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.
Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Diversity Explored: The Edible Sunflower

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.
Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Diversity Found: American Black Currant

Diversity Found: Dandelion

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

I had this collection of dandelion varieties for a while. These were selections bred for human consumption for the foliage as a super nutritious perennial green. I kept the collection secret. My employees noticed when they started to flower and release their seeds in the greenhouse. There they spread on the weed mat wiggling their way past the best of weed barriers into the ground below and flowering like all of life was one glorious exaltation filled with immense possibilities. I love you dandelion. Yet here was the poster child of the herbicide isle in Lowes plastered all across some of the most toxic substances on earth. My frequent visits to fix or find something for my farm always surprised me. Don’t look to the left was my thinking as I walked into the store. Yet in a few minutes I will be in my greenhouse tending my dandelion collection. Don’t tell anyone. I am sure I purchased the seeds illegally. I would like to think that anyway. Like I’m some sort of bad ass of weeddom. Don’t mess with me, I have dandelions. I’m a lion too. Yet I saw only one place where they were quasi-outlawed: the northern arboreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Evidently the sides of the gravel roads have created the perfect dandelion habitat. I may visit there someday looking for the perfect dandelion. But then maybe I don’t have to go that far. I found a nice one at a rest stop coming home from my parents house once. There herbicide and mulch in a not so cared for landscape created a dense planting of dandelions. One in particular with multi-clustered flowers and foliage caught my eye and I popped it up and put it in my truck. No one noticed. Whew! I am sure I could get arrested for that. But then I have connections being in charge of dandelion weedom and everything so not to worry. When I offered them in my nursery, few if anyone purchased them. I planted them in bulk under the bald cypress. I couldn’t just throw them out. Almost immediately they were browsed by deer and rabbits. It turns out that the lower bitterness levels and the upright growth habit of the blades of cultivated varieties were also appreciated by the animals that shunned them before. Who knew? Today I don’t have my collection. It turns out that once a dandelion flowers, the root fades and breaks down eventually. You need to collect the seed and continue the cycle to help the dandelion along. The flowering is one giant expression of pure consciousness to capture wind and disperse to open soil far away. No one knows how far the seeds can travel. Children seem to know the potential as they blow them upwards into the streams of wind far above the tree tops. If we keep an open mind, maybe the seeds will land and grow into our diet as we cultivate this wonderful green. In the meantime, the bumblebees and honey bees will fill up and pack their bodies with pollen and head home telling others of their location and the great discovery of the giant yellow flower rich in nutrition and life. That is the dandelion. Everyone knows it. Just don’t look to the left when you walk in.

French Improved Thick Leaf Dandelion
Nouvelle Dandelion
Vollherzigen Dandelion
Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Diversity Found: Dandelion

Diversity Found: Blackhaw and Medlar

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Almost immediately after I closed the door shut on my nursery in 2021, several great opportunities existed where I could foster new crops in unexpected ways. These would be crops that few people have experience with under the banner of minor crops or the edible wild. That banner is colorful and exciting but it is something few take seriously as a means of cultivation, applied ecology and agriculture blending it into a seamless whole. Since the plantings are more mature now, I can look at the yields and the quality of the fruit. There is no way to promote a new tree crop unless you do it yourself because you can’t explain flavor very well. I used to go to farm shows with my jams and syrups so people would get an idea of how these minor fruits taste. Direct experience is the only way. Once I left my booth to check another vendors display. When I got back, I noticed the spreads were all eaten. I asked a nearby attendee what happened and he said a class was let out directly across the hall and they really liked it. Problem solved.

Yesterday while talking to the power line vegetation control folks at my farm, one of them said to me, “It must be really cool-satisfying to know you planted a forest.” I agree. It is satisfying. I was very fortunate to do this. But what can you do with this diversity? Diversity has to move and expand outwards. Otherwise its just a ‘cool forest’. Since my forest is a novel ecosystem filled with plants and seed strains from around the globe, the focus has shifted to inspire others to do the same. Untended, wild and otherwise non-varietal plants are the future. We have gone too far to convince people that varietal plants are the only game in town. I am saying it is not. That is the power of my global forest. Its not exclusive. Anyone can harness that power in a short period of time very inexpensively on their land and spread the word of diversity by having diverse genetically different individuals that make up populations that are also genetically different.

Here are two examples:

Blackhaw Viburnum – Viburnum prunifolium Iowa or Michigan

For Syrup, Flavoring, Jam, Spreads, Dressing-Raisin like Quality

The flavor of blackhaw is one of those aha Viburnum moments where the flavor is very strong and enjoyable even if you eat it fresh without processing. There are other species I have that have the edible raisin fruit like Viburnum cassinoides, manshurica and carlesii but the fruit has a limited amount of pulp surrounding the bony seed. Blackhaw has the most pulp and it dries nicely on the bush which is the time to harvest it. It has to look crinkly for the best flavor. Blackhaw could probably use a new name like “Raisin Mango Tree” or “Raisin Spice Bush”. Blackhaw does not make me want to buy it off a store shelf or market. I have no idea what that would be really. A good name is everything. I like seaberry. I do not like sea buckthorn. One creates a vista of ocean and fruit. The other creates an image of blood and injury picking the fruit. You choose. Choose a good descriptive name for your fruit.

The foliage and fruit of blackhaw are pristine always. It would not require sprays. The fruit is easy to hand harvest in clusters. Other methods could be worked out too with mechanical harvesting. The fruit drops free of the racemes easily. Many years ago, someone who knew the plant very well was telling me of tree forms of it with large trunks. He mentioned I should look for those if possible as they have the highest yields because of the vigor. He was right. I noticed in my small population that there are some selections that are naturally more tree like with single trunks and others that are multi-trunked. I found one selection that has roughly a 30 percent larger fruit. This may not matter as you really are looking at plants with high yields of fruits because you are processing it. If the larger fruited one has higher pulp yields per fruit, then this might be a start to more fruitful selections. Rooting viburnums is easy so you could multi-clonal types in a single orchard too. It took roughly twenty years for my plants to stolon outwards. They are now an understory colony near the sawtooth oak and bur oak hybrids. You can harvest the stolons and use them as your own clones too.

The Michigan seedlings I have are also very heavy fruiting which started fruiting three years ago. The fruit is smaller but all things considered you could easily create a seedling planting with this strain as well. One tree I have in particular seems very high yielding with dense clusters all up and down the shrub. I received this seedling from a nursery in Michigan that had produced it from cuttings. It is found here in Michigan but it is not common in landscapes. It is interesting in that there are no named varieities of the prunifolium species in this super selected highly cloned genus. The Viburnums are rich in diversity of ornamental appeal. Viburnum lantana is grown as a kind of substitute of the blackhaw. Unfortunately it is short lived outside of its wetland environment and has foliar diseases weakening the plant over time. My planting made it up to a decade before disappearing entirely but no fruit in my sandy dry soil.

Medlar-Mespilus germanica Walters Ecos Selection Michigan

For Flavoring, Jam, Spreads, Fresh fruit sauce-Pear like flavor

I could never understand the hype around this smooshy looking brown fruit until I finally tapped into a ripe one in November. Here was all the flavors I love in one fruit, sweet, slightly sour, pear, raisin and apple all in one mellow syrupy sauce delivery vehicle. I had over a dozen varieties at one point. They had large fruits and some had fairly good production but the flavor was funky with dry like astrigency. The ripening period seemed never to come. It was not uniform and I never understood how anyone would eat this. I was wondering what I was doing wrong. To make matters worst, the grafted trees I had were nailed by a fungus called fireblight and like the name suggests makes the foliage of the tree look scorched while killing the tree to the ground eventually. It was from here I began looking at a seedling grown trees from a nursery I had known from my college days. As time went on and the trees got more mature, it left the other cloned varieties in the dust as far as yields go. It also had something the others did not, fire blight immunity. The fruit was smaller but this did not matter in terms of making it into a sauce. It was from this spring board of seedling plants that produced identical plants with dense fruiting. The fruits were always rich in flavor like pear sauce. It was surprising to me no one looked at this fruit before. It too could use a new branding name. Meddlin with Medlar. That is all I got because the name actually comes from something that looks like a horses anus from the blossom end part of the fruit. Maybe “Perryeire” ? Because of its long history of use past and present, medlar is fine but you could have a brand name around the fruit that would be more descriptive. Like “Pearhaw” or “Pear Berry” or “Apple Berry” or “Perry Berry” Last one looks cool but difficult to speak clearly. berry berry or perry berry? Medlar does not jump off the shelf.

The propagation of medlar is slow from seed and this might be why no one grew it from seed to begin with. The seed has a two year dormancy. Once the seed has sprouted the tree grows fast from year three on making upwards to 12 to 18 inches of growth per year. It has a deep tap root and until this is formed the trees stand still just like hickory. Fruiting begins in years 5-8. I made one clonal selection only to speed up this process. Called ‘Beacon’ it was the highest yielding plant with the greatest vigor on the sandy hill where it stands. Normally the varieties are grafted onto hawthorne which is readily available in the nursery trade as ornamental trees. The Walters strain medlar is likely from central Europe which made it more adaptable to the Michigan climate to begin with.

‘Beacon” medlar from the Walters seed source. All heavy fruiting and ripens in Michigan fully. Not grafted, medlars will form colonies over time spreading by underground roots very slowly outwards similar to some species of hawthornes.

GERMINATING THE SEEDS OF BLACKHAW VIBURNUM

Like all Viburnums, this requires double dormancy. Fall plant after cleaning the fruit. Plant 1/2 inch deep. The seed has a tendency to migrate to the surface of the soil so tamp in and use a sawdust mulch or something similar in consistency. The first year in the summer and fall, roots will develop from the seeds you planted the year before. Then in the following spring, a top will emerge from the seed. Usually leaving them grow for two years is ideal for transplanting. Seeds can be consumed by rodents so using a screened tray is another option leaving it outside in a protected area and letting nature do the dormancy. Lift the screen in the second spring to allow for the seedlings to develp their tops.

GERMINATING THE SEEDS OF MEDLAR

Medlar seeds have both an internal clock type of dormancy which requires a completion of the embryo’s growth along with an extremely hard dense seed coat which needs wearing down by soil bacteria to split the sutres. Normally planting them outside and/or going through dormancy requires a winter, spring-summer and winter again to sprout fully. I have had several seed batches have portions of the seeds go into the third year. The seed coat takes the bacterial action of the soil to complete the splitting of the seeds along the sutre. Peach seeds are like this. There must be a tremendous force of a germinating medlar seed to pop the sutre. The seeds are consumed by animals so I would suggest using a screened prop tray to germinate the seeds. But it is not as heavily consumed compared to other seeds. It is in the same class as hawthorne and can be treated the same way. If you have every grown hawthorne from seed, medlar is pretty much identical and is a close relative. The young trees are extremely tap rooted and can be kept in place for 2-3 years before digging and transplanting. It transplants very well and grows in a variety of soils except water logged conditions.

Seeds will likely be the new source of many orchard plants in agroforestry systems as well as normal fruit plantings. This will allow a certain flexibility in selection by defining a seed strain to a specific region. What will matter most is the yield and end use of the fruit and how a market can create a value to it so that the farmer is wealthy for creating healthy individuals who eat the fruit. The medlar and blackhaw viburnum are likely a source of wonderful nutrition. We just don’t know what that is entirely. Now we can have a range of flavors and nutrition combined in one fruit. We found diversity and it found us too. Now we can share this resource to others in need of greater health and well being on both environmental and individual levels.

Enjoy, Kenneth Asmus

Korean Spice Viburnum in flower. Found near a park that self seeded in a pile of grass clippings. Created a small planting at my farm specifically for seed and fruit production. It has a good flavor but not a lot of fruit surrounding the seed. Viburnum carlesii. Many times this species is almost or entirely sterile with little fruit.
Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Diversity Found: Blackhaw and Medlar

The Pecan is the Pie in the Sky

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

I live in one of the cloudiest counties in North America. When sun appears, people comment on it in the stores. “Oh, it’s a sunny day!” As if to say time is short and you better enjoy it now! The sunny levels are spotty because of the effects of Lake Michigan which is roughly thirty miles away. Today the water temperatures are in the forties. This too creates this cooling effect along the lakeshore and inland. Called the fruit belt, Michigan has an ideal climate for a wide variety of fruits. Pecans on the other hand do not fit into this cloudy short season area. They are heat lovers and like to bathe in a long season of warm soils and air to ripen the nuts fully. If you announce to the world you are going to grow pecans in Michigan, you might as well say you have figured out cold fusion. The pecan market is massive and you need massive plantings to make it profitable. When I first started growing pecans in the mid to late 1980’s from the Northern Nut Growers Association northern pecan seed distribution project, I was not as optimistic as I am now. Cold pecan fusion was a dream not a reality. What happened? Time and the constant dream of this pie in the sky tree crop kept me going.

To find, create and develop any tree crop, takes patience. The pecan like all hickories takes a lot of time and space. They are huge trees. Some of the older southern orchards clock in at 8 tree per acre. People today do not have patience or have the land resources to make pecan growing profitable especially into the unknown real estate of Michigan. There is a large government breeding program in Beltsville, Texas that houses all the pecan varieties and actively breeds new pecans. It takes a certain stick-to-itness within a government repository. You need a long cycle time to grow and release a pecan variety. Very few are found in the wild anymore and used. Although it is still done this way, it is not a common thing in the most southern part of its range. Breeding pecans is all hand done with mass selection in the hundreds of thousands range to create the perfect pecan variety. No other tree crop takes this much time. The juvenile age of the tree runs from 15 to 30 years from seed. The short cut for researchers is to graft seedling trees into mature trees. This brings it down to 2-3 years to fruit but it doesn’t tell the whole story until several characteristics are met and then put out into an orchard as a single selection. Today at my farm, I still have some seedling plantings from Missouri seed from James Pecans and Shephards Farm that after forty years still have not fruited. Typical of seedling populations, I also found several seed strains that fruited in under ten years of age. One of them is highly precocious and a dwarf tree with minimal foliage production. This natural variation of pecan and its ripening period along with its precocity doesn’t mean you have a commercial pecan. It just means you have a pecan that can grow and ripen in southern Michigan and reliably produce good crops of nuts every year despite the climate. Is that commercial? Probably not, but then those characteristics have never been put to the test because…….. pecans do not grow in Michigan. See what I am saying? This highlights the issue of developing a new crop that is only thought of as a southern species. For many, it sounds too pie in the sky.

If you could have a working clonal collection here in Michigan, that would likely help alleviate the problem. There are other ‘ultra-northern’ pecans.They too are from some of the same wild selections I have at my farm. The difference is location, location, location. You need to have them in a short season area with cloudy cool weather area. This makes it possible not only to grow the tree but to ripen the fruit. I use to take my family to the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary not far from Battle Creek, Michigan. There they had some of the nut trees from the early Kellogg days. Near the lake there is one massive pecan tree reaching 70 feet tall. The nuts never ripen and do not get past the milk stage. The tree looks fantastic but nut production is zero and stayed that way for the decades I would visit the area. This is a common issue with pecan with such a huge range from Texas to Iowa. The pecan is a fast growing hickory species for Michigan. We have the right soils, climate and the tree is very well adapted here. Once I received seed from someone who collected from a tree in northern Minnesota. The nuts were fully ripened. This was in an area that minus 40F was common. This highlights a physiological compotent of hardiness much like bald cypress. Bringing a plant under cultivation expands the range and makes it possible to grow food in areas not thought possible before. The northern pecan leads the way with its high oil nut and rich flavor. The pecan pie is brought down to earth and made possible by human selection and agricultural innovation.

I asked one of the USDA scientists about the use of pecans in Michigan at a nut growers convention. He said I should focus on yields and not pay attention to the commercial characteristics needed for a commercial nut. We do not have heat stress, drought or missing levels of funky micronutrients. The shucks pop open on their own and the nuts drop in September and October. Michigan pecans are high in oil and delicious radically better than their southern counterparts.

“Michigander Prolifica” A dwarf selection with clusters of nuts forming on the tips of the branches. Small, compact nuts form and drop free in late September. Tree is not as vigorous as others. Minimal foliage is produced and the crown is wide open with good light penetration throughout. Tree is very heavy bearing. Parent tree is on a low organic soil on a windy bluff. Hardy to minus 30F.

Michigander Prolifica Super productive small tree.

“Michigan” Selected from dozens of other ultra northern seedlings, this one selection was both the most vigorous and heaviest yielding of all pecans at my farm. Almost every year the nuts ripen fully and drop free of the husk on its own. It has long thin nuts that ripen in early October. the ripening period is spread out over a two week period. This is by far the best selection for ripening and yields on a large robust tree. It was likely one of the seedlings from the Voiles #2 seed source which was from the Richard Best orchard prior to its demise from the Mississippi flood waters. The Northern Nut Growers Association brought this seed source to light as well as others found in Iowa as possible sources of short season pecans in the northern part of its range. This was the geographical hot spot of short season pecans distributed by crows, native Americans and early settlers.

“Michigan” variety of pecan grown from seed from Illinois wild pecans-early ripening. “Michigan” had the highest yields by far compared to all other seedlings at my farm. I still sell the nuts of this variety and the scionwood.
Dawson Creek Pecan from Shepherds Farm in Missouri. This was a good northern seed source from wild trees in northern Missouri.
Some of the Michigan pecans on my farm enjoying the early morning sunshine. Pecans naturally split their husks and the nuts drop out or fly off in a blue jays beak.
Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Pecan is the Pie in the Sky

That is the Power of Bamboo

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
River Cane

When I lived in town with my family, I would go for a run and take the same route almost every day. I would pass by this house on an old brick road that contained a beautiful well cared for landscape. It contained a sizeable clump of bamboo in the front yard. It’s not a plant you normally see in southwestern Michigan. The yard was filled with wonderful fruits many of which I could not identify. The house was on a corner and the bamboo provided privacy and sound buffering capabilities to the front and side yards of the house. It easily grew up to the second story window. Just by luck, I met the owner when he visited my farm and agreed to give me a tour of his yard. The bamboo was contained within a small area yet provided a huge benefit to the house and occupants. He invited me over for meditation which was scheduled for four hours on a Sunday. This was a bit long for my family life but I thanked him profusely. Later I hired someone for my farm who rented a portion of the house and lived there. He said it was a wonderful cosmic shade from the plant all throughout the house especially when the wind blew. It was accompanied by the music of many birds using it to rest in. He said there were lovely design patterns on the walls and floors with the filtered light coming through the windows. Many years had passed and I found out the owner was moving to Hawaii. In another cosmic twist of fate, just before he left, the bamboo flowered. This is a very rare occurrence happening once in a lifetime. As if it wanted to say goodbye and good luck, the bamboo said farewell to him. He sold the house. Not long aferward, I happened to be at a nearby garden center when I overheard one of the employees talk about ‘killing the bamboo’ for a customer. I knew it was the bamboo I was familiar with. I asked and soon found out the new owners were not fans of the bamboo. The employee told me bamboo was a dangerous plant and very hard to get rid of which required multiple applications of a specific herbicide to kill. This highlights the love-hate relationship people have with bamboo. One year the plant is loved and cherished as a glorious landscape plant filled with cosmic possibilities. On Sundays incense and four hour meditations are within its vicinity. Songs of birds flood the streets. The next year its dangerous, destructive and a destroyer of all things good. The bamboo is gone now. A little planting of coneflowers sits near the curb with a sprinkling of coreopsis marking the end of an era. No one knows what greatness was there before.

Hello, my name is Bob and I love bamboo.

Early on in my nursery I thought of the bamboo as impossible to grow in my climate. They were never seed produced and involved large equipment to dig and transplant due to the massive root systems. I kept trying to purchase bulk roots but they were always low quality and died during the first winter. Finally I purchased the indigenous North American River cane and a Black stemmed bamboo. Only the River Cane survived. I noticed even mentioning I was going to plant bamboo created quite a stir of emotions. I love personal experience, good, bad or indifferent and the bamboo didn’t disappoint. I kept my love of it secret and told few. I really didn’t want to argue plus I had nothing to go on. There were no Facebook groups at this time. My main question to folks dishing out advice is “have you ever tried to grow the bamboo?” And if yes, “what kind was it?” Here was the issue. Most people had only heard of its effects in odd sorts of ways and had no direct experience. They saw the pictures in National Geographic was one. When I said river cane, people heard sugar cane. It was frustrating. I gave up. Eventually I began the process of producing River cane in my nursery from roots. It was slow to harvest and I had to extract soil with the roots to make it work as well as root prune the plants the year before digging. I had two forms of it and one was very nice in spreading producing linear roots with evenly spaced canes. I grew it on a sandy hillside which is the opposite of its native haunt of river bottomland. I limited the sales to ten to twenty plants per year to keep my planting from disappearing entirely. It was popular. I think because it was native and not found like it once was in its native habitat, there were no complaints. Bamboo was becoming popular again with new varieties entering the marketplace too. There was less guilt.

As time went on in my nursery life, I soon found several opportunities to develop cold hardy selections of a couple of species using seed produced plants. The way to do this is quite simple. It is similar to taking any zone 6 or 7 woody plant seedling and finding hardier selections in zone 5. I would grow a few hundred seedlings in an open polyhouse and let winter take its toll. The remainder of the seedlings would then be planted outside as a source of genetically different bamboo. The way bamboo is produced today is the opposite of this. They are all rooted from clones whether it is the clumping forms or runner types. Bamboo also has its own 6 mil weed barrier to prevent the runners from running and moving into unwanted real estate. Its a whole production system and installation in a landscape and is not your average get a shovel and dig a hole type of thing. You need a trencher to go three foot deep. There are several companies on the east coast that specialize in bamboo removal. One runner species is banned from several states. Like poison ivy, it is not wanted at all by some. It cannot be part of a modern landscape where plant selections today are short, squatty, sterile and tidy with a sprinkling of nativity. Bamboo is exotic, free, fat, prolific and overflowing. Its moving out brothers and sisters. Bamboo usually is a clumpers only game now as far as retail production goes. It is becoming popular again. It is considered a safe to use as directed sort of plant.

The seed of bamboo became available commercially and it was possible to obtain it here in the U.S. However, a law was put into place banning its import eventually reducing the available seed on the market. It was a tricky little grass to germinate but once started a white clean root pops out from the embryo. The plants take two years to really fill the pot and look like bamboo. I focused on two species, timber canes——Vivax bamboo and Edible Sprouts—- Edulis bamboo. I sold them for a couple of years only. There was quite a bit of loss during one winter at minus 17F. This in itself was a deterrant to trying to create winter hardy selections because I knew minus 20F was probably around the corner. However, I did manage to squeak out a small population of both species. Today those plants grace my farm. After ten years they did not take over the universe as many had predicted but they are not the same plant that is found in the southern states or in China. Most folks who know bamboo way more intimately than me say I will likely only experience the yearly top growth of the plant and winter will bring it back to ground level. So my bamboo forest will be more of a bamboo grassland than anything.

My goal was to develop construction grade varieties and edible shoot selections. I wanted the forest type trees to 70 feet or more like I saw when I took my family years ago to Disneyland. I think that still might be possible but to do it in Michigan would require to kick out at least 100,000 seedling plants to find hardier and even more robust selections. I liken it to a specific application and a means to harness the power of bamboo. It might not make a great landscape plant and like mint might ruin your flower garden state of mind. But as a source of commercial fiber, timber, lumber, plastic substitute, cotton substitute, flooring, scaffolding, chairs, tables, damn near everything and edible shoots we are on to something unbelievably powerful and life saving. These selections could be employed and used to a greater degree in areas where scale, control and use would dominate the plantings in commercial settings. For vigor and health we need the runners of the world. Dense, solid roots holding the soil as a precious resource and slowly bringing back those soils currently filled with GMO corn and soybean. Those soils are ruined and may take a generation to cleanse themselves of the poisons we have put in them. Even if we treat it as a bamboo monoculture or develop it as a bamboo polyculture, it does not matter. Bamboo could easily purify those soils while making our life on planet earth easier and more productive. The power of bamboo is the power of grass. One sheath at a time, creating a forest of perennial possibilities while it forges us ahead in permanent tree crop agriculture.

Think it all started on a corner house on an old brick road.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on That is the Power of Bamboo

Chufa-The Savior of Sedges

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
Commercially produced chufa from Spain

One of the crop plants I had the pleasure of working with was chufa or tiger nut. I had heard about this plant from a food website describing the use of the crop and how it is cultvated. I ordered a pound of them and found them very delicious like minature coconuts with a chewy texture. I ate them like a snack food while driving to my farm in the morning. Chufa is considered a beverage plant. A drink called horchata can be made using the tubers. Chufas 25% oil content makes a rich drink with the addition of cinnamon and sugar. Much of the world wide production of chufa is in Spain. This is where most of the U.S. imports them from for specialty food products. A cooking oil is made from them. As a secondary use they are also put in turkey and duck seed mixes for planting for wildlife use. The smallest tubers are used for this purpose. It is the same sub-species as the chufa only graded for this purpose. The plant does not produce seed like normal perennial sedges so it is difficult to breed and is only grown from tubers. There are no seeds available. So the diversity you see today is all clonal yet they are not normally listed as varieties instead they are listed by their geographic location of where you might buy them. Each country has its own selections.

Chufa produced at my farm. 2012.

I was not aware of anyone growing it in the U.S. at the time but I did find one seed company, J.L. Hudson that offered them. I knew this was a tropical grass and might have some problems in Michigan. The first plantings were done outdoors on a warm sunny hillside under irrigation. The plants grew wonderfully up to three foot tall but when harvest came, it became abundantly clear that every small mammal within olfactory range completely eliminated the crop to the point, there was just enough to replant. It was weird because when I went to dig them, they came out like pancakes with few roots and none of the delicious tubers. They shredded the roots. Only near the densest part of the root near the root collar were some tubers they could not get to. In a fresh state, the tubers were even more delicious than the dried packaged ones I purchased from the Spanish food store. I did notice the turkeys found them too. They used their feet to unearth the tubers. Everyone was very happy but me.

Chufa produced outside in one of my first plantings of it. 2012.

In future growing conditions, I doubled down and began growing them in poly bags in my greenhouse. This allowed me to extend the season and control the mice and voles to a greater degree. Like a vole magnet they found them there too but eventually I put a stop on the pillfering and got a crop from them to the point I could see a trend of some sort. The length of time needed to finish the crop was an issue even in the polyhouse. It was from here I moved some of the planting outside and began to measure tuber size and length of time to finish the crop and the real life yield of the plants. This explained why previous attempts to commercialize the crop was done in the southern or southeastern U.S. You need heat units big time. There was an issue with yields too. They were not the most productive tuber crop.

Chufa produced at my farm 2012.

After thirty years of experimentation, I finally did manage to squeak out a couple of forms from the original J.L. Hudson Seedsman company as well as others. I was at a point of giving up until I visited a Detroit permaculture group with a few clumps of my chufa grass with tubers attached. I washed them thoroughly and removed all the stones. People kept eating them and saying over and over how delicious they were like minature coconuts. Gosh darn it, people love the chufa sedge. Inspired by the delicious fresh tubers, I continued my chufa quest. My early ripening strains with larger tubers where doing okay. This year I tried several in polybags which true to form brought in a lot of mice. They were digging down and yanking out the plants. Eventually I put a stop to that and saved the remainder using pelletized animal off and increasing the depth of the planting so it was more difficult to get to. So far so good, but I check them a few times a week for damage.

Not A Nutsedge

This chufa is a tropical annual grass which does not flower, produce seed or is winter hardy in Michigan whether the soils freezes or not. At this time the taxonomy has it as a subspecies called ‘sativa’ but some scientists want to classify as a separate species. It is not a serious weed or any weed of any magnitude and cannot spread on its own. This information is frequently copied by writers who have never grown chufa and likely have never seen the plant in real life. It has to be replanted like any annual. The images on line are often wrong and do not reflect actual chufa because once again it is thought of as a nutsedge. Instead the flowering is the perennial yellow nutsedge not chufa. For a while, there were a few laws put in place which led to the removal of the chufa from store shelves and on line sales in some states in the wildlife sector. People are unjustifiably paranoid about chufa. Chufa is not nutsedge in the way the herbicide companies advertise it but it is the same species and that is the source of the confusion. This leads us directly on the path of good intentions which then becomes the path to Hell. In the process it eliminates a great crop plant by spreading false information. The wildlife industry followed the regulation to a certain extent but when I checked, it wasn’t enforced as far as I could tell. I still found it for sale locally during this time. It is possible this is still an issue in some states for those still going down the path of good intentions.

Gardening With the Chufa

Its a easy plant to cultivate and I enjoy growing it and sharing it with others. Every time people consume it, they always love it. But trying to use the space for this versus some other tuber crop, it will be a tough sell. It is getting a second life from my early ripening types to a very limited degree. I can see where the yields could be improved by using the forms with larger tubers and clumpier forming grass. This whole thing is my ‘path to heavenly enlightenment’ thinking in terms of its acceptance by the public and widespread use by the gardening public. This is better than the path of good intentions. We all know where that leads. There does come a point that makes you wonder what sort of potential it has as an oil producing crop plant on a larger scale. The drought and heat tolerance is significant and I think in this new age of climate fluctuations will make us think of the chufa in Spain, how it grows in the arid climates of the world, its calorie per acre yield and health benefits to humans around the world. A grass species cultivated for thousands of years sounds enlightening to me.

The Nutsedge Returns

In one of the parts of my farm, I have a small colony of nutsedge. It is the type that sells herbicide for corn and soybean fields. This is the perennial species which produces long rhizomes in all directions. My colony is on one of the sites I never tilled but did mow from time to time. When I decided to investigate, I found only one actual tuber on the rhizomes after ten minutes of digging. It is not a very productive plant tuber wise but it has a large numbers of rhizomes. It could be possible to take what is considered the worst weed in the history of mankind and make it a savior by selecting it for heavy yields and ease of cultivation. But like all saviors would anyone recognize the value of it or would it just be another weed and shunned for generations. The chufa was that weedy nutsedge at some point. It is a crop plant that was cultivated 4000 years ago. It originated in Egypt as a source of food on the flood plains of the Nile. I am sure it flowered and had great diversity of progeny too. It is entirely possible that the forms in East India or West Africa could provide us with a view of this crop and how it would be possible to grow it in North America again. But for now, it is the miniature coconut tuber that grows on a sterile grass found in Spain introduced by the Moors in the 11th century. Thats a good start.

Many good ideas start here. Knowledge. Education. Action. Dispersal.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chufa-The Savior of Sedges

Bean Flowers

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

Yesterday while trying to capture insects working my bean flowers via photography , I remembered the college professor that I took an Entomology class from Western Michigan University in 1975. The whole class went out one night to a nearby state forest. We whizzed up a peanut buttter and beer concoction and lathered it on oak tree bark with paint brushes. It was a secret formula according to the intern who was totally into it. We lit up a bed sheet with a black light of some type for attracting moths. We hiked up and down the forest road to check our splotches of beer whizzed butter using flash lights. At some point, someone said, “You know if the police come, we are going to have a hard time explaining this.” There it was a giant blue white square orb in the middle of the woods. Some of the students had mining hats on. “Want some peanut butter beer officer? If you drink it, you will attract moths.” We stayed out quite late in the night. We found spiders and a few other night insects but no moths. This experience has stayed with me and highlights my thinking with pollinators today. It is constantly changing with a wide range of butterflies, bees and flies. You never know what will come if anything on any particular day.

In terms of my bean flowers, I see new insects every year and wonder where they came from. Others vanish entirely only to show up years later. I rarely spend more than an hour every week looking at my bean flowers when in blossom. I do not go at night either. I need a larger sample size to grasp this complex system of pollination. Some appear to vanish for a while or have greater reduced numbers in some years. Since my neighbor took down an out buidling made of wood, the carpenter bees are not there like they use to be. But again, I am guessing. Saying one insect is dominant is completely impossible but for a brief moment the carpenter bees were king of the bean flowers. Today a small bumblebee is seen hovering above my lima beans. There is one constant in all of this related to my love of beans. It is the consistency of my planting and the populations I am inadvertantly supporting during pollination time that brings them back year after year along with a diverse cast of new species coming and going. There is a huge number of very small bees that look like sweat bees and flies that appear to be really going after the small lima bean flowers. They are very selective on the flowers preferring the creme colored lima flowers with the broad petals and a curved ‘landing field’. As a result, the flowers, plants and beans have responded by creating plants with greater flowers with more open faced flowers and a greater potential for seed set. The pollinators are changing my populations to be more successful for them while helping me discover heavy fruiting selections. This was my aha moment of bean consciousness. You would have to be completed blinded to say only certain plants attract certain pollinators. That is just not possible. The insect is wrapped in this new source of food and it is not going away easily as it chooses wisely the flowers that suit it the best. This is also the type of plant I want. I want it easily reproduceable from seed and highly successful in a wide range of environments with extremely delicious nectar and pollen. This in turn produces more beans. The hybridization process is worthless unless you consider the value of the pollinators that do the work. From honeybees to the teeniest fly its not a competition. Its a collaboration far outside anything you could construct or direct in any way. For that I am thankful. I propose a toast of peanut butter whizzed beer to all. Here, here.

Farmerless fields can sustain all life even if it is a minor compotent of a farm encompassing less than one percent of the land area. One percent is enough to improve the other 99 percent whether it is intentional of not.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bean Flowers

One Plant-One Human-One Idea

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment

If you have ever planted a cover crop of rye, you soon realize how much this powerhouse of a plant can do in such a short period of time. It is such a simple thing yet has immense environmental benefits. I know many people normally don’t view rye like this but after creating a field of rye on a family Christmas tree farm I soon became a believer of the little rye plant. It was more than wheat. Recently I saw an article questioning the use of rye in wildflower plantings since it is not native. My first thought was how stupid can you be. The second thought was how similar it was to my own thinking until I actually planted a field of rye! From the idea to its creation, the rye field became much more than I expected. It was definitely more than the sum of its parts. In the real world of an abandoned Christmas tree farm surrounded by white pine, oak and birch forests of central Michigan rye enriched all life on the many levels of plants and animals. It was from here I saw the light. And wow, was it bright. I too was lost until I was saved by the miracle of rye. There was nothing before and then after a few rains a green field emerges from darkness.

My daughter Kelly helped me create this image of the rye field in its first year. I used it for one my catalogs. The field was prepped by my father, uncle and a contractor with a bulldozer. The bulldozer removed the few remaining trees in the field. My uncle yanked out an old disc from the woods and attached it to the tractor. There are probably a lot of old discs sitting in Michigan woodlands. I rented a rotovator to run off the tractor to smooth everything out prior to planting. It was an abandoned Christmas tree field. Soon it will be rye. Rye seed is relatively inexpensive so we overplanted using a hand held spreader and walked back and forth criss crossing the field several times to get uniform coverage. It was a joy to do. I was wondering how many birds this would attract. The only thing to do was wait for rain. The stage was set.

I was aware of ryes green manure potential. I used it on my tree crop farm to build the soil prior to planting acorns. The stems and foliage break down quickly adding organic matter to the soil. The rye held my low organic sandy soil in place on this slope I was working and helped in the production of my seedling oak trees. You normally till it under before it reaches maturity and sets its ‘berries’. One day at my farm, I saw two large pheasants consuming the rye seed I had just planted. I was so enamored with these beautiful birds and the rarity of their presence, I considered it a great honor for them to visit. I didn’t scare them away. You just don’t see pheasants very often if at all in Michigan. The rye brought them in for me to see. Since there was no future Christmas trees being planned at my families farm, my father and I decided to let it go to maturity to see what would happen. This rye field signaled the last crop we would plant together. I would visit my parents home during this time and would always make a point to check the fields progress to see what sort of rye shenanigans was going on.

After emergence in late October, the plants were being heavily grazed by deer. The ground was solid with hoof prints. The succulent nature of this grass brought in large herds of deer. It was attracting the attention of many of the nearby homeowners who were probably spritzing out their coffee in the morning looking out their patio windows. It was solid hoof prints. The grazing had little influence on the plants themselves which seemed to generate even more foliage. Even in December with snow cover the deer kept coming back moving the snow aside for obtain fresh forage. The following year, the plants put on their heads and grew upwards to three feet tall. It was at this point, the turkeys began to nest in one thick area. As the seeds ripened and the stalks turned to a golden brown, a huge number of jumping mice filled the field. I began to mow it shattering the seed heads and spreading it in all directions just like I had done earlier with a hand cranked seeder. The field was alive with mice. They looked like kangaroos jumping in front of the tractor as I mowed the field. Finally after the mowing and a little rain, the new rye grass started again. This time it was not as thick. This same process continued for three more years minus the mowing and finally only one plant remained in year four. The rye had run its course.

The cumulative benefits created a new field of ecological opportunity. There was less thistle in one area. New trees began seeding in. Wild strawberries were there in great abundance again with solid patches of them here and there. A few willows grew in the area with the highest clay content. You could say it went back to normal and everything calmed down. To me it set the stage for things to come whatever that may be. We sold the land and gave up the field. But for a brief moment in time, we came together under one idea and one plant and immersed ourselves in the rye. Out of darkness we emerged after a few rains.

The ‘Kelly Renee’ apple looks particularly good this year and free of insects and diseases. Named after my daughter this apple variety was grown from seed from a russet apple found in northern Michigan at an abandoned homestead. (Probably not far from an old disc.) This selection is what I would term as a no or low spray apple. It has a few blemishes but hey, we all have them.

Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on One Plant-One Human-One Idea

The Deer Solution

Posted on August 12, 2024 by Biologicalenrichment
2024

For many years on my way into town, I would drive by a farm that raised sheep. The pasture was very neat looking and was often cropped to the ground. Like a neatly mowed lawn with isolated thistle plants popping out of what looked like a green ping pong table, this was their home. My farm is home to another herbivore called the white tailed deer. It eats my pasture grasses but also the foliage of many species of shrubs and trees. It has a varied diet including my tree crops of persimmon and acorns. The pasture at my farm is dense and rich filled with many species of grasses and forb of which the diversity increases every year. It is never cropped. The deer are selective eaters. This makes the deer a shaper of vegetation of which it is of great benefit to my farm. I realize when I say, the deer love that, I know the deer will partially or totally destroy it. I had a large collection of sunchokes and each time I planted them in the outer reaches of the farm away from my weekly spraying of “Deer-Off” or outside the electric fencing, the deer loved them to death. Like a herbivore freight train, even the most vigorous selection of Jerusalem artichoke was gone by the second year.

I had the thought many years ago after seeing browse on a neatly chomped buckthorn bush that it might be possible to stimulate browse on other plants that I needed to reduce or eliminate to make it easier to harvest under the trees. I have to do this from time to time. I use a weed whip and lopers. I do not own a tractor or mower. Inspired by sheep, the weed whip would allow me to crop an area like a ping pong table. I would use lopers to flatten shrubs around these mature trees. I started by testing large shrubs and pruning them back to the ground. I used multiflora rose and tartarian honeysuckle. The groundcover at the time was pasture grasses, timothy and quackgrass. When they began to thin due to shade and star thistle, the other shrubs took hold. I was using sawdust mulch at the time and this aided in seedling establishment as well. I would prune back the shrubs to ground level using lopers. New sprouts from the rose and honeysuckle are very succulent. Deer will consume these in great abundance coming back to them over and over just like my sunchokes. The forage of honeysuckle is rich in protein. The multiflora rose sprouts are heavily browsed in the winter too. I have noticed that the young sprouts of grape vines are relished and are quickly consumed. That seems to be a favorite after I cut back the vines from climbing my pear trees. Even new seedlings of pokeweed are tipped by the deer. You would think this would make them sick. One of my cameras in the winter showed a line of deer eating the pasture grass near my Korean nut pines and hybrid chestnuts. This particular low area was capturing the warmth of the sun which made the grass grow late in the season which in turn created a small herd of deer all eating in a row cafeteria style.

Not an easy row to hoe, any wild squash is difficult to establish due to deer browse. I keep trying.
One of the most beneficial plants at my farm consumed by whitetail deer. Star thistle.
A new dwarf species of Desmodium at my farm likely brought to my farm by deer. This is a cool species of which I cannot identify yet. I plan to put some into cultivation to see how it grows and test its seed production.

I do not allow hunting.To begin with, my farm is too close to residential homes to be safe and would not be legal. I love the deer and their presence at my farm. I do not feel they are destructive. The benefits clearly outweigh the small amount of food they take from my tree crops. I do not want them killed or managed or whatever you want to call it. The coyotes do a better job of that plus they feed on other animals in the process. It is interesting that my small 13 acres rarely has more than 3-4 deer at a time on site. I found out a few winters ago after a light snowfall that many deer from outside my farm come in to feed at night before retreating to the heavily forested areas and a nearby wetland.

It is through the white tailed deer that land can rebound by increasing plant diversity, improving habitat for other animals. Their waste feeds other plants with its nutrients while cultivating the ground with its hooves allowing for greater water and nutrient penetration. To me the white tailed deer is a perfect animal doing everything it can to shape my vegetation into a greater whole while asking for so little.

People have told me stories of specific deer they have gotten to know a little. For many years there was one female deer that did not run away when I was working in the fields. I was a steady fixture with my shovel harvesting field trees for the nursery. I would turn away or walk at an angle to her. Once I saw her giving birth. She looked at me from a distance but did not move and then looked straight ahead. I turned away. There was a certain trust built up over the years. One day she was consuming grass in a recently demolished greenhouse area about 40 feet away from where I was standing. I could not figure out at first why she was eating Johnson grass of all things.Then I saw the buck sitting on the ground about ten feet away from her. He was not moving and with my presence probably was on the verge of bolting. I quietly slipped into the barn and lightly closed the door. I will let that play out on its own in this ecological theatre I call my farm.

Yum Star thistle.
Low valley area with pasture grasses
The doe on the left is the one in my story above.
Posted in Diversity Found, Ecology-Biodiversity-Integration, Miracles of Nature | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The Deer Solution