biologicalenrichment

Dreams of Crop Diversity-The Perennial Bean

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

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.

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 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 Mechanical Way

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

THE CLOUD LIMA SEED PACKET AVAILABLE FROM OIKOS TREE CROPS

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.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged agriculture, bean consciousness, bean hybrids, Beans, beneficial-plants, crop-diversity, ecology, food, garden, gardening, hybrid plants, Lima bean, perennial bean, plant-diversity, seeds, thicket bean, vegetables | Comments Off

The Hazelnut Arrives

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

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.

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

”Take a straight and stronger course………”

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged agriculture, Corylus americana, Corylus x hybrid, ecology, filazels, food, hazelberts, hazelnuts, nuts, seeds, tree crops | Comments Off

Flavor in the Distance

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

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.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged berry, food, fruit, fruit growing, jams, jellies, nature, recipes, Viburnum, wild fruit | Comments Off

Flavor Impossible

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Some of the plants I grew at my farm were the ‘lost in translation’ of the edible world. I was not sure how anyone, made use of or processed and consumed in some way their fruits or foliage. The flavors were impossible to enjoy. There might be good reason for this. Processing can eliminate the bitter alkaloids or remove any number of compounds which are not good for humans. Some of them are toxic and damaging to the human physiology. Others are more like the amount eaten or dosage which would require tests based on your body weight and what else you consumed that day. I have listed a few of these here only because they often skipped over in terms of actual edibility. Some nurseries and seed companies paint a very rosey picture of the flavor impossible plants. The rabbits may skip them too.

Good King Henry was an easy plant to grow. It was vigorous and produced large amounts of foliage. The name ‘poor man’s asparagus’ hints at its use as a perennial green vegetable but its flavor was off the charts bitter in its raw state no matter what time of year I harvested it. Unfortunately I never had the chance to cook and eat it. It was so bitter that I never got that far. I freaked. It flowered once at my farm, but it was not persistant as a perennial plant. For that reason, the experiment ended.

The Mexican plum is one of the few plums impossible to consume fresh off the tree. The highly astringent plums make your mouth completely numb and dry like a desert. Like an unripe persimmon, there is no way to finish the fruit before it is ejected with great velocity from your mouth. I am sure with enough sugar and processing you could make a jam from it. Maybe. I still have a few plants and I am hoping to move them this fall to better locations. It is an extremely drought tolerant species and does not grow very well in Michigan. This astringency may be less pronounced in very hot climates so maybe that is the key. I am guessing.

The buffaloberry is one of those forgotten indigenous North American shrub heroes of the nitrogen fixing realm. The plants produce a extremely tart berry with a ph of 3. You will ask yourself what is happening to your mouth as you chew the fresh berries along with the seeds into a acrid soapy paste. It is high in phenolic compounds which hints at its potential health benefits for the prevention of cancer. The soapiness to me says saponins. In moderation, that is a healthy compound but makes it impossible to eat fresh off the bush. This species will likely be used like seaberry. The plants were short lived in southern Michigan. Sugar may hold the key.

Buffalogourd is poisonous. Everyone knows that. It is high in alkaloids beyond belief they say. You will die they say. The smell of the leaves are old road kill leave alone fragrance. I once put my tongue on the freshly cut surface of the fruit only to realize the taste sensation I was expecting was nowhere near where I was heading. To say it was bitter is a kind statement filled with hope and salvation at the end. There was none. I spent the next five minutes trying to wash the flavor out of my mouth with repeated water rinses. Later after processing and drying the seeds for sale, I had the thought to taste the seeds. Maybe they will be different I thought. Maybe I am a genius I thought. What a great idea I thought. Why? What is wrong with me? Didn’t I learn the lesson the first time? No. The seeds were concentrated bitter too. But maybe in the background there was a slight hint of pumpkin seed. This highlights a larger problem besides my blind ignorance. People read the cultural use of plants not realizing that there were procedures in place to harness that wild plant in some way and to make it safe and better tasting. Many of these techniques are lost in time. You can’t back breed, hybridize, or select plants suitable for eating until you know this process and the culture around it. With scientific data in tow, you need to know how that translates to a healthy food creating a direction to follow. From there you can discover the flavors of the edible wild of the world’s flora. Carefully and comfortably outside of impossible flavor.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged bitter foods, cultivated, ecology, edible wild, food, foraging, gardening, nature, vegetables, wild crops | Comments Off

Alders Grow the Extra Mile

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

The Genus Alnus contains some amazing unsung heroes of tree crops.There are no commercial stands of alders or horticultural varieties to be found in cultivation. As far as I could tell there were no indications that any nursery produced alders in the recent past and none going back. From what I have read about the tree often resembles the copy of what other people have written but no corroborating evidence. There was a cutleaf form rarely produced. But who knows maybe it was grown somewhere at some time for some specific use. You just don’t see it in production today or in any historic landscapes of any type. Certainly no one took interest in the genus as a means for wood production or ornamental appeal. Birches are in the same family and they took front and center. You can’t compete with the birch bark appeal. One alder species I was familiar with was the speckled alder, Alnus rugosa. It is the species most likely to be found in Michigan where it forms thicket like growth along trout streams. It is the one that trout fisherman complain about getting their flies stuck into.

If you decided to produce alders just for wood production, you would be trying to emulate the red alder of the Pacific Northwest. It is considered a weed tree in many ways yet lately has been used for furniture. I purchased a night stand made of red alder. It is a light wood easy to work. It took stain nicely and had no knots. No one knows of the alders nitrogen fixing capabilities or how they would grow in different environments benefiting other plants in its vicinity. When I was producing plants in my nursery, I too tried to grow many species throughout the world. I tried small amounts of them trying to estabish them on my farm for future seed production. I felt the genus was under valued and had potential for wood production much like popular. In the end, I found that most of the species I tried were not very forgiving to dry conditions or what would be considered non-wetland environments. I found a very nice speckled alder at my familys’ Christmas tree farm next to our pond in central Michigan. I produced that for a while. In some ways it was annoying to get calls on its origin because speckled alders are amazing and so beneficial at holding soil and preventing erosion near streams and ponds. Many people are not familiar with alder identification too. It is a fish out of water when someone puts them in a landscape. They need water and will slowly die unless under irrigation. It was the cattails of trees. Over ten different species of alders failed at my farm many from China, Korea and Russia. Alders were specific in their soil needs.Who knew?

In the end, the most adapted of all the species was the Italian and the Oriental alders. Today only the Oriental alder grows at my farm. It has proven its adaptibility in dry soils in mixed plantings of pear and pawpaw. There is a nice stand of alders near one of the rivers here in southwestern Michigan I use to cross when I picked up soil for my farm. I tried to get seed once, but they were blanks with no fertile seed within the cones. This particular grove was in standing water difficult to collect. Judging by the size of the colony it was likely established prior to the bridge being built. One year they cut them all down to do bridge work and widen the road. Some of the single stems at that point reached 20 feet high. I was sorry to see them go. The next year they all grew back to roughly the same height they were prior to cutting. That in itself highlights the power of the alder. Like popular you have a large root system established generating trees at lightening speed. That is a good thing. Judging by this colony, it would be a good one to clonally propagate from root or top cuttings. There are several variants of alders or subspecies listed. This is one of them in southern Michigan. I have yet to find black alder. I keep looking.

I kept at my alder species plantings but it was the least successful of all tree crops I had ever grown. The failure rate was very high. Eventually it was only Oriental alder, Alnus orientalis standing. It was from an arboretum planting similar to Michigan’s climate in its cold hardiness. It produces fertile seeds and is one of the best for dry sandy soils. The real value of it is that it naturally produces a straight trunk with minimal pruning. It is a sort of red alder knock off in that regard and could be grown for its light and knot free wood like red alder is used after the spruce and fir are harvested.

Surrounded by oaks, pawpaw and pears, the Oriental alder makes it way to the canopy of the food forest at my farm.

The more I read about alders, the more I realized this nitrogen fixer of a plant could play a giant role in fixing damaged land where nothing else grows. It could reclaim fire damaged land and create a useable resource in the process very quickly. It could also be used as the first crop prior to hardwoods and walnuts. Not many people know the value of secondary plant crops within the development and establishment of permanent tree crops. The alder could be our neighborhood tree species that could welcome home other tree crops unfit for reclaimed land. Its very existence enhances the growth of other plants in its vicinity. This is the situation I faced with wind and drought with my chestnuts on a hill. Secondary trees like the alder can slow down wind speed and hold precious moisture in the soil while colonizing it with roots with nitrogen nodules attached. Now you are fertilizing the soil with leaves, twigs and prunings you create. The thick underground root system holds the soil in place while capturing nitrogen via air in the process. There is a lot of land that could benefit from the Alder where you cannot just plunk in the trees you want and expect them to look like sequoias in twenty years. The alder is the bridge tree and could provide a secondary tree crop for wood. It is an easy idea to employ and an inexpensive fix to a larger problem. No bulldozers are needed. No giant mounds of mulch are required. The alder is a mulch generator and land and water holder.

From Seed:

The seed production of Oriental alder is prolific but it rarely establishes at my farm on its own. I can only find one seedling near a path I walk on to the planting. I think I played a role in that one seedlings establishment. Why? Well it turns out that only bare soil will work. And not just any bare soil too. It has to be bare soil with the seed tamped into the surface of the soil and not covered by leaves or frass of any type. Once the conditions are met, the dormancy of the seed can be overcome only by sunlight. Sunlight will turn the cotyledons a light green within the seed. This will in turn cause the seed to sprout. That is the beginning of the alder tree. That is why you do not see hundreds of thousands of seedling alder trees under or around the two Oriental alders that are currenlty fruiting at my farm. If you want alders to reseed, damage the existing vegetation beyond repair to the point only soil remains free of organic litter. Birch is the same way. Some of the most bulldozed soil at my family’s tree farm now contain the highest density of white birch trees. You need completely barren soil for the seeds to stick to the top surface of the soil to receive light to germinate fully. This explains why we noticed when we propagated them only the seeds exposed to light sprouted. This is a common germination requirement of some birch species where light itself overcomes dormancy within the seed. Sometimes you need cold dormancy too. It explains why the hundreds of thousands of seeds that rain down on me when I prune never establish. I kind of wonder what type of birds would eat the seed. I plan to harvest the seed this year and do cut tests.

It would not take a great deal to test new plantings and create new clones useful for agroforestry applications. For now, the alders will remain the unsung heros hidden from view growing in places where few plants can grow. Now if only we can harness this possibility and employ it in our quest of tree crop woody agriculture.

Life finds a way.

Bell flower on a rock jetty out in Lake Superior

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged agroforestry, alders, Alnus, Alnus orientalis, environment, fast growing, lumber, nature, nitrogen fixing, Oriental alder, tree crops, trees, woody crops | Comments Off

Chinquapin Chestnut On the Move

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

In the shadow of the hardwood forests of North America lies a well kept treasure rarely cultivated. It is a small nut shrub called the chinquapin. Unlike any number of chestnut trees cultivated or wild, the chinquapin is mostly thought of as wildlife food. For the most part people thought the nuts were too small to fiddle with. You cannot peel them like a normal chestnut. Nonetheless they are a great wild food easy to pick or shake while crunching away skin and all. From a cultivated point of view, the plants are precocious and fruit at a young age. They prefer a lightly acidic sandy well drained soil and can grow into zone 3. At my farm they took the minus 25F at my farm several times. The chinquapin is one tough little shrub with immense staying power. Despite chestnut blight and changes in the forests over time much of it human induced, it is still here cranking out nuts like there is no tommorrow. I became super absorbed into finding this rare treasure at one point and began producing it at my farm. The little shrub that could was not particularly easy to find in commerce either in seed form or seedling. Apparently no one was fiddling with it. I had to find out why.

My first introduction to the plant came from a nursery mentor that lived near me. It was right after college and he operated a wildlife nursery out of his yard specifically for birds. He only had one shrub. As a result, no nuts. It needs cross pollination with another of its species, Castanea pumila. The cute little burs would form but with no nuts were inside. It was a joy and frustrating at the same time to see it in growth but no way to taste or propagate it.

About a decade later, I was at a chestnut farm in mid-Michigan. By now I had my farm and was producing seedling trees. They too had only one shrub and it was at the edge of the orchard. It had a few burrs but they too were mostly empty. Because the chinquapin was surrounded by a lot of chestnut trees of many kinds, there was some light cross pollination between the species and the chinquapin. But it was no chinquapin nut bonanza and no way to taste test those precious three nuts from that one plant. Eventually those went into my orchard plantings where one still survives today.

Hybrid chinquapin with small chestnuts and burrs. They too open up fully and expose their seeds to the birds to carry off.

Hybrid chinquapin chestnut pruned upwards tree form.

I decided to create my own seed orchard. I ordered ten plants from a chestnut nursery in Ohio who had a group of ‘pure’ non-hybrid fruiting chinquapin shrubs. Along with the hybrid plants these are the seed sources I still offer to the public. That particular seed source has been stable and fruitful despite everything around it including chestnut blight. I still have two out of ten plants. As time went on I found a seed dealer in the south that provided me with even a greater variety of subspecies found in the southeastern U.S. He was accessing wild trees which were difficult to find and even more difficult to get there at the right time to secure the harvest. Evidently the chinquapin family tree has a lot of branches throughout the U.S. Each subspecies is difficult to tell apart and in many ways are considered more of geographical variants. Some are more tree like too. The highly perishable nuts are difficult to produce a plant from because they sprout immediately after harvest. Refrigeration is not good. They rot super easy no matter how you attempt it. You have to plant them immediately. They are hypogeal in nature throwing down a root first in the fall right after the seed is fully ripened on the tree. After winter dormancy, then the top sprouts which then grows the tree. We were doing potted trees and holding them over in the polyhouses as they sprouted their roots into the pots.This was a tenuous means of growing chinquapin with a thirty percent loss but it did work better than any other method. We would mulch the pots to prevent them from drying out in the winter. This finicky nature I had experienced is the definitive power of the tree to establish in new areas. The birds carry the seeds away and every now and then drop them where they get covered by leaves or pushed into the soil by deer hooves while the root sprouts and goes deep within the soil. Even if the nut is ripped off its root and is consumed by rodents, the root is already established and is not going anywhere. As long as there is an epicotyl or sprout there is no need for the nut now. It has done its job. It produces a new plant. Once winter dormancy is set in, the epiecotyl or sprout can begin its growth in the spring after the cold period of dormancy. Its a good system. Don’t mess with it. Fit in.

Today the chinquapin has gotten new fans.I see them as non-profits, institutions and on social media. New ideas have come along with hybridization, wild forms of selected plants immune to chestnut blight, digging up and resuscitating old breeding projects of the past as well as just growing the plants as they are found in the wild with no so called improvement. Sometimes improvement is over rated. Not everything humans do to plants are beneficial in the long run. But it would be of great benefit to have additional population level plantings accessible to the public to help promote the crop. Hybrid plants may create a more precocious and delicious chinquapin with a larger nut. Nurseries are not likely going to produce it. It is too much work for them as they are scramble to stay alive. But eventually you could find it in a nursery devoted to such an endeavor and nothing else. Because the chinquapin is a native North American plant, it might get promoted on that level including the hybrids or selections. If there ever will be such a thing as a commercial crop, a shaker and a machine to separate the spiny husks and nuts as well as a means to de-skin the nut would be ideal. Like the pistachio of chestnut, chinquapin would make a good snack food. I happen to agree with a lot of people who insist the chinquapin is the best flavored chestnut in the raw state. It is quite sweet and has a very nice smooth texture. I could see where it could make a fine flour or make a great nut milk. You can also have the once in while wild snack food crunching away skin and all.

In many ways I get connected to certain plants because of all the experiences I have had with them. I tended to combine those over the years to try to grow something that others may benefit. That was my nursery despite making plants ‘commerce’. You become personally attached to those plants you grew or harvested. The last three years I made new plantings along a hillside where I lost a lot of chestnuts due to blight. I used the hybrid crosses as well as the species from the southern U.S. and put them in a single row hoping they will eventually cross pollinate each other and create full burrs of three nuts. This year a few started to flower and look robust. I planted a few potatoes around them as I mulched them with composted wood chips as if to welcome them to their new home. The deer took a few bites of foliage and added their calling cards. Chinquapin is on the move and I’m right behind it.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

Chinquapin chestnut-non hybrid species type Castanea pumila

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged biodiversity, Castanea, Castanea pumila, chestnut, chinquapin, ecology, environment, hybrid chestnut, nature, wild food, wild species | Comments Off

Hog Peanut Moves to the Light

Posted on October 8, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

The underground peanut as a subterranean bean sees the light of day for the first time.

A heavy seed set is insured if the vines are grown in full sun and put on a trellis. This trellis is a four foot tall two foot diameter cone of one inch chicken wire. Pollination is done mostly by bumblebees.

A small tuberous crop, hog peanut is harvested in the fall starting in early October. It forms on long rhizomes that develop directly from the vine and from the roots that spread from last year’s peanut. This variety called Crispy Snack was found at my farm and stewarded for a decade before releasing as a variety. It has larger than average tubers and is high yielding in aerial beans. It is from Michigan germplasm found in northern Michigan and given to me by a former employee and intern. Over time it likely crossed with the hog peanuts I have at my farm as well and created this unique variety.

The small seeds are edible too and can be cooked like lentils. The pods produce 2-3 beans each and are very productive.

Seed production per plant is high and is useful to develop new varieties as well as an edible seeded variety for the aerial beans it produces. The pods twist to eject the seed at great velocity and distance.

Once a seed repository is built up including varietal selections like Crispy Snack, seeds can be used for the production of the tubers. You can pelletize the seed for greater uniformity and inoculate it with appropriate nitrogen fixing bacteria. It is two crops in one. Edible seeds and edible tubers.

The texture is very smooth with a creamy light buttery flavor in its raw state. The yields could be improved on as well as the way it is grown. It is one of my most flavorable tuber crops in the raw state. I just wish I had more of them to harvest. They are frustrating in terms of their low yields. I have plans made to increase the production of them for 2025. Seeds are available late fall this year. (2024) There are other individuals who have developed selections of them world wide that have focused on the tuber production. It wouldn’t surprise me the usually slow moving crop improvement industries of modern agriculture hoist one up related to its seed production. Maybe they are afraid of its invasiveness or weediness.

Left to right: Crispy Snack Hog Peanut seeds and pods, Lima bean hybrid, tepary bean (Dark Purple) hybrid, 1 dragon bean, 2 dragon bean and 1500 Year Old Cave Bean cross.

The light of day is also the light of our awareness which can shed light on the value of this crop and many others often obscured by our lack of knowledge of the natural world in its infintie variety.

Crispy Snack hog peanut tubers like all new root crops need conditions that are often not met in cultivation. For the hog peanut this low yielding rather stubborn tuber and its traits appear to be highly specific under certain conditions. Sometimes the yields are super high for one plant for no apparent reason whatsoever. What conditions those are and how they can be replicated is the next hurdle to overcome in this wonderful delicious perennial crop. In the meantime, this duo crop plant can produce both beans (seeds) and tubers too. No one has taken a look at what is within these delicious treasures in terms of its nutrition both the seeds and tubers. The seeds seem to have great possibilities to me in terms of growing and harvesting it within the existing technologies of modern agriculture. No need to gene edit. No need to create a massive breeding project. No need to raise money from individuals or government to make it a reality. It’s here now.

If someone wants to disparage the plant and says the ‘i’ word (invasive) then yelling fire in a crowded theater is not good. I have heard the lawyers of hog peanut have huge cash reserves and are ready for their day in court. How? But laying forward a path to a healthy and happy human being. Watch out. They mean business. This crop plant can take everything lying down on the soil while reaching high into the air. They win in court every time even against their fiercest adversaries who believe that the hog peanut is just a weed. Just a weed? Not possible.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged agriculture, biological enrichment, crop-diversity, ecology, edible, food, garden, gardening, hog peanut, nitrogen fixation, plants, seeds, tuber-crop, vegetables, wild, wild plants | Comments Off

The Perfect Plum

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

One of my early nursery experiences with another nursery owner on the west coast was with plums. He was producing an Asian species from seed like gangbusters. I started seeing them in the some of the giant retailers like Gurney Seed Company. He would crank out seedling Asian plum trees and then market them to the public as ‘new and improved’. I think his source was hardy into zone 3 and likely was the Ussuri or Japanese plum. It is considered one of the world’s hardiest plums able to grow right up there next to zone 2. His nursery did not last long plus I was told he moved to a different country. I only knew of him as a company not in person. It was kind of a unique situation in that the fruit industry is totally using grafted trees of a clonal nature and here he was popping out a seedling tree of the same species for 45 cents. Obviously the fruit industry would not take this seriously and ignore his new and improved as yet another seedling tree. I was wondering if anyone every looked at the population of a well known cultivated plant that is only grafted? The answer was no. That is not how it works. The questions then become what is improved as a seedling and what is different about its use as a unamed seedling plant? And that really was and still is the issue. It does not fit into our nice categories of cultivated, grafted, clonal or seedling including new and improved. I want to know is this a valuable seed source and what can be expected if you did decide to grow it from seeds? I was going to find out.

One year one of my friends had cranked out a huge volume of plums grown from a mail order retailer using grafted trees and possibly one of the west coast seedling plums at his home here in Michigan. He lived near me so I visited and found a massive crop on the ground when I got there. He let me harvest enough plums to process for seeds. It was definitely a seedling bonanza of Japanese plums. He had both the yellow and a large purple plum. They were very sweet. This species Prunus salicina is well known for its sweet plums highly cultivated throughout the world as “Shiro” and many other varieties all clonally produced. I had enough plum seeds and I produced over five thousand seedlings. Life was very good in the beginning with zero disease or insect problems on the trees. But eventually by years three and four black knot came calling and there was dues to pay for my care free selection process as my trees were in the real world now. Black knot disease exists on chokecherry and many other Prunus species. On some species, it has little or no noticeable effect. On others it encapsulates the branches and turns it into a ‘black knot’ filled with giant growths around the stems. The trees eventually die. My thousands of trees were soon exiting the real world for the land of mulch. I tilled them under. But before I rushed off to till, I made some selections that I thought were immune to the dreaded knot. There were very few maybe one per five hundred trees if that. The ‘new and improved’ was born in the form of black knot free. That was the only selection criteria. As those seedling trees began fruiting, I realized that the immunity was in more of a highly resistant category as I continued to loose a few more. However, this time it was only a small percentage. Sometimes you still had the disease but it was limited in its effects. Or in the Big Lebowsky way, sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. The fruits on the other hand make you forget your troubles when you first bite into them. The flavor is so sublime, sweet and full of rich juice. It is interesting in that the yellow color is the only color from the population despite using the red and purple colored selections. Purple was even more susceptible than the yellow turning into a deep fried tree. The immune trees are super vigorous often large reaching 30 feet easily. To me its a perfect plum. To others its just a seedling. I have a new area of several seedlings planted. I love to see the results despite not having enough room at my farm to do a lot of them. I planted them near a row of hickory and pecan hybrids as a type of understory tree. They seem to tolerate shade easily and still fruit.

Like any scientific endeavor, replication is the key. You need further plantings in new locations to secure the seed source and improve upon it even more. I know that new and improved needs constant attention to make it newer and even more improved than the original. That is the nature of seeds and the every widening road of adaptibility of the species. They have to be used and allowed to grow in new environments far outside their native ranges. Without that, there would be no agriculture. It has to step outside of the boundaries of restricted breeding, commercial endeavors, retail internet and the conservation industry. Perfection like beauty is found is in the eye of the beholder.

Forest like growth of the Japanese plum Prunus salicina var. ussuriensis From the original planting this tree has shown high resistance to disease for over 30 years. The disease itself also changes and will find a ‘work around’ so you need genetic diversity to stay ahead of the changes eventually passing the threshold of susceptibility. It all happens effortlessly within a population. Getting my pole pruner out of the tree as pictured above was not as effortless.

Not too bad for no spray. Probably would benefit from neem sprays to lower insect and disease damage. Some worm damage occurs and those fruits drop early in the season.

A chipmunk planted young ussuri plum tree under pignut and bitternut hickory trees. This particular tree was incredibly fruitful but eventually was filled with black knot. I no longer use this seedling for seed as the yields continue to drop as the tree fades into the land of mulch. You always want to use trees that are immune to disease for seeds so those seeds will continue to produce another generation disease free and pass those traits on to the next generation. There is no real practical means to remove black knot. Pruning is only temporary and not effective. Some folks live in black knot free areas. These are often outside of the areas where this disease has never been found as it has no particular host plant upon which to survive. You cannot spread the disease via seed. The seed is impervious to getting infected. It has to be live stem tissue. Another advantage of growing a tree from seed.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged agriculture, ecology, fruit production, garden, gardening, japanese plums, multi-story agriculture, nature, plants, plums, regeneration, seeds, tree | Comments Off

The Edible Rose

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

First rose selection done at my farm for its delicious edible petals

Starting in the early 90’s I started a collection of species roses at my farm. I would plant different cultivated rose seeds that I found in my area or wild roses I found on vacation. I placed the seeds in propagation trays to put them through dormancy outside in the polyhouses. Then we would pluck them out of the flats as they sprouted and plant them in paper and peat pots. It was a simple process to extract the seeds. When I found the hips on a certain plant I liked for whatever reason, I would take them to my farm and whiz them up in a blender and then decant off the fruit. I would put the seeds on a screen to dry a little before planting in the trays. In the nursery industry, there was only one or two species grown to any degree. In general, people had a fear of species roses because of the thorns and what is thought of as their uncontrollable nature. It was estimated at one point that 25 percent of all nursery sales in the United States were roses. Roses were grafted and grown in abundance in Texas. There are literally thousands of varieties of them. On the species level, there was maybe three or four.

Davids Rose Rosa davidii This species grew well in Michigan.

I became focused on hip and petal production because of their well-known health benefits. As far as I could tell no one had bred roses specifically for this purpose. In the nursery trade it was the Rugosa rose for hips and nothing else. Damask rose was used for its petals for the Ayurvedic formula Gulkland made with rock sugar. I grew that species for a while but seeds were extremely rare as it was usually clonally produced. I knew I could find better examples that tasted better or were a lot easier to grow under cultivation. I was hoping to find more productive and longer lived selections and species. As far as I knew no one was looking at the global rose hip or petal production picture in terms of cultivation in the U.S. Many countries had their own preferences or varieties developed. I was able to obtain seeds of some of these selections and began to grow them at my farm. Everything that is within the edible rose market was imported. I was making rose petal jam from dried dog rose petals that I ordered from a local food co-op. I loved the flavor of the Indian cabbage rose selections used in Ayurveda. Those had a long history of cultivation and use. The flavor was superior to everything else I had tried up to that point. I now had a goal for a flavor profile from the petals.

Wild Thang rose seed strain grown from seed. A hybrid with Rosa canina.

I decided to start from scratch and grow them all from seed. Many were from arboretum collections all around the world. I also purchased pound lots of seed from seed dealers in the U.S. Because rose seed has an incredibly hard seed coat which is designed to go through the intestines of a bird, seeds processed by humans were usually good too. I found many rose hips on vacation on the shores of the Great Lakes as well as hips on ornamental roses. One of the ornamental types likely created the “Mary Jo” rose. (The above image) It was my senior year in college and I lived about a mile away from campus. I had an old ten speed with horrible brakes that I used to get around on. I overslept and was very late for my agricultural class exam on east campus. I had to take this one corner at the base of a steep hill very fast to get enough momentum to make it up the hill. The corner house had a wonderful garden of roses along a split rail fence. When I hit the curb and went airborne over the fence, the last thing I saw were the roses. I had the thought don’t crush the roses because I knew how much care and cost the hybrid T roses took. I did miss them and ended up in the lawn. The rim on my bike was completely bent and the people who owned the house let me store my bike there while I hobbled off to get to my exam late and beat up. A decade later I moved to the area, and I decided to jog by that house. To my surprise, they still had the roses but not in the same density as before. I picked one of the hips near the road and extracted the seed. The hybrid T roses are highly bred and rarely have viable seeds. The hips are often a green fruit shaped like a cup with no seeds inside. The hips rarely ripen fully. But every now and then you get one large seed in the middle of the hip. This plant had one of those and I grew the variety ‘Mary Jo’ from it. I since repeated this experiment using other highly bred roses with the hips harvested in November from public gardens where there is a good mix of varieties. It is interesting the progeny from these seed sources are so broken down genetically that rarely is there a plant that grows vigorously and healthy from the seed lots. I viewed it like breeding a ’race horse’ with few possibilities of winning the Kentucky Derby of roses. I loved the texture of the thick petaled hybrid T roses. Yet many of them did not have fragrance or flavor. The two go together. Even today when I see rose hips, I want to harvest them. Many times when I found certain selections, I would bring them to my farm only to realize there was no seeds inside. This is the world of over breeding and roses.

Prickly Wild Rose grown from seed from the upper peninsula of Michigan.

Many of the native Michigan species roses were very easy to grow from seed. There were many species that I collected in the Keewanaw peninsula in Michigan’s upper peninsula. They provided a nice selection of species roses for landscape use but they were not that flavorable or productive enough for hip or petal production. I did find one selection with a very strong bouquet and put it at the top of a hill at my farm. The whole area smells wonderful in early spring when this one plant flowers. It does not produce hips. This experimental attitude highlights the benefits of cultivation of roses for human consumption. Unless you test these species over time, you cannot appreciate or understand what direction a population is leading you in. Most people who breed roses are not going to fiddle with species. Like apple varieties, they need a cultivar at the end with a patent after their hard work. For me, I want a species population that is refined enough like corn varieties that can be produced from seed. It is more than making one or two selections. Unfortunately, I ran out of room. You need to have hedgerows of nothing but roses to test the whole system of cultivation for hips and petals. It is such a huge area of untapped potential. I think rose seed oil, rose petals and rose hips. Other people think Jackson and Perkins with the embossed metal tags.

In one of my grow outs, I found a small rose with intense fragrance and another with hips when only two years old. These greenhouse discoveries made me move several plants out to other areas of my farm to see how they would do on their own without spray or care other than sawdust mulch. It worked and today I have many very nice species types all established and growing on their own free of disease and insects. The hip production is significant. My original ‘Wild Thang’ roses were low yielding in hips but insanely vigorous and with large canes reaching up to 15 ft. long. They shared one unique trait. They had no foliar diseases. For a rose that is rare. At the garden center I use to work at, rose fungicides and pesticides were the leading chemicals in sales. No wonder people fear roses. You have to nuke the surrounding areas to enjoy them.

Advancing the goals of a healthy environment and a healthy human being can create the means for coming out of the research of plant selection and smelling like a rose in the end.

David Adams copyright.Selected seedling from my farm grown from seed from a highly cultivated rose.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged ecology, edible rose, flowers, food, gardening, plants, rose, rose petals, seeds | Comments Off

Beautiful Orderly Plants

Posted on September 24, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Under a powerline ground to sawdust by the tree services of Consumers Power is an autumn olive bush which resprouted creating this one bud sport or sprout which is variegated. From a hundred sprouts only one is variegated. Variegation can be short lived or fade altogether in the years to follow. Variegation is attractive in the ornamental world we live in. There are many variegated Oleander family members like the autumn olive already in existence. This is the second autumn olive variegated seedling I have seen in my years looking for unique plants. Many years ago, a colleague of mine sold a variegated hosta plant from his nursery in an auction for the Hosta Society for over a thousand dollars. Why? It produced all variegated seedlings. That was something that was not found in other variegated hostas at that time and would make it easy to develop new hosta varieties. Hostas are highly propagated and valued. Not so much with autumn olive despite its use as a delicious and healthy fruit crop.

Looking at the roots of potatoes is enlightening. You start with a microscopic group of tiny cells along a rhizome which then explodes outwards into the spud we enjoy today. I always have the thought it is likely the same laws of nature that create galaxies but on a microcosmic level. Here is a slight variation of this trait like a clustering galaxy creating more galaxies of tubers found all from one small plant. It is a very unique and highly structured orderly potato.

If you mention the words ‘Hog peanut’ it is not likely to get you the good seats at a concert. It’s confusing. Why hogs? And is it a peanut? I have never seen the flowers close up until this year when I put a cone of chicken wire around the plants and added fish emulstion to the soil mix. At five feet high the flowers and beans are prolifc. The flowers are at the ends of the vine and branch off the main ‘trunk’ like a tree. This structure produces a huge amount of seeds. From the variety ‘Crispy Snack’ I now have enough diversity to create the first ever hog peanut planting devoted entirely to this wonderful nitrogen fixing plant. I will not get the front row seats to REO Speedwagon though and apparently hog peanut cannot help me there.

I like the species name of this sunflower ‘anomalus’. Helianthus anomalus is the sand sunflower. Why is it an anomaly? It looks ‘normalus’. Being a desert plant, I found it is not a fan of my industrial peat driven high organic soil rich in micronutrients fed by chicken manure. It’s too much. But it did respond to the point, the plants fell over. I keep proping them up letting them lean on the corn and sunchokes. What is interesting in this flower is its large seed head for a wild species and its dense clusters of compact seeds. That head says volumes about its evolutionary history. I wonder how the seeds taste. When was the last time a human consumed this food in the desert? The heads protect the seeds more than any other sunflower I have grown. My guess is the orderly extraction of the seeds begins by birds and this is the best way to disemminate it in the real world.

Thicket bean flowers go all out. It is all or nothing for them. Their large clusters seem to over produce compared to the actual fruit -bean pod-set. This is intentional as the plant can only support so much effort for seed production. Unlike an annual bean, it does not die and needs resources for its long deep tap root which can drill down twenty deep. This is one flower cluster that is the largest amount of flowers I have seen so far in the decades of growing it. Having a cluster of flowers that slowly opens over time ensures bean set. You do a little at a time to attract attention which then creates a road map in a bees brain where all the good stuff is. Very simple. Very orderly. The bee knows where it is and keeps coming back enhancing the production of seeds in the process. Order creates more order.

Looking at all the date palms and plants within the Frederick Meijer Gardens greenhouses is peaceful and comforting. Against the back drop of an orderly human structure, it appears we cognize the same structures found in nature. Each one supports the other in an orderly and beautiful fashion. Beauty is calming and attracts humans. We are by nature calm. Calm is where we do our best work. There order is found in the greatest amount.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged beautiful, beneficial plants, flowers, garden, gardening, nature, order, plants | Comments Off

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