious amounts of seeds all which sprinkle down on the soil below with perfect timing. I beginning to appreciate the value of this tree and how it can do all this so simply.

There are some interesting information of this species on the Wikipedia page. Here is something to consider from my experience with this wonderful tree. It needs to expand its range and we should help with this. I would love to see colonies of it here in Michigan but I would also love to see it as a landscape tree throughout the United States. It has an ethereal look to it. I know that the wood is quite impervious to decay and could easily fit into todays woody ideals in terms of agroforestry and timber production. Another aspect of it relates to establishing it on the east coast. It would be a complete waste of time to remove invasive species or use herbicides or create any number of short lived conditions by these methods for the sake of the Atlantic white cedar. It doesn’t need any of that nor will it help. That would only interfere. The reason is the plant itself is fully self regenerative and self sustaining once you get the populations established which I have discovered to be extremely easy. It is ignorant to think of it as an agricultural crop in some way and then blast everything back to 1491. It doesn’t work that way. The whole mineral based and peat soils are rather sensitive to these disturbances you might call ecological restoration. Think of yourself in a very hot polyhouse. How does it feel for you? Not too bad today? Is it too hot? Can you enjoy the sauna? You look over to your right and see the Atlantic white cedar is there pouring water on the hot rocks. “It’s cleansing and refreshing” says the cedar in a calm, cool and collected way.

That is what they do. Clean. Refresh the world.

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

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