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.
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.
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?
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.
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’
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.
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 Gourdby 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.
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.
lima bean with swirling galactic patterns-just another day at the farm
The thought of creating or exploring a new crop is a good idea. It is very simple. You start with seeds. All new crops start with new seeds. Like an idea the new seeds are something that no one has explored or thought of. You plant it, it takes root as it grows and then changes over time. It can solve a lot of problems and create new possibilities for farmers. It can create a new food rich in flavor and dense in nutrition.
unnamed beans of unknown species and origin grow freely at my farm-shocking I know
About twenty years ago, I became fascinated by beans. I have no idea why. I periodically would sell and give them away in my nursery but it was not something I was serious about in any way. I just liked growing beans. They were so prolific and fun to shuck. I remember once the neighborhood kids were over for lunch at our house playing with my children. We were having green beans from the garden and Kraft mac-and-cheese. They were completely unaware of greenbeans. When one asked “what is this?” I knew beans were not universal in appeal or use. They loved them. I wondered what happened when they went home that night. “Mom, Dad we love beans” could be heard for miles around.
Today I am searching for a deep-rooted perennial protein crop that is easy to cultivate. It can generate food diversity in the process of creating health and wealth for the farmer who grows it to the people who eat it. It doesn’t have to take decades to do and millions of dollars of research. Crop diversity is critical if we are going to make crops healthier to grow and more resistant to extreme climates throughout the world. It can be an individual that will make great discoveries in the field and not a massive breeding project. You are wish that your crop will be adopted and selected from the giant cloud of diversity already in existence hoping it will be appreciated by all even those unaware of its potential.
a cloud of lima beans found floating above my farm
The perennial wild thicket bean, Phaseolus polystachios was not grown as a crop in North America by anyone as far as we know. However it played a part in the diets of the early Native Americans many thousands of years ago before the introduction and use of annual beans. One discovery found the shells in a 9000 year old strata in a cave on the east coast of North America and another on an island in the Detroit River. Obviously the beans did not swim there on their own. Thicket beans have a very hard seed coat which allows them to be stored even in high humidity areas. That reason alone suggests a strong positive for cultivation. But to cultivate a vine like bean means you need wide open areas similar to what you would find along rivers and streams where there is plenty of light and open soil which is perfect for expansion of the population via exploding twisty shells that pitch the beans great distances. This is the habitat of the thicket bean today. There are no varieties of thicket bean but there are slight variations found in the wild. To find all the variations and grow them would be a very interesting exploration of wild crop diversity.
Did you know that beans talk? The thicket does this by ‘clicks’ using the sound of the pods twisting and releasing the seeds into the environment. This is the language. I understand it to mean : “Ken, harvest now or forever say goodbye to your crop.” Thicket bean, Phaseolus polystachios on my trellis system at my farm in Michigan.
I consider this wild bean a cosmopolitan indigenous North American plant lost in its historical use. Some species like the Hurricane bean in Puerto Rico look almost identical to the wild bean of North America. In South America, its close relative the lima bean was cultivated extensively by ancient cultures. The Mayan grew the plant in the forests and jungles as a giant vine. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lima wasn’t perennial in nature long ago. Here was the protein that did not run away. The food fell from the sky as the pods twisted and expelled its beans in the warm sun of its tropical homeland.
prolific limas fall out of the clouds and onto the land of Michigan-its new home where if it decides to stay, it too will be native
I feel fortunate to explore plants left abandoned long ago. I have the luxury of finding ‘cool plant’ things as my college botany professor use to say. Some are forgotten and not considered practical on a larger scale. Many are passed by in industry and commerce. I know there are some good ideas stuck in storage somewhere. I think of the Indiana Jones movie with the Ark of Covenant scene of a giant warehouse filled with many wooden crates one of which contains a valuable treasure. I think of seeds. It could be something of great value but it is nailed shut in a crate in a dark and obscure warehouse in the middle of a desert locked away surrounded by barbed wire. I have to follow the plants and their connection to the real world. I have to see how they respond to all the different environmental conditions that shape their lives. I want to foster a personal connection based on observation and intuition. Every year to me is a joy of discovery and full of unexpected surprises. This is what seeds are meant to do. Change. That is my world of beans and why I follow it like a trail in the forest. Each new vista is inspiring to behold.
tepary bean finds a way upwards past the browse line avoiding the deer and rabbit salad bar altogether
Here is my view of a potential future for a perennial bean long ago forgotten and left as a horticultural oddity. I have listed some of the characteristics that will shape its future and what lies ahead in terms of its cultivation. I found the crate. I have to open it up to see what is inside. You may not want to look directly at it. In this case only good can come from it. It won’t melt your face off. That I can promise.
pink lima flowers shed light on an active and attractive way to attract friends with benefits
The Lima Bean and the Thicket Bean Meet On A Lonely Row In the Middle of My Field of Dreams
I know little about the technicalities of plant breeding and even less about beans. I love beans but I am not a bean breeder or know what sort of ‘shenanigans’ they are up to in terms of combining traits or developing varieties. When I first tried to create natural crosses of the thicket bean to create satellite populations, everything was too separated by time and space. First I tried to flood the area with tepary beans only because to me they look like the thicket bean. There is a subspecies of tepary bean that is perennial. I thought it was a good fit. The goal was to create a cloud of beans and inter-weave plants within the cloud and hope for the best in terms of cross pollination. This works with oaks very easily but they are wind pollinated. That is where I got the idea from. It turned out that the tepary branch of the bean family was too far away to connect genetically. It would be like crossing a red oak with a white oak. It is not likely to happen. The tepary beans engulfed the thicket beans. It looked impressive. I did enjoy growing the wild selections from Native Seeds from the southwestern U.S. The following years I planted several varieties of lima beans because I read they were much more closely related in their family tree. The thicket beans were on a nice long trellis flowering in August and the lima beans were in a series of cone shaped chicken wire trellis’ ten feet away flowering in June and July. The gaps were just too big in time and space. They will never meet during the pollinator banquet. I did raise a nice crop of Christmas limas in the process and became familiar with the lima bean during this time.
Lima clouds found on a Lima bean leaf
Eventually to overcome this, I had to snuggle up the plants next to each other in the same row and trellis interspersing them next to each other while planting the lima beans very late in the season to allow the overlap of the flowering of both species. This meant planting the limas in late June. Not all of the lima beans would form completely and only a small portion of the crop will be usuable. I needed many of them to do this effectively and not just a lone individual. To double down in my wild like varietal selections, I switched to a lima bean called The Heirloom Traveler Lima. It was an old variety grown in Michigan that contained the ‘older than dirt’ traits of exploding pods that twist. The thicket bean explodes its beans too. There were very few insects visiting the flowers of the lima beans the first year. I was wondering what if anything would hybridize the plants. Eventually as I increased the plant diversity with other types of limas and some of what appeared to be their hybrids, I noticed many new types of pollinators including one very tiny fly sneaking in and out of the tiny yellow flowers. The surrounding insect populations were finding and using these new plants as part of their diet. This was an eye opening experience for me because up until then I was a statue in my plantings waiting trying not to scare any insects away. I must of looked whacky out there frozen and staring straight ahead at banks of bean flowers on the trellis walking extremely slow as I worked my way down the trellis.
the carpenter bee goes for the gold while avoiding the whacky guy nearby
I observed many types of hoover flies in my patch of beans. This was a constant. It took several years before the carpenter bees began using both the lima and hybrid flowers going back and forth. My neighbor had an open post and beam shed filled with cavities drilled by the carpenter bees. That was carpenter bee central. Cabbage, oranges, skippers and fritillary butterflies were in strong attendance. During the first few seasons there were few insects pollinating lima beans that I could see. I wondered how they would even form beans. Some people told me it was not necessary as the beans set without pollination. As the generations changed, the flowers began to have shapes that were more pollinator friendly. The flowers were larger with bigger petals and wider openings which allowed a greater diversity of insects to do the crossing. My guess is this attraction was scent based as well as color and size. I no longer had to late plant the limas as now they were in synchrony with the thicket bean. The flowers in new generations became mostly pink but there were a few yellows and white. I finally had my satellite populations of cloud limas and they were orbiting each other. The meeting that I had set up years ago came to fruition. This was a decade long endeavor. The bean shenanigan level hit an all time high and has remained that way since.
Clouds can be any shape or size-all it takes is two widely diiferent species separated by time and space. You may think it looks like a rabbit or a cow or even God. It does not matter. Your cloud can be anything you want it to be as it is based on your interpretation of the natural world where nothing is wrong.
Annual and Perennial in Nature
My explorations with the cloud limas became an engine of diversity far greater than I predicted. The unpredictable populations created both perennials and annuals very easily. There is a great flexibility to it. If you were a strict plant breeder and you needed A TRAIT then this would only lead to frustration. It is a field of mixtures blending like a tapestry of infinite colors. You can create new annual beans as well as develop perennial beans in the process. A new annual bean could contain some delicious treasures filled with health. I think the flavor and texture of the lima bean is much more agreeable than the soybean. It could be possible to use the thicket bean to help discover even more robust selections where vigor, yield and larger bean size would foster a huge robust populations of perennial beans. In terms of growth, it needs to be over the top in terms of root development. It is the root you are actually searching for. It is the basis for everything else; yields, flavor, growth rate in extreme environments. Even without hybridization cultivation of a wild species is possible. However you decide to grow it, you need a broad base of supporting individual plants with natural crossing by the bees, butterflies and flies. This is much more effective than hand pollination or other methods used while creating a strong population of genetically diverse plants. Now you have the cloud in front of you and it is not floating away in the distance. It allows you to enjoy it too. No need to turn into a statue in the middle of the field trying not to scare away pollinators.
Small is beautiful
Small Beans and Fast Cooking Selections
Having a small lentil sized lima bean that is quick to cook would be ideal. On a culinary level a small lima could greatly reduce cooking time and eliminate the need for soaking. In my plantings, small is often associated with heavy yields. The combination of these two traits makes this ideal to cultivate and foster the population along. Many lima bean varieties are not that productive for me so finding small seeded individuals with large amounts of beans all along the vine is a wonderful surprise. The pods are set in large clusters and all along a secondary branch from the main stem (vine) or a single line of them on the vine. It is unknown what percentage are perennial but most have inherited the pink coloration in the flowers. It’s part of the cloud. Synthesis is critical at this juncture.
Uniform Early Ripening For Cold Climates
Finding the sixty to seventy day early season lima beans that ripen a full crop in Michigan is not as common as you might think. It turns out that a lot of the lima bean varieties have a rather long luxurious season much like their tropical homelands in South America. The season is spread out so far that frost is likely to cut a part of the crop short meaning that the beans-seeds will be shriveled and not fully formed. This tendency decreases with time as the population changes and I select for full ripening beans. I now have no problem growing them in the cool spring soils as the plants become more adapted to their northern home. The husks on some plants will remain a solid crispy green color even with frost approaching. This is partially why the lima bean is considered more of a southern crop or delicacy. It is not something you would find growing in a place like Michigan. Although there are Michigan selections and other short season bush limas, the ripening period is late. Even within the hardy northern thicket bean there are late years ripening all of the seeds. These late years and cool summers create crinkly seeds. The heat units during the summer are critical. This year there was plenty of heat and frost still hadn’t arrived as of October 30. The vines have gone dormant now on their own without the help of frost. The stems are a bright green yet.
I was checking out my planting yesterday on October 15th and there are individual plants flowering still. This is normal and highlights a certain evergreen nature that most of us are not aware of. Ideally you want all of the pods to ripen at once to make bean life a lot easier for the farmer to harvest all at once if it was produced commercially. You want the pods to turn brown and dry like soybeans on the bush. Uniformity is the key for that. The population on the other hand is only useful if it can regenerate new diversity and is totally adapted to its environment as time and space marches on whenever and wherever that is. Flowering in the fall is not going to create a winter lima in Michigan however it does hint at its use in the tropics as a perennial bean. So for that reason, I cull nothing. I keep all of the diversity if possible. Plant breeders do not do that because they are hyper-focused on a single characteristic. Diversity like this is a curse for the old scientific back waters of breeding plants.
this is what we dream of-the tap root of the wild thicket beans goes deep-no one knows how deep the roots actually grow. my guess is at least 25 ft. deep judging by measurements of young plants. Here the voles have found something to eat. The roots have responded and continued their downward descent to the center of the earth.
How Perennial is Your Perennial
Within the diversity of a population of a wild plant like the thicket bean, you will discover many traits beyond the obvious ones like flower color. These traits represent the species on its own not selected by human beings. Thicket bean is rare in that it happens to be a bean never to have been bred by a human. The twisty pod characteristic was de-selected a little 9000 years ago but nothing else. For my cloud limas, there is no tell tale sign a single characteristic of the thicket bean hybrids or the species in its ‘pure’ form is seen as a perennial. However a quick look underground of the out of sight root reveals a large tap root. The tap root is the perennial nature in force. Here is the obvious power of the bean. I once found an individual thicket bean plant that fruited very heavy in its first year from seed and then promptly faded like an annual bean. It was a small vine with side branching on a dwarf plant. The annual nature is likely a characteristic of the thicket bean as well. No matter how we grew thicket beans in the nursery, if they were in pots in the polyhouses, it was a 100 percent lost. To me that says part annual and part perennial. It has both natures found within it. It is only a matter of time a population will create a dominant group of perennial beans in a perennial way. This means it is a smooth transition done in a few years of growing and replanting. This is something anyone can do.
The Beans Are Taking Requests and Answering in a Quantum MechanicalWay
The perennial nature of a population of plants may not contain a single dominant trait making it obvious which plants are perennial or which plants are something else that you desire. I think of it more as a quiet expression below the more outward characteristics. When you first grow a perennial species of a common annual plant, it will take time for that plant to build up reserves to set seed. This is common with perennial plants from daylilies to milkweed. As the roots become increasingly larger and the vines grow taller, sooner or later you hit the sweet spot of foliage production and flower and seed set. It is within the third and fourth year of the thicket bean that fruiting will occur. Before that time you may think your plants are sterile because it is locked into a growth only cycle. Sometimes the flowers will form but no seeds are set the first year. This happens especially with super vigorous hybrid plants. The whole population is undergoing a transformation. It is robust in nature and hard to pin down. I tend to view the population as a single individual. It has to stabilize itself as if it was settling down after its great expansion into a new region of space. It is this settling down that you will see new characteristics replicated many other times by individual plants. It is the expression of only the best ideas in the world of beans. This is the trajectory to follow on a course to evolutionary and ecological success. It is not random. The plants will thrive and be fruitful. By and large we have no clue what the beans are up to. It is bean consciousness after all. I define it as a cloud of possibilities. It happens within a group of diverse individuals all uniquely different. We are often confused in our interpretations of real life natural events. Not the beans. The beans are fine and doing their bean thing. We need to catch up to this bean intelligence; bean order, bean creativity and bean consciousness. As odd as all that sounds, that is exactly what best describes the events of my real experience of growing wild beans.There is one vigorous plant that in its first year grew extremely fast to the top of a twelve foot trellis. In year two, the same plant grew many secondary branches this time filling the trellis with flowers and pods with a few seeds. This is one possible beginning of a perennial bean. I now see the multiple sprouts from the same root, giant leaves and vigorous growth overtaking the trellis. It is not a goal but a path to a diverse future.
You are the moderator and guide in your creation of diversity. It is infinite in diversity. To say infinite, I mean there is no end to it. Pay no attention to the “How Can We Help You’ box as you leave the Trader Joe’s store. The specific requests have already been answered. It is done by generating the greatest diversity of all uniquely different plants. All the questions are answered and all requests are fulfilled automatically.
That is bean consciousness. By consciousness I mean intelligence at work structuring itself on the level of the genes as well as the sound and light vibrations behind the genes we have yet to discover. I am sure the micro-RNA is in tow. This is the way to harness a dynamic population of perennial beans beneficial for its cultivation by humans. It all starts as a human desire fulfilled by beans.
the white lima makes it appearance for the first time at my farm-please say hello everyone
4 PACKETS OF BOTH SPECIES AND HYBRIDS OF THE LIMA AND THICKET BEANS described in the above article.
This is enough to enclose a 10 ft. trellis or arbor of your choosing. See details on the link above. Free shipping with this seed offer and the other beans on our website currently grown in the 2024 season here in Michigan.
Thank you for your support and help to steward and spread the cloud limas.
It was over forty years ago when I first peered through the tree line on the land I was about to purchase and spotted hazelnuts. It was a good sign. I had no idea what was ahead of me. Here was an expanse of complete emptiness where I could create a tree farm. Here was the flag of hazelnuts waiving me in. They were found only near the road and under the powerline near the hickory trees dropped by chipmunks and birds long ago.They were loaded with nuts. It was obvious I needed to purchase this fruitful land for my farm.
I began growing them right away. It was joy to do. I found American hazelnuts in other locations throughout the county. One person I met hesitantly showed me a map where he marked all the hazelnuts he could find along the roadsides. He didn’t want me to look too long at his map and figure out his spots. I promised him I would not go to those locations. We both laughed after I said that. There are a lot of hazelnuts along the roads but getting nuts from wild shrubs is very difficult because a lot of animals also love hazels including deer which will eat the nuts husks and all. It is not just knowing the locations but getting there at just the right moment in the fall to harvest.
When I first started selling to the large mail order companies, there was a good market for hazelnut plants. I found I could purchase nuts from other growers and seed dealers and soon began a much larger scale grow out. The gardening companies did not care if the plants were hybrids or not. They just needed hazelnuts. It could be a filazel or it could be a hazelbert. Sometimes they would go into detail on the origin of the crosses in their write ups. Other times, it was left out entirely. You have to realize for them it was a small subset of plants in a subset of edible nuts in a much larger catalog of plants used by the American public. Teeny interest compared to everything else. Eventually they discontinued the selections I was growing because it fulfilled the market and sales did not support the catalog space. Hazels are grown only for one or two years before they are sold. I sold many thousands of them bundled in twine, dipped in water gel and shipped to Iowa and Missouri. If you are a nursery growing plants for sale on a national scale, it tends to be a boom or bust type of thing. When they switch to a different supplier because it is cheaper or drop a product all together, they will not tell you in advance. What you are left with is significant inventory while you scramble to find a market. Since the wholesale market price was so low (partially sustained by the state run conservation nurseries) it was much easier to destroy the plants. I told a local farmer he could dig out as many as he wanted for free. I was coming back from lunch in town and here was this giant pile of brush driving down the road heading right at me. My employee next to me asked, “What the hell is that?” I said, “Relax. It’s Dave and a boat load of hazels in his old flatbed Chevy.” When I peered into the cab I noticed Dave looked a bit disheveled. Later Dave told me he darn near died digging and replanting those. His wife had to take off work to nurse him back to health. I had tens of thousands of hazels. I let them grow as much as possible. Very slowly I began taking out beds of hazels as I began new types of plants and plantings hopefully with a more forgiving market. I started producing seed to sell at that time as well.
It was through these large groups of hybrid hazels that I soon unwillingly became a participant of a giant experiment. I had assumed previous plant breeders had solved the filbert blight problem and growing them from seed despite the genetic diversity was not an issue. Filbert blight has minimal effect on the American hazelnut that I first knew when I purchased my farm. It exists on the plant and really is part of its evolutionary history that benefits the plant. When the older canes begin to weaken, it helps decrease the vigor and eliminate the stems while new ones generate from the roots keeping the plant healthy and productive. Disease in plants is more like a motivator than anything. Time to change. Without disease, plants would be in trouble in many ways. This is the stoloniferous tendency of the American hazel as it continues its life unimpeded by disease. It’s a fantastic work around. With the European hazelnut types as well as the hybrids with it, death of the plant is imminent and painless. The plants rarely have a chance to fruit. It encircles the canes immediately killing the stem. The plant rarely resprouts. By years 3-4 the plants are toast. Here was my giant field of toast. Blackened stems falling over as I walked through the old planting beds crushing the dried twigs as I went. With an over 95 percent failure rate only a few green spots were evident. I didn’t mind the death of my plantings entirely because I could till them into the soil and continue new crops. Build new on top of the old. Never underestimate the optimism of a farmer. I was surprised at how much disease there was and how unforgiving it was to the hybrid plants. I needed a reboot on this project if I was going to continue growing hazelnuts. The last time someone had done that was in the early 1900’s. I gave up on selling to the large mail order companies.
It was from this large sea of nothingness that hazel life sprang forth. From the first batch, I moved 67 plants to new locations on the farm that appeared to show complete immunity. This new group of hybrids I called ‘Precocious’. They were directly selected from plants showing no disease fruiting in a 3-5 year range from seed. I was very happy with myself at first. I must of just cracked the two hour marathon I thought. However, it turned out the time slot of freedom from disease I discovered in the life of these plants was only temporary. The disease also had a work around. This took another decade to sink in fully. Scientists had found the Michigan hazelnut disease was the most powerful in terms of its effects. It was from here I began to use seeds from the most American like and follow the seedlings that were completely immune and healthy despite having small nuts or thick shells. Survival became an all or nothing in terms of the hybrid hazels. In the meantime, the American hazelnuts were singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips by Tiny Tim while humming I’ve Seen All Good People by Yes.You could not stop their upbeat life filled with joy trajectory. I too took note and began growing more selections from my plants near the roadside I had almost forgot about. Dave moved. I visited a few times prior to the new owners bulldozing out his plantings. A few remain today to herald a time gone by.
In the meantime, I continue to add to my plantings and harvest the nuts in the fall. I love the hazelnut plant. The flavor is rich. The catkins remind me of spring. I named a few varieties yet it is calm and slow now. Not a lot of activity. The disease is minor. The plants fruit. No one is interested like before the grow outs. Many others have stepped forward in the cultivar development circle with greater cash reserves and a means to fulfill the teeny market of hobby growers. Will it expand to any degree and become part of a success story of agroforestry and tree crops? I did create one solution to the problem of low crop diversity within a commercial tree crop. I was satisfied with the results because that crop is currently only capable of growing in the United States in the state of Oregon isolated from all other hazels. In many ways, it’s a message in a bottle. Throw it in the ocean and see where the current takes it.
I wish for Dave to drive in. I wish to see a brush pile going down the road again.
I discovered these precocious Viburnum-American cranberrybush plants in a grow out of three thousand seedlings from wild collected Michigan seeds that fruited in three years from seed. As the plants matured they turned out to have secondary spur type branches with heavy fruit set. Viburnum trilobum S.W. MI
There are many types of wild fruits that people use for jam, jelly and syrup. These are harvested locally by those who are aware of a unique fruit that are not cultivated. It is made on stove tops in small batches. There are no commercial plantings where you can buy the fruit. They are processed with loads of sugar. If you take these same fruits and try to consume them directly off the tree or bush you soon find your mouth awry in much torment. The reason for this is that the very compounds that protects the plant from insects and disease is found throughout the sap including the fruit. The fruits usually have a very high mineral and vitamin content along with many types of anthocyanins. These all combine to make the torment even more pronounced to the point the fruit is not possible to eat fresh. This is what fuels my constant use of sugar when I make something from these fruits. I go to Costco. I buy the large bags of organic sugar because lets face it nothing says organic like sugar. To be honest, when the Michigan Sugar Producers decided to go to GMO sugar beets and not separate them, I bailed. I use a 7 cup sugar to 5 cup juice or pulp ratio when I make my jams. I give them as Christmas presents to my family and friends. I use to take my jams and syrups to farming shows and feed everyone my creations on crackers at the end of my presentations. One woman came up to me at the end of my talk once and looked me straight in the eye. She was a close talker. “So you’re a man who makes jams?” Yes I am. I am a man who makes jams. It was right out of a Dr. Suess book. For some reason that was a shock and disbelief to her. My mom taught me how to do that in high school and I continued the tradition. That was the day when you used paraffin wax on top of the jam jar. It is through this type of processing that allows you to tap into the nutrition and flavor found within these fruits. It puts it into a delivery system that you can spread it on toast in the morning. I like that system. Today I view it as a gummy type of vitamin with intense flavor. Each tablespoon is filled with dense nutrients. It is good with yogurt. You are not going to get that same effect with regular fruit. There the flavors are weak. Yet we know the trade off is delicious fruit you can eat fresh with regular old fruit.
Flava was found in Manitoba and grown in the most northern reaches of the United States. It produces a lot of fruit but the fragrance was not appreciated by everyone.
The American Cranberry Bush – Viburnum trilobum
People who worked for me know this smell. The whole barn was dense with it when we ran it in the seed processor. I call it the old-gym-socks-stuck in-your-locker for-two-months-in-high-school fragrance. I had a selection that was yellow that was particularly bad. Normally yellow means mellow in fruit taste. The fresh taste was even more putrid than the reds. Each seed source had a slightly different fragrance and taste. I collected a few locally and began seed production right away using the varieties Phillips, Flava or Yellow, Local Compacta and seedlings from Montana. At that time no one really was selecting for fruit production. I was interested in the fruit quality and quantity. The fruit is used for jelly in the northern regions of the U.S. and Canada. The use revolves around using the fruit like a cranberry of which it is not even remotely related. I started torturing myself by taste testing many seedlings over time while growing them at my farm. Finally, a much more experienced grower and wild food afficinado told me to wait until several frosts and then try. That was a revelation wrapped in a good idea. The fruit is much better when the frosts weaken the grip of the tannins and astrigency in the fruit. The flavor changes over the course of two months on the bush. I began to propagate a few of them from cuttings that had a relatively friendly taste that was possible to consume fresh without having to snap your head back to get down. One selection did not require the frosts and I felt that selection was better than the average gym sock. The varieties do have a smoother flavor yet still retained their tart and cranberry like essence. In my seedling grow outs I found several types that I developed further because the fruit production was far greater than the average plant. This stemmed from finding plants with side branching that produced heavy fruit set. Normally fruit is only set on long canes. This easily trippled the volume of fruit per bush. In case you’re wondering, there is no market for the results of my research. American Cranberrybush is used extensively as a wildlife conservation and ornamental plant. I did not make something necessarily better but I did find a flavor profile that is useful for the making of new fruit products like juice and syrup. So for now, I will lay low waiting to pounce on someone with my high school gym socks fruit. Watch out. I might send you a jar of it. Afterall I am a man who makes jam.
It is easy to spot the American cranberry bush from a long distance.The bright red berries hang on to the plant in clusters near the outside of the bush when all the foliage has long dropped in the winter. This seedling below was grown from seeds collected originally in Montana. I called it ‘Movin-to-Montana’ selection. It had heavy yields and thick dense fruit clusters which were useable after frosts. Get a cuppa coffee. Some may know this reference. Others will have to look up the song Moving to Montana by Frank Zappa.
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