Seeds Create-For the Love of Water

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

“Seeds are a source of wonder. They are objects of ernest inquiry in man’s ceaseless search for understanding of living things. Seeds protect and sustain life. Seeds are wealth. They are beauty. They are a symbol-a symbol of beginnings. They are carriers of aid, of friendship, and of good will. ” Victor R. Boswell USDA 1961 The Yearbook of Agriculture.

Seeds can do so much for us yet we only see a tiny reflection of a portion of the pond of diversity. Like the above image of my family’s farm pond, we are seeing only a small reflection of total potentialities at play at any one given time. We go back to the pond and each time it looks different yet it is the same pond. The expressions of the plants continue over time in unique ways as they play out in different environments. The benefits of seed knowledge and experience help us elevate humanity in its quest for better health.

There was always some new seed that I grew in my nursery that surprised me in some way. Some plants had very limited use and were not available to any great degree. I wanted to highlight these in my nursery even though they were not found in the marketplace. Think global, act global. The world is our family. Seed selections can actually mitigate a lot of world problems on a global scale.

Baldcypress and Pond Bald Cypress –Taxodium distichum and Taxodium ascendens

It is interesting in that one of my neighbors who lives down the road from my farm cannot figure out how baldcypress ‘got into’ his wetland. His words not mine. It doesn’t appear planted and yet the trees are not super old either. It confused him with his nativist bent on everything. Another one of my neighbors told me they harvested some cypress nearby for the making of one of their outbuildings long ago. She showed me the large posts her husband harvested holding up the tin roof. They probably came from his wetland years earlier. Other people told me of a massive hundred year old baldcypress tree existing in a wetland near Kalamazoo, Michigan. These outlying populations are likely not planted and are ‘natural’ extensions of their southern cousins from Illinois and Indiana. The range maps that have the smooth lines of existence of a plant are more dotted than you know. It is not likely someone waded into the middle of a swamp and planted baldcypress. To begin with, it is not that easy in Michigan. You cannot canoe it, God forbid swim or wade into it because of the deep black fine muck. Only turtles can traverse effortlessly unless you come back in the winter when everything is frozen solid. I am surprised no one has selected the baldcypress in terms of its forestry use and created selections for faster growth let alone collect seeds of the Michigan northern strains. This would be a good wetland species to plant into existing wetlands where ash and elm are no longer the dominant species. It can also grow in dry soils without irrigation and has a huge range of adaptibility. I did a trial at my farm using seed of two species of baldcypress from Louisana Forest Seed Company. There the baldcypress is prolific and seed production is plentiful. It is sold in broken balls which are hard as nails. The seed adheres to the cone tight, so normally it is purchased by these broken cones and seeds combined. The seed may make up a small percentage of the weight depending on the seed source. I could not get seeds of the northern forms unless I was willing to travel. I visited a tree once north of Fairfield, Iowa that was just a massive beauty in a front yard of a home along the highway. A friend of mine use to grow seedlings from that tree. Thankfully a customer sent me a sample from a beautiful large tree from his farm in Missouri. I grew both the species baldcypress and the subspecies the Pond Bald Cypress. I grew and selected trees that were fast growing using roughly 3000 seedlings. I noticed a few of the trees grew to 2-3 ft. tall while others were only 6-12 inches tall. I planted one row of the Pond Bald Cypress. I was hoping to use the trees for seed. Thirty years later they still have not fruited. It wasn’t until I saw other trees in landscapes that I realized these fast growing selections actually may be of great benefit to wetlands where few plants can establish in these low oxygen soils.

Using a super southern seed source and putting it in Michigan seemed like a long shot but I had no choice. Surprisingly there was no winter damage at minus 27F and the trees flourished here in my sandy dry soils. It turned out that baldcypress has a physiological response to extreme cold that even the most southern forms retain. The fast growth continued outside of their polyhouse homes and the trees are now fruiting. My row of Pond Bald cypress look true to form and are very slow growing reaching 10-20 ft. after 30 years. The foliage is very beautiful and feathery but no fruits yet. The species baldcypress that I made are now close to 50 ft. tall with minimal side branching. My one lonely Missouri tree has a large trunk and wide branching like a shade tree. It is like a different form entirely.

Every year I see the balls way up at the top of the trees far outside my reach.They disappear eventually hauled off by the red squirrels who have figured out a way to extract the seeds. Today they shade the subartic Finland Norway spruce trees. Louisiana meets Finland at my farm. The baldcypress is actually related to the Sequoia and it can naturally cross with it and produce fertile progeny. In Russia somewhere there are plantings of this cross. That would be one amazing planting to visit, study and get seed of for Michigan. That would be one powerful seed source of great diversity and potential use for Michigan forests and beyond. Seeds could create it. People could nourish it. And nature would benefit. Win. Win. Win.

Family farm ponds.

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Discovery from Seeds

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Sometimes its the small things that matter. Growing plants from seeds and finding traits that are inherited over time in a population of plants is a joy for me. I have no idea why I like it. I just find it enchanting. It is fortunate I am not following a predescribed trajectory laid out by years of scientific inquiry. I consider myself more in the ‘Miles Davis’ musical camp of no practice and using my intuition to hit the right notes unlearning my way in the process.

This week I uncovered these blue lima beans only because they had something that was hard to find and unexpected; all at once early ripening. That may not seem like a big deal but for years the limas that I was fostering through hybridization with their perennial cousin the thicket bean were creating very vigorous and unexpected results. These side light populations are beautiful but you need to have something very uniform in ripening with husks that split open easily expelling the beans. It makes cultivation much more practical and easy. There were only two plants. I have both the white speckled and blue versions. The yields are high all along the vine and not overly vegetative. For me it was a great discovery.

I grew a lot of sunflowers over the years. I loved all the varieties but they were too uniform to use for finding new characteristics. It was from this accidental seedling that I found near a cottage that had more variation and a means to find new traits of unknown possibilities. Here is the smallest plant I have found so far surrounded by its siblings. Under a foot tall with a tiny head is ideal to cross with the sunchokes. I bend down the Jerusalem artichoke flowers near this sunflower to make it easier for a bumblebee to go from flower to flower. The timing is critical and it might be too late but it is fine in that I can try a more robust planting of teeny sunflowers next year. I will save the seeds of the annual and perennial plants in the process and see what discoveries lie ahead. I blasted the area with fish emulsion and deer-off yesterday. This combination of stench and fertilizer seems to be a bumblebee magnet and brings them in to the point the whole planting is alive with the sound of music. zzzzzzz……go to the sunflowers my humble bees. I love the music you make.

Potatoes grown from true seed create a whole myriad of exciting traits some of which are confusing at first but revealing about the wild spud of yesteryear growing out of rocks in the Andes mountains. This particular clustering of tubers creates a very small one foot tall plant which produces between 50-70 potatoes. Its hard to count them all. The seedling was grown from my Perennial Perpetual Diversity seed mix and was one of those dense fibrous compact roots found in a seedling population. The above image is in the second year of growing it. Next year I will devote more time to this and split up the clusters a little. This was definitely an outlier in the population but seriously what’s not to love about this plant. To me its the perfect potato filled with wonder and excitement. The below image is another form that was found in the same population. Here the potato decided to produce the spuds in a more robust and larger fashion. It too is in its second year from tubers. You cannot predict what will happen and each one is different.

All joyous discoveries come from unexpected directions. Such is the case for the Umbrella magnolia below. Today they reside in my yard planted over 25 years ago. Originally a lone tree was found on a berm at a fast food restuarant. I got a call late at night from a horticultural friend of mine from college who asked if I had seen the fruiting Umbrella magnolia tree at the Long John Silvers restuarant. How in heck did that get planted there was his comment. I had driven by it for a few years thinking the same. How in heck? Here on a berm smack dab in front of the restuarant known for its delicious fried fish was a rather unusual horticultural find. The next day I found a grocery bag at my house filled with the beautiful red seed cones. He went in and asked the manager if he could pick the fruit. They thought it was odd but fine to do that. At that time, I was growing many seedling magnolias in my nursery but not this one. The issue usually is that seed companies ruin them by over drying. When I moved, I quit selling them and put the remainder around my home. I collected the seeds this year because there was quite a few. I thought back to my friend, fried fish and the eventual demise of the tree. I got an email from him letting me know the tree had been uprooted for a new landscape replaced by the sterile mini-compacta shrubs. He told me not to look as to avoid the pain. Too late, I saw it. It sat there on its side for some time before they chipped it up. Luckily I captured the germplasm. Its progeny will live on. I have the Long John Silvers near the parking lot entrance magnolia now. I had converted them to the black oak and hickory woodland. It was easy to do and there was only joy remaining.

the how in heck has been answered Magnolia tripetela
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Full Seeds Ahead

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Styrian Hulless Pumpkin Seeds

Every time I see seeds on a rack in a store I stop. They are always very organized. The packets jump off the rack. They are small and easy to pick. It is like the space between your hand and the seed is a quantum realm in a frictionless vacuum state. I love yellow wax beans. I need yellow wax beans. Instantly I have the yellow wax beans. There are more behind which keep popping out. How deep is the rack? It seems to hold a lot of seeds. When I was a store manager of a local garden center, people came in to buy bulk seeds in the spring. We would line the seeds up in clear jars like candy. We had an old scale. We sold a lot of seeds. The racks were near empty by the end of the day sometimes. There was few places that had seed racks back then. Today that same seed market is still there and going strong. The woody plant seed market is there but doesn’t exist in a cardboard display in the world of retail. Instead it lives as a direct by internet enterprise only. It is just not practical to sell seeds of woody plants in a store no matter how you frame it. Whether it’s local, native or exotic it’s different because now you have something people have to think about first. Also the dormancy requirements are too complex and slow for most people. I went full seed ahead fulfilling our small market. People did enjoy having a chance to tap into this diversity that would normally would have gone unnoticed by the big seed companies. Here are a few of my favorites.

The Naked Pumpkin Seed from Austria The Styrian pumpkin was well known before I grew it. One of my customers sent me seeds of it thinking I might be interested in growing it for its health benefits. I had heard about it a few times but thought it was difficult to grow. It was not offered in the U.S. to any degree at the time. There were other naked seed pumpkins on the market but this one was used specifically for cooking which was processed as a flavoring oil from Austria where it had been passed down as an heirloom. It was a species pumpkin that if grown alone, the seeds did not have shells like a normal pumpkin. The fruit itself had no flavor and was not used. The plant was easy to grow at my farm and was free of squash vine borers. Each plant produced one or two medium sized fruits. The naked seeds are easy to extract. The Styrian seeds make you want to consider buying a small hand oil press. The flavor is wonderful and way better than any pumpkin seed I have purchased in the store roasted or raw.

Alberta Clipper Corn

The Short Season Field Corn from Canada It was by accident I found out about this super short season corn for the coldest of climates by a Canadian researcher. Apparently corn was cultivated in the far northern regions but was lost over time. A researcher found one strain and was using it for breeding but the project was abandoned. When I received it, the corn needed additional growing to fully make selections from it. At first the ears were only three inches long with a couple rows of kernals. Eventually over a decade, I selected it for the 60 day ripening period and larger and fuller ears. I named it Alberta Clipper. It made delicious corn meal. The plants were dwarf growing only 3-4 ft. tall with a ripening in the area of 60-70 days when the corn is dried down enough to harvest. Even planting it on July 1st once worked. It wasn’t quite as robust but the ears fully matured.

The Productive Jerusalem Artichoke from Michigan Normally the sunchoke doesn’t produce seeds. It was by accident I found that having a great diversity of sunchokes in one area created a lot of fertile flower heads. Each year was slightly different but for a while Clearwater and Shiawassee were two varieties that kicked out a lot of fertile seeds. When you whittle down a bushel of sunflower heads and only get an ounce or two of seed you may think why is this so low. Yet this was actually very good compared to my previous attempts which made it to the point I would count the seeds by hand there were so few. For the first time in the history of the plant, I offered seed of it in small packets. Here you could grow this marvelous tuberous plant from seeds. That took a great deal of time to make that happen.

The Green Rhubarb from the United Kingdom I kind of grew fond of this because of its low oxalic acid and perpetual nature so you could harvest latter in the season. Plus my grandmother gave me a recipe for Firemans Rhubarb Pie which was a quick way to make a delicious crisp perfect for this variety. Fireman meaning it was quick to make and cook. Quick back then was 45 minutes in the oven. You could easily grow this ‘Glaskins Perpetual’ rhubarb from seed and for the most part it was very uniform. However, when I did that I did find some variation of light reds and all greens in the populations. There were a few plants that were totally green. If I were to do that again, I would attempt to select those milder all green ones and create an additional variety from it if it was that much difference. Rhubarb from seed was a good idea. I hear it is hardy into zone 2.

Sibirski tomato

The Off the Charts Flavorful Tomatoes from Russia and Germany For a while I received seed from an arboretum in Russia who had some amazing tomato selections done by the Russian people in their backyards over the centuries. Basically what they did was bring together all these land races and reselect and improve on the traits that made them so successful in the first place. I remember thinking ‘Sibirski’ is everything you want in a tomato and more. There were several other paste varieties and one that was an industrial hard as nails tomato for shipping too. Ironically even that tasted good! I also receieved a private breeders release of a cherry tomato from Germany that never split and was insanely vigorous growing while producing lots of delcious fruits far better than any cherry tomato I had ever eaten. ‘Kanaan’ was amazing. I plan to try to grow those again because I too want to relive my past with those particular tomatoes.

The Thicket Bean Makes a Good Stop to Refuel and Help the Colony

The 9000 Year Old Perennial Bean from Everywhere This perennial species bean was more of a horticultural oddity than anything. The flowers were beautiful and the vine was vigorous. I could see it in a packet under flowers more than beans. It was a delicious dried bean and worth growing even though the yields and the beans are small. I hope to expand on this species and find more productive larger bean selections. Found throughout North America, this could be our perennial protein.

The Flat Giant Yellow Wax Bean Vine from France It was by chance that I found a website that had quite a variety of green and yellow pole beans. I remember thinking I am sure they must taste better than the pictures look. I forgot about it for a while and shortly a U.S. seed company offered them. I think it was Baker Creek but I have forgotten where I got them from. Such is the nature of the packet especially if you throw it out. Whoops. I wasn’t sure it was the French or English selections but once I grew it I knew it was ‘close enough’. They were so good and way better than the pictures. I grew them again this year and they did not let me down. I saved enough seed luckily. Each pod may have up to a half dozen seeds. I hope they did not cross with the dark purple ones next to them but hey I’m fine with that too. I am sure they will jump off the shelf into your hands soon. It creates its own vacuum state. Watch out.

The Early Ripening Wild Tepary Bean from New Mexico
The Yellow Wonder Alpine Strawberry
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Seeds: River Cane, Pawpaw, Apple, Sloe Plum, Soybean

Posted on September 16, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

There is always something new to learn from plants. Growing them from seeds adds to the anticipation of discovery and connection to the natural world. When I grew plants in my nursery we would sell seeds along with nursery stock of the same species. It was very popular. We made small packets and grew it up to 3000 packets per year. We tried to use species not available elsewhere in the seed trade. It was very time consuming figuring out quantities and inventory. We did sell them internationally at the time and it was one way to spread the diversity inexpensively. People were very appreciative of the seeds. I put detailed information on germinating the seeds on line to help people in their quest to grow woody plants from seeds. There is a certain mystery to it but once the conditions are met the plants grow effortlessly as tomato plants. It is the dormancy part that is complex. Here are a few of my favorite from seed plants which were also rather popular when I grew them in the nursery and farm. Specifics on dormancy are included. I’ve included a few failures too because that is also part of the experience.

River Cane Bamboo- Here is one that did not work. I have yet to grow it successfully from seed. The seeds are fresh and produced at my farm. They appear viable and pure white in the embryo and fully developed. For whatever reason I cannot get them to sprout despite applying warm and cold periods as well as moisture. Bamboo is generally easy to grow from seed especially the Phyllostachyus genus. It is my favorite to grow from seed. I have tried the last three years. This year there is no seed crop, so I will have to wait. How long? They say when bamboo flowers every hundred years or so, the clone dies entirely as a kind of respect for the new progeny about to be produced. This has not happened to the River Cane so lucky I still have the original strains that I started with over 20 years ago.

Pawpaw-Asimina triloba This seed requires constant moisture from processing to planting. Never let the seed dry out on a rack or open air. The fruit is very soft and the seeds are encased in a clear celluose sack. Even after removing the pulp, that little sack has to be removed because it can rot the seed in dormancy. The fruit pulp has to be removed prior to it breaking down as the alcohol will kill the embryo if concentrated enough. The fruit has to ripen on the tree for this to happen as it relates directly to the maturity of the seed. It is not good to pick the fruit green and do it later. The fruit drops out of the tree with a light shake when mature so it is soft to the touch. This condition is ideal for the seed. The seed gets its nourishment from the fruit and the surrounding vascular system in the fruit which is directly connected to the tree. After extracting the seed and cleaning the fruit from it spotless, drop it into a moist media like Canadian peat moss. It should be lightly moist so you cannot squeeze out any more water from it using your hands. Apply a cold dormancy of 90-120 days from 34F to 38F is ideal. A refrigerator is fine but not freezing. Then put the seeds at room temperature. Seeds take a long time to sprout usually a good two months. At my farm pawpaw seeds sprout in July when planted in November. Pawpaw roots are produced first and then the top comes up. The plant needs to be in at least 50 percent shade the first year otherwise the first two leaves burn off in the sun and that is the end of the seedling. It will not resprout. Pawpaw seeds are odd brain looking seeds with deeply resessed cotyledons. This year I planted late and the seeds came up in early September. This is fine and the trees will grow like crazy next year because the tap root is now completed. My particular strain of pawpaw is the most northern in the United States and people have put them in areas of extreme cold from Finland to Minnesota. Apparently using this seed source will increase the plants northern range under cultivation.

Apples are very easy to grow from seed. I would recommend collecting wild apples that are blemish and insect proof. This is the future of apples. Organically producing them while improving the overall health benefits you can find the perfect apple far greater than research scientists. Anyone can contribute to this noble cause. Apple seeds are extracted by crushing the core or cutting them with a knife and popping the seeds out one by one if you want. I use to use a hand brick and patio sand tamper for crushing. Then I would put the apple pomice in a Vita-mix slowly grinding it in reverse to break the seeds out of the inner core. Then onto a large bowl and do a bit of panning action for gold where the seeds would sink to the bottom and the pulp would float off. Once cleaned then I would put them on a screen rack to dry. After drying for a couple of days, I would rub them and repeat the process adding a touch of Dr. Bronners peppermint soap. All-One Brothers and Sisters. Then let them dry again for a few days. From here I would let them after ripen for a month on a shelf where they were in an open zip lock bag with a bit of dry peat moss in there to let them continue the growth of their embyo. Finally I would add a teeny amount of water and mix thoroughly and store at 34 F to 38F for 90 to 120 days. Often apple seeds will sprout after 60 days or so. You cannot stop that so the seed needs to get planted soon because once its too etioliated, then it damps off easy. Sprouting them in the fridge is very good in terms of success. Sometimes a portion of them sprout the second year. So do not throw your seeds out thinking you failed. Check for rotting or mold. Wash and check for smelly seeds that are now part of the compost. Remember to plant at the level of the root collar and not the stem. You can skip all of this if you put them in a germination tray with drainage holes and germinate them outside. Make sure to cover the tray in window screeen to prevent mice and voles from consuming them during the winter. The tray should never let to be dried out. The apples will sprout in the spring in April and May.

Sloe plum is a good example of a species fruit that has health benefits yet it is not found to any degree in North America. At that time, people had no idea what it was or anything about the plant. Eventually the spirit companies along with a few wineries purchased all of the plants I could produce. I remember finding the plant in a landscape in the early 1980’s in an apartment complex where I had a contract to do the lawn maintenance for one season. There was a woman from Latvia who lived in one of the units so I am guessing she got her starts from her homeland. The fruit was not possible to eat fresh as it was so highly astringent. It was used to flavor drinks. Eventually through an arboretum exchange I received enough seed to outplant a row of them from the variety, ‘Plena’. From here after the giant whittling down from black knot disease began and I ended up with 3-4 plants with immunity . This is the ideal thing to do with seed grown plants to make a healthy population. Sloe plum seeds need an after ripening period to mature fully. I would whiz them up in a blender carefully not crushing the seed coats. I would do this several times over the course of a week going back and forth from blending to letting it sit overnight on a screen after several washes. The fruit hangs on tight to the seed coat. After cleaning I would put them in a lightly moist media and store at room temperature for 2 months before refrigeration. Then cold 3 months and then store at room temperature for the next season. Some sprouting may be seen after three months of cold but normally this species requires two cold dormancies with a warm dormancy in between. This warm dormancy matures the embryo fully and the seed continues its growth prior to the last cold dormancy which then changes the chemical make up which prohibits sprouting. The plant produces a very long tap root and a small top the first year. From seed it takes roughly 4-6 years to fruit.

I found a soybean plant near the entry way to a cottage I was renting. What am I going to do with those? I planted them. A groundhog came by and ate most of the plant. They flowered and set fruit. I now have the same amount of seeds I started with. I tried once to buy the wild groundcover soybeans of Australia. I remember seeing the giant five foot soybean plants across the road from our farm when they first started growing them in the 1970’s. I remember trying to eat soybeans in college where even butter and soy bacon bits could not cloak the flavor. I have four beans. I will try again and see what the beans will say to me in terms of directions . Thoreau said to expect miracles in a seed. He grew soybeans.

Enjoy, Ken Asmus

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Meanwhile Back at the Grocery Store Germplasm is Found

Posted on September 14, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
This variety of seedling pears came from seed I extracted from a fruit at my local grocedry store.

For many years I would keep the pits of some of my favorite grocery store fruits and try to grow them at my farm. Every fruit looks so spectacular coming exclusively from California. Everything is also patented and illegal to use without permission including leaf, pollen, buds or seeds. This is to prevent the theft of that variety or any of its characteristics. My experiment it is not being used to generate new cultivars in some mysterious way. I was hoping to create seed strains. I had to try. I could find giant apricots and white peaches that tasted liked sugar crystals. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the breeding of fruits for the specific California climate was not meant for the cold climate in Michigan. Everything died in one winter. This beautiful diversity was useless. The other aspect of it was that each fruit is highly bred like a race horse with specific progeny done over and over again. This produced a seedling not useful for my seed strains.In the end, the grocery store seed although plentiful was not practical. I was surprised something wouldn’t stick. I do not give up easy.

Sprouting seeds of plums and apricots at my farm. This was one way to obtain maximum use of specific seedling varieties for growing out in my pasture.
Fruit from my farm is the source of seeds to produce other trees from seeds. They are not highly bred and easily grown in Michigan and other cold climate areas.

It was the fancy round pears in a mesh stocking that caught my attention. It was truly the opposite of the seedling fruit I grow at my farm for seeds. The Korean Giant pears were expensive and were completely flawless. They were grown in the fruit rich climate of Washington state. It was a type of fruit I had seen before but was unaware of the species it represented or its wild counterpart at the time. I was working with several Korean strains of pears one of which was an insanely astringent pear rich in bitter flavors impossible to eat fresh. It was hard to believe that these are related. But in the world of fruit breeding, you know someone is going to create a selection sooner or later that is delicious and sweet. The seedlings I planted from the grocery pears grew slowly and were constantly hammered by deer in that location. I put five foot tall tree shelters on them and even those got rammed and knocked over several times. Eventually with constant vigilance, I was able to get them up and beyond the browse line. As the trees matured and began fruiting I was finally able to taste test the results as you see above. Each seedling has its own profile of flavors yet you can experience the giant pear flavor in all of them. Even the one that looks like a meteor has a flavor too despite its propensity to have cracks like the Grand Canyon on its surface. A few of the seedlings died due to fireblight and a couple just gave up the ship due to the deer eating the foliage. But those that did make it did represent a chance to clone the fruit in some way and bring in another Asian pear variety into existence should you want to. Since the parent was not patented, it is free to distribute. From what I have been told by real plant breeders, it difficult to bring a new variety to market and make a profit from it. The Asian pear selections are becoming popular and there are many varieties of them now. In the past there was one: Korean Giant. This was the source of my seeds. Worldwide there are natural hybrids of it as well and this helps create new selections.

Natural hybrids of the Korean pear are common which can produce very unique flavors and shapes of fruits. This one was not from a backyard tree in Michigan. It shows the inherent flexibility of plants adapting to new locations by hybridization.

Amidst the piles of grocery store fruit I tried, one stood out and made it through three decades of Michigan winters. It was adapted, useful and delicious. Mesh nets are not needed. Unlike the wild Asian pear below, the Mt. Kyebang crab-pear is destined for syrup and jelly. It is said to be a hang over cure and the compounds within suggest a type of adaptogen not normally found in fruit. Here lies the surprises found in the grocery store fruit usually overlooked by modern breeding. We find dense flavor, medicinal fruit and a new type of climate to grow it in. The grocery store fruit has some surprises and my attempts brought to light the value of using what we find in cultivation today. Next time, I’ll try the farmers market and try to avoid the patented fruit.

Wild form of the Korean pear. Grown from seed from wild collected seed in South Korea from one of the mountains of South Korea. It is impossible to eat this fruit fresh as it is highly astringent. It ripens in early to mid August and drops from the tree. The fruits can be made into a syrup. It has a very high denstiy of stone cells. No insects or disease affect the trees. I am currently selecting the grown seedlings from this tree as a new form of timber and fruit tree. The tree itself is incredibly tough and is usually biennial bearing bearing huge volumes of fruit. All of this highlights the value of wild fruit growing untended and unbred in the wild.

Enjoy,

Kenneth Asmus

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Waves on an Ocean: From Monoculture to Diversiculture

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Going to the Ocean of Corn Where Waves of Diversity Continually Emerge

Like an ocean filled with innumerable waves, there is no end to plant diversity. When it comes to a common cultivated food plant like corn, the species becomes very uniform over time. From a population level, the ocean is calm with only a few ripples. The original two or three species that create the corn as we know are hidden from view.  If you have ever seen volunteer corn in a soybean field or along the road somewhere, you know immediately corn that has departed from cultivation will not survive long.  Often there is no cob or kernels. It needs our robust support system because it has essentially ‘evolved’ this way with our management systems. Even to hint at trying to breed or select something for the sake of growing corn seems hopeless to me. It is probably already in existence. Nothing is new under the corn sun. Yet there are many people who love to breed and experiment with corn especially for human consumption.  It was when I started growing woody plants that made me realize the value of corn because the diversity found in the natural world is not the same type of diversity found in the corn world. A corn field is not looked at the same way a forest is. It could be. But then it would not be corn. Corn today has to be very uniform. What if it could be the opposite?

From my experience, I do not have the required background or resources for such an endeavor in terms of real corn breeding. To a corn scientist, they would see my credentials as a C minus high school student barely squeaking through college as a part time church janitor while working in a greenhouse that grew roses. In college, I flunked genetics and had to retake the class. Check the box, NOT likely to improve corn. But I think I could find the forests of corn. I am sure it lives somewhere outside of my farm. I am not trying to make corn better in some way.  I think it is fine as it is. Besides corn can do that on its own with the help of all the great plant breeders and scientists. I am sure they aced numerous genetics classes in their careers. If I had to guess, I think corn likes having friends. Let me explain.

Corn has very strict regulations revolving around seed production. You cannot just casually grow seed corn. I had a plant inspector for my nursery do what he called the ‘popcorn walk’ which was hiking back and forth in long rows of fully mature popcorn to inspect for seed. He described it as hot and brutal. The soil where he did his walk was a nearby township which had a rich black prairie earth which radiated the summers heat. Each stalk had to be eyeballed on some level to be certified both for disease and potentially ‘tainted’ corn that was crossed with something else. I never fully understood it until some of my employees told me how detasseling works and the means for busing highschoolers to the fields in the super early morning hours to take off tassels. This system removes the corn’s own pollen to set the stage for hybrid vigor. In the system of hybrid seed production, corn has one friend only. It resides in a row in the middle of several rows of the actual seed corn. The plant in the middle can look rather weak sometimes. Seed corn cannot go outside of its field to capture some sort of wild corn germplasm. It is part of what makes 600 bushels per acre possible. You can have open pollinated corn but even that begins to break down over time unless new individuals are added to the population. It is kind of frustrating on a certain level for plant breeders and the corn plant because that leads to a genetic depression. Corn is depressed because it needs new friends with new stories and ideas!  New ideas come in the form of novel or robust expressions. Yet at the same time it cannot be allowed to be the wild apples of corn. Wild apples are crazy and off the charts of imagination only dreamed of by corn.

Yet this was exactly the dream I was trying to create for corn by following the effortless direction from a blue heirloom sweet corn and a northern highland teosinte plant. If you go back to the source of corn prior to domestication, there are a lot of stories to be told that never had the chance. The middle ground was left behind never to be seen again. Humans popped teosinte. Humans chewed on the husks of teosinte to extract the sweet juice, but it was not cultivated. For that we needed corn and corn became our good friend in the process able to change into several forms all of which we enjoy today.

Diversiculture: Defined as a crop plant grown to produce food that represents a population of plants each genetically different with a wide range of expressions and traits. This continues as the population grows over time. It can be a single species or a hybrid swarm or crosses of various forms or selections done intentionally to create a mixed population difficult to define by their characteristics alone, the opposite of a cultivar or variety. Diversiculture represents both wild crop plants that are cultivated and highly cultivated varieties that have been deselected to the point they are unrecognizable from their former varietal status. The diversification can be pronounced or small depending on the plants ability to express itself over time as long as it has the ability to change with the environment.

From seed Teosinte to Neosinte to Corn to Pod Corn to Grass: The Full Range of Corn is Explored

Increases Diversity over Time

Each cob can contain three types of corn. There appears to be no direction or uniformity within the population. Some plants maintain some of the original teosinte husks and kernals embedded with the cob.

Eliminates the Need for Resources Outside the Field

The plants’ production of seeds is small taking up less resources compared to its foliage. The seeds can be used over and over again. Depression is not possible as only new stories (characteristics) emerge.

Makes Corn Dense in Minerals and Nutrients

Small kernels are rich in anthocyanins and nutrients which are produced as a grass plant capable of producing a grain. The cob becomes a sheath opening up the kernels to sunlight for the first time in 9000 years.

Soil Improves Over Time

Seed production is a minor component of the plant. The foliage is the powerhouse of the plant replenishing the soil as it degrades quickly into the soil. The stalks are thin as they do not require to hold up a heavy seed load.

Additional Crops from the Same Plant-The Population Creates New Resources

If harvested as silage or for cellulose production, additional selective processes could create multiple secondary populations where vigor and higher stand density could compete with other grass species while remaining genetically diverse. This hybrid population would be grown for a specific use outside of grain production. Seeds could be generated at the same time for planting the next generation.

Creates a New Crop from New Seed Capable of Creating an Entirely New Food Plant

The sweet corn and teosinte cross was successful in creating another ‘corn’ that contains all corn we grow today. It pops. We can create flour from it. It has the crinkly seed sweet corn within it.  Yet calling it corn drops it into a category of interesting but quasi-useless corn breeding experiments. It would be only used for breeding purposes or as a wildlife corn. Everyone would see the extremely low yields per plant and bail.  This is the middle ground. Welcome to the forest of corn.

I am told the forest of corn grows in Michigan where the stories get more elaborate as time goes on.

I can tell you one if you want.

But I would suggest we have some rich black organic coffee first because we are going long my friend.

That story may never end.

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

NEOSINTE TEOSINTE SEEDS AVAILABLE

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One Potato: Teeny Tubers on a Quantum String

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Its a funny thing to talk about potato roots. It is for my audience of one. I can clear a room discussing potato roots. Need help getting rid of guests that stay too long? Let me talk to them about my potato roots. Soon your house will be empty. Yet there is something very inspiring about roots because they are the unseen and unsung heroes of the plant world especially with the potato.

It was a set of unusual circumstances that created this dialog of roots in my mind. I was digging many diverse varieties of Jerusalem artichokes for my nursery. The roots on some selections were long with pure white rhizomes stretching out several feet from the parent plant forming a tuber on the end. It was like the mint roots of sunchokes. You could not stop them other than put them in grow bags where they would spin around in a soil mix that made them feel like they were in hyperspace. Why is it that potatoes are not like this? I thought it was a good structure in terms of its ability to reproduce itself as a perennial plant. You had both the storage as a tuber plus movement through the soil to new locations. You would still harvest the potato, but you would leave behind a small string of mini tubers for the following years crop. If you decided to harvest the small string you would have next year’s crop. You would then put it in your refrigerator crisper for winter. Being quantum has its advantages as you could easily store several hundred teeny tubers in a zip lock sandwich bag. I liked this idea as a form of wild potato where the roots play a dominant adaptive role in the soil. I needed a means to do this reliably so my search for potato root structures began.

To do this you need true seed. True seed is extracted from the berries of potatoes. Here lies the source of all potatoes. Having access to my own true seed allowed me to see this wonderful variation as a seedling population. Just like plums and apples, without the variation you have nothing. Potatoes also inherently have a type of superpower where previous generational traits can show up unexpectedly despite being hidden for generations. I began to notice some seedlings that contained both rhizome type roots that spread out far and wide as well as clumpy roots. Clumpy roots were a mesh or lattice of roots that had very tiny tubers. They were often under 1/16 of an inch in size after a full year of growing them from true seed. My guess is a normal potato breeder would have thrown those out because you cannot make anything with those. One million potatoes later you might have enough for a bowl of mash potatoes. Personally, I thought I hit the lottery of potatoes because finally I had my sunchoke type root system. Never mind the actual potato you eat. I had the roots! Jackpot! This clumpiness characteristic was not a common occurrence clocking in at maybe one seedling per 500 in my populations. I began to collect them and grow them out to see what the effect would be as well as take a look at flavor and yields. I was trying to emulate the wild potato that hangs on the rocky mountain slopes of its homeland in Peru.

The sunchoke like potatoes were highly diverse as well. Luckily most were incredibly productive small white potatoes which were uniform in color and size. The actual roots that I was hoping to save in my crisper this winter faded and dropped off. Luckily a few had continued their quantum versions of themselves on a string in the second year just like my Jerusalem artichokes of yesteryear. The combination of selections or specific varieties derived from them would be very good in small spaces where the root real estate is limited. This type of competitive advantage with other plants nearby would be an advantage in prairie, field or the slow conversion to tree crops where they could easily be used as a foraged food. The tubers grow close to the ground and do not require digging with a shovel. They create a sod lattice of tubers densely packed next to each other all of which are easily picked by hand. Their life creates a food opportunity where none existed before. In a pot, on a wall, in a flat, near a sidewalk or in a field the quantum tubers can find a way, replenish themselves and grow ever closer to their wild cousins rich in nutrients far beyond their cultivated and esteemed varieties. And to think it all started from one potato.

The above seedling selection was done using similar clustering potatoes on long strings showing a ‘compacta’ trait in the roots. Like the above ground branching of yew bushes, potato roots can follow a similar pattern with a ‘my split ends are getting split ends’ sort of particle physics.

Compact root systems can have clumpiness because of the density of the tubers along with an outwardly spreading mesh of roots. Nature has its little surprises.
Clustering potatoes found in 2024. This particular string had roughly 200 potatoes on it with a cluster forming on each axil. The plant was small and compact with minimal yield. This was the most promising selection I have found. The next step is to plant the teeny tubers the next year. Others were selected based on yields of small potatoes heavy showing a fiber laden root system.

With plants you might find a solution that appears to be the opposite of everything else. It emerges from the pool of all genetic possibilities which is equivalent to the biological quantum mechanical realm in nature. The potatoes are found on a long string which are generational possibilities that are retained within its ancient genetic structure. Then under the right conditions it can express itself. The potato is changing to meet the demands of this new world environment. These changes help us enjoy the nutrition and flavor of this wild potato which addresses some of the current means of cultivation and its continuation as a wild species on all continents and climates. Humans can connect with this same realm and realize it in terms of practical applications.

The potatoes featured in this article will be available for purchase starting in the fall and winter of 2025-26 seasons. It will be a collection of at least two selections know for its heavy production of small tubers. It can be purchased directly on the Oikos Tree Crops website under

Quantum Potato Tubers.

Enjoy. Ken Asmus

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Diversity Explored: The Wild Blueberry

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
The original ‘Madelline’ blueberry. A wild selection from my family’s Christmas tree farm.

When my father and his friend from the post office purchased 140 acres of wetland in central Michigan in the mid-1960’s they knew that it was a swamp and generally unusable.The price was roughly $100 per acre at the time. There was no standing timber and for the most part, only a quarter of it was high enough to walk on. There was only one trail surrounding the farm said to have been created by a machine meant to prevent wildfires. A large portion of that trail was underwater most of the year. You did not know what was in the middle. I remember you couldn’t walk through many of these dense swamp areas because of the ‘saw grass’ which was a very sharp edged sedge that grew up to five feet tall. As time went on, it became quickly apparent there were a lot of wild blueberries all over the farm. They were all sizes and colors. There were even dwarf little plants, only a foot tall loaded with tiny berries which took forever to pick.  Immediately we began to collect them and make everything from jams to pies. At one point, we allowed people to harvest the berries as a pick your own type of farm. It was not easy and usually people got a few quarts before being chased off by the horse flies. 50 cents was the charge for the whole day no matter what you harvested. 50 cents.

The term huckleberry was used as a form of wild blueberry. Found this sign in a shed near the barn.

At one point, a small contingent of the Ladies Aid from our Lutheran church showed up. They were professionals. They had mosquito netting. They had repellants. They had nimble fingers created by years of knitting, repairing socks and making gigantic quilts able to cover a house. 110 quarts later, the 50 cents was quite a bargain. I don’t remember how many days they spent but I do remember the sounds of their laughter in the forest as they picked away and told stories to one another.  The smell of fresh pine and marsh gas mingling with the sounds of the grandmotherly ladies laughing seemed like another world to me at twelve years old. The blueberry was the center of this social dynamic on the land.

When I moved to southwestern Michigan, I discovered the commercial fruit industry. Here blueberries were grown in giant rows and picked by machines that looked like small houses on wheels. The fields were flat wetlands and laid out in a perfect grid. In college I would attend the fruit meetings of various fruit industry leaders and shakers. This was hard core. Here there was no laughter in the forests by the women from the Ladies Aid Society from the Lutheran Church.  Apparently when you bring together a great uniformity of blueberry varieties, a lot of problems occur. Here I heard the sounds of angry old men with complaints like farts in a windstorm. The stories were filled with strife and hardship with cash in the balance. The money was very good I was told. It was much better than apples, but you needed a wetland with a high-water table and acidic soil. This whole system came at a cost of both mental and environmental health. I am guessing but I think those two things are connected.   

Dwarf blueberry found on the side of a dune facing Lake Superior. Pictured Rocks area.

When I started my nursery, I was very much confused on blueberry varieties and their potential in a edible landscape as a wild plant. Blueberries had very specific soil requirements and were short lived outside of their wetland home. You had to buy a Costco Paper Towel size bag of Aluminum Sulfate to keep the soil acidic. The only nursery I knew that had a wild collection was Hartmanns Plant Company. These were blueberries found growing on bluffs and windswept locations in pine forests. The owner, Dan Hartmann had found certain seedlings in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula while on vacation. They were the lowbush varieties growing in acidic sandy soils with small dense flavorful fruit. He used his nursery to propagate them and make them available to the public. No one that I knew at the time, really cared about this wild germplasm. He too loved the flavor despite having a choice from his mega repository of blueberry cultivars. Although my hats off to the newer variety of blueberries, that are more focused on flavor a lot of the Jersey variety was bland as they were grown in these highly cultivated settings. The real issue was the over cultivation of the plants to the point as the berries got bigger while the flavor got smaller.

Partridge Lake blueberry selection from Hartmanns Plant Company. Upper Peninsula Michigan

It was during my trips to my family home to help my father that I took the time to rediscover the farm that I knew so well as a child. There was one area on the farm that was rich in dwarf blueberries on a sandy hill. The hill was the area where we would find arrowheads and flint. On one end there was a blueberry bush that kept getting whittled away at by the mower. It was once buried by sand when the ponds were dug. That blueberry did not give up.  It had a stoloniferous tendency. It was larger than the dwarf ground blueberries in the area reaching up to 3-4 ft. tall. I took a root piece of it and planted it at my farm. It never had fruit on it at the Christmas tree farm. I would walk by this plant every time I walked around the pond. I would always look. Once I found three berries on it. They were very good. Three berries was enough. The main reason I took the piece of root was it was constantly replenishing itself with great vigor and vegetative growth. It was surrounded by Scotch and Austrian pines near the pond growing in pure sand. A wild black cherry tree grew right out of the center. It just never fruited. As time went on the plant continued its luxuriant growth at my farm. It was without irrigation on a sandy south facing hill. In this new home it began fruiting heavy, producing very delicious small wild fruit.  I moved several additional root cuttings under some African Oaks near the River cane bamboo. They all started fruiting heavy. It was this under cultivation scenario that made this happen. It was not like I was searching for a variety with heavy fruit set. I chose the opposite and did it randomly. It is purely where a wild plant thrives in a new location and produces a great abundance of fruit far greater than where it currently resides. This is a common experience where cultivation can improve even an unselected wild plant with zero fruit on it and change its fruiting characteristics even though it appears to be fine in its original habitat. This says something extraordinary about wild populations. There are no inferior seedlings. It is how we view the plant and how we decide to grow it as an individual or a population.

We may not need machines the size of small houses. The Ladies Aid Society of the Lutheran Church is good. Bring your own stories and laughter. The plants will respond.

Madelline blueberry-Named after my granddaughter this wild form of blueberry can grow in dry soils that do not require irrigation. The small berries are often hidden under the foliage which ripen over a 2-3 week period. The dark and intense flavor creates a very rich pie and jam high in anthocyanins.
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Diversity Explored: The Edible Sunflower

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Cucumber-leaf sunflower Helianthus debilis var. cucumerifolius
Arikara sunflower Helianthus annus
Sand sunflower Helianthus anomalos

I always was fascinated with the sunflower. There was always so much activity around them. My parents decided to move to a new home when I was 16 years old. It was in a new subdivision in the midst of a suburbian utopia. My dad hired a nearby landscape architect and nursery to put in the landscape. The landscape looked identical to all the other landscapes in the surrounding homes. It had the junipers, media yews and crabapples. My dad added a few white birch clumps from the farm. Perfect. The whole thing was exactly what you would expect to see. A couple of years later, when I came home from college during the summer, I would sneak in sunflowers between the shrubs. No one noticed until they started flowering. My parents started getting good comments from the neighbors who thought it was quirky and cool. My dad found it annoying and wanted me to stop doing it. Quirky and cool was not for him. Back off on the sunflowers son. My mom liked it and soon we began to plant petunias in the front yard near the groundcover junipers. Not long afterwards, a few other people down the road planted sunflowers around their mailbox and garages. My dad relinquished and let the sunflowers live but I could not put them in great density like I did the first time. It was my landscape art. I made it look like a South Dakota sunflower field blended with a modern suburban landscape circa 1970. I call it South Dakota Suburbia. Like a well worn lesisure suit, that landscape was not all that exciting to begin with. As time went on I added northern pecan, cactus, yucca, apple, metasequoia and bayberry. The pecan and oak are still there today looking spectacular.The whole sunflower thing was attracting too much attention. To begin with the sunflowers are heliotropic attention getters. Very gawdy. Perfection has arrived. Ta-Daaa.

“Haven” sunflower-dwarf early ripening sunflower -single and polyheaded versions were produced at my farm. We had to use various bags and coverings to protect against predation by birds and chipmunks.

It’s a different story today. The ornamental aspect of sunflowers has been highlighted by numerous colors and forms with super breeding and the strong floral market. It was Stokes Seed Company that offered the first red sunflowers. I grew those a couple of times. I only knew of Mammoth up to that point. It was the standard. The seed production for oil and its edible seed is like hybrid corn with many selections all from North American genotypes many bred in Russia. I knew by the early 90’s that it would not be possible to add to that genetic diversity at my farm in any meaningful way. With that in mind, I grew several wild forms including species types as a sort of filler for landscapes that were more or less in transition much like my old suburban family home. I sold small packets of them for $2.00. Some of these species and their counterparts of Native American selections were not grown commercially. I was wondering if the wild forms or species had unique flavors and oil qualtities. Often these qualities are left in the dust in modern plant breeding.

I began the grow out of perennial sunflowers and began plantings for seed production including using the Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus while finding and creating new selections in the process. My world was becoming full of sunflowers. At one point I met an actual sunflower breeder from Canada who was working on extremely short season sunflowers for oil production. I lost that strain but found others almost all by accident. It was like the sunflowers were finding me. I could not stop making eye contact. No one can. At one point while renting a vacation home near Lake Michigan I found an accidental seedling dwarf sunflower that had ripened very early in a mulched yew and rose bed. It reminded me of my hometown sunflower plantings. I started grow outs of that strain at my farm winnowing it down to the poly headed forms with early ripening.They were both black and the grey stripe types mixed.

Even this year, I still keep company with a few sunflowers. I find another annual species to grow and buy a few packets from a specialty seed company that has wild species in different locations throughout the U.S. There is a lot of diversity. When I did this in the past I soon found out that many of these so called sub-species are very unique in their flowers and foliage yet they also may not look like the images on line in many ways despite the seeds being wild collected. They do not sit still in their morphology. This is the nebulous world of part this and part that. Subspecies means it is a branch off the tree of Helianthus annus, the edible sunflower most of us know. It is a genetically complex plant easily connecting species and selections one gene at a time like a bridge with infinite highways all creating a uniformity of characteristics. You could create a hybrid and not even know it.

Sand sunflower Helianthus anomalos Not quite there yet with its ta-daa moment.

I grew one variety called Havasupai. I knew the story of it as a wild relative and the Native Americans that fostered this selection in the southwestern U.S. It was used in breeding to save the modern sunflower because of foliar disease. I had not heard about its flavor or potential for oil as it existed in its wild form without hybridization. This was a surprise. The flavor of the seeds was like a concentrated elixir of sunflower with the fragrance of a boquet of fresh sunflowers. Like everyone else I was chomping away at the roasted sunflower seeds I buy when I fill up at the gas station. The gas station sunflowers are a bit mealy, pastey with a hint of canola oil mixed with sunflower. Even the ranch and barbeque flavored ones do not mask or help the rather weak flavored seed. With Havasupai in tow in my memory bank of flavors, I had a standard to go on and to find others with similar attributes but possibly more concentrated in flavor. For that I had to go a step down the ladder of domestication and go into uncultivated and wild species as much as possible while looking for high yields.

Polyheaded Haven selection

Is it bland, oily, rich or cardboard? It is surprising in that each sunflower selection is different. The species types can taste like a pine cone. My goal is to taste as many sunflowers as possible. I am finding the short season plants under 60 days. It is different type of selection because you want small seeds and heads to fill all along the stem. You want the strong over the top flavors minus the barbeque and ranch. But more importantly when people taste even the raw seeds they experience the ‘wow’ factor like I did when I first started looking into this. I visited the Chicago Botanical Garden’s sunflower collection once. It was my Jimi Hendrix moment where you want to throw out your guitar. It reminded me why I thought I had nothing to contribute because it all ready existed. The sunflower is very unique in its ability to redefine itself. It can change and realign your thinking about it and how to best harness the sunflower power. It creates a new means of expression very easily. Like a dahlia, changes are always going to happen in unexpected directions. You just have to be there and notice. It’s a good example for woody plants. There are the tiny heads of sunflowers filled wth great abundance along the stalks of the polyheaded sunflower.

I still eat the roasted sunflower seeds from the gas station but now I know what I am missing. I know what I have to do. I know the solution has already been laid down long ago in a pristine land untouched by humans and a suburban utopia. I just have to capture and share it with others in the way of the sunflower. What’s not to love?

Enjoy. Kenneth Asmus

“Home” Sunflower for large seeds from selected plants at my farm some of which were cultivars and others just random selections with larger than average seeds.
“Afar” Sunflower for selected seedlings with good production and some cultivars mixed. The flavor was very good.
Jerusalem artichoke flowers will produce fertile seed if you have genetic diversity. They are not sterile and will cross with the woodland sunflower and the annual sunflower quite easily. The question is will you notice?
A perfect sunflower day. Jerusalem artichokes in the background.
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Diversity Found: American Black Currant

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

When the ponds were built on my family’s farm, large ditches were needed to drain the water to finish the excavation. It was roughly a 30 acre pond surrounded by a wetland. The ditches near the highway were massive as the road needed to support the weight of eighteen wheeler trucks filled with wet sand. The sand was being used for the Zilwaukee bridge-I-75. The driveway was made of spent industrial cinders, cement chunks and sand. It was the granola of gravel. The steep cliff face into the ditch had little plant life on it. Even the wetland sedges and grasses gave up ship colonizing it. Yet here on the slope was this small wirey shrub dangling fruit calling out to the world “this is not so bad”. Wedged between cinder chunks in the shade of a red maple tree, a bird had dropped the seed there years ago along with some fertilizer. I had read about this Ribes from my cold descriptive botany books. Who doesn’t remember Billington, Shrubs of Michigan? The small taste sent me on the path of fruit salvation. For God sakes, no botanist ate the fruit. The descriptions would fly off the page if they had. There was only a few clusters of fruit on the small shrub but it was enough. I collected them and cleaned the seed and brought it to my nursery. I wanted to capture a bigger picture of the plant and how it could be cultivated. I had dreams of jars of American black currant syrup and other healthy concoctions made on my stove top. It was from here I began the process of growing the plant at my farm specifically for seed production. Apparently, I was not alone in the search for what best could be described as species Ribes that could be cultivated in some manner. In my best Borat immitation, “Very nice.”

The black currant that many of us know are the European types. These have been cultivated for hundreds of years and have a rich history of selection, breeding and growing in many countries throughout the world. That was a different fruit entirely. Yet if I was starting from scratch, the American black currant would still be considered black currant. That is how people would view it. I would have to come up with a different identification with it because the black currant is in so many health products on the shelf already. It is pointless to reinvent the wheel of currants. I met a nursery person named Clayton Berg from Montana. He was a big fan of the buffalo currant, Ribes odoratum. I was purchasing and growing many of his currants at my farm at the time. We were able to collect seed of it and enjoy the flavor of this western wild currant. Yet it too was very low yielding and not particularly adapted to Michigans’s climate. Eventually the plants faded with time and died out. I met a USDA scientist who visited my farm that made a seed selection called “Riverview” American black currant. It was found along a river in North Dakota. The images showed very heavy yielding plants with dense fruit clusters. It was a dream come true, yet they too had low yields in my limited grow outs. Even today wherever I plant them, there is beautiful flowers, large amounts of pollinators in my genetically diverse plants yet few fruit. My first accession American black currants still persist and grow at my home. I love to smell the fragrant flowers. The frustrating thing is I cannot share it. It is too little. I have hit a dead end.

This year I found the rest of my Ribes americanum still hanging on after 30 years. I am going to fall plant a more robust group. These were plants that showed excellent flowering, growth habit with zero leaf disease. Most of the seedlings look very nice. High five! In a Borat way! I have this thought that if I put them in a new area they will thrive again. I have no plans to alter the soil with cinders and cement chunks but I am trying gypsum with a top dressing of chicken manure and mulch with composted hardwood chips. There is one more dead end. This time it’s a human induced one., Ribes is the most regulated plant with a long history of restrictions going back to the early 1900’s due to white pine blister rust. This makes it very difficult to distribute throughout the United States. Each state has different regulations some of which are county or regional restrictions. But it is possible to offer seeds. But once you got the seeds, you may be prohibited from growing it depending on where you live. The data waffles on the American black currant. For a while the USDA said it was immune to white pine blister rust. Then it wasn’t yet no data exists. It landed in the ‘better safe than sorry’ category of rule it out. When I spoke to a Ribes organization they said it was completely immune. The two roads both have dead ends. We will have to create a third road. This one will bring us to our destination . Ribes americanum.

Stuck between Indigofera, peony, lemon balm and Baptisia the American black currant fruits.
Small seedlings will be moved to areas with greater fruiting potential.
Seedling American black currants show their ability to seed in areas with a light leaf mulch over sand near the foundation of a garage.
Clove currants – One of the most heavenly fragrant flowers is found in the clove like essence of the buffalo currant. It too flowered like no tommorrow but left only small yields in its wake. You went there, you got the t-shirt at the gift shop, now it is time to go home. The fragrance is enough for now.
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