Wild Strawberry Fields

When my sister helped me pick wild strawberries at our family farm over 50 years ago, I realized that not everyone likes to be hunched over swatting horse flies while picking the teeny and delicate little strawberries in the middle of our swampy land. Yet the berries spoke to us in ways that few fruits …

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One Cup of Green Tea Please

I love tea. I do drink coffee but tea is my favorite. Even in college I drank tea with my college roomates. Lets have tea I would say. Of course there were other beverages but sometimes on a Sunday afternoon we would sit in the cafeteria and drink volumes of tea as we made jokes …

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A-Salading We Shall Go-Violets

The whole Viola genus is filled with wonderful fragrance, flowers and food yet rarely used as a source as perennial greens. That was my quest when I first started growing them in quantity. As a perennial vegetable, I was surprised there wasn’t much on their palatability, yields or flavor.  Once I began the collecting process …

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Atlantic White Cedar: Diversity Discovered

One of my favorite evergreen trees at my farm is the Atlantic White Cedar, Chamaecyparis thyoides.  At first I grew the plant from seed collected at an arboretum in the midwest. Then eventually I made two small plantings at my farm which then produced seed after a decade or so. I wasn’t sure what to …

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The Sloe Plum is Not that Slow

One of the most unusual fruits that I grow is the sloe plum. It is not rare or some sort of magical fruit hard to cultivate. It is quite prolific in terms of its fruit prodution and colonization of the landscape with its runners. I was perplexed on how to use it.   Over time it …

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Peaches From Pits: Peach Nirvana

For the last couple of years I have been sending free samples of seeds of Iowa peach seeds out to everyone that has ordered from me. Who doesn’t love a surprise seed?  I was fortunate to receive these seeds from known provenances isolated from other peaches in Iowa. Many of these go back to the …

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Questions on Quince: Quizzical Quandary of Fruit Proportions

A few years ago one of my neighbors near my farm was arriving home late and decided to turn on the news before bed. Lo and behold, here was her mailbox featured front and center on News 8.  Here was a newscaster talking about an event in front of her home just prior to her …

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The Hog Peanut

  Every now and then you find a unique wild food that from all practical appearances and applications  is not going to ring anyone’s plant bells or create a new food of great magnitude.  The hog peanut is a shade loving trifoliate, nitrogen fixing plant hunkered down under the oak trees here at my farm. …

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Medlar-Pear Sauce on a Tree

It is not a common fruit within the United States.  There are several grafted trees of it offered by nurseries. At one time I decided to plant as many as I could find. I grew eight varieties of the medlar which was all I could find. The trees were usually on hawthorn rootstock. Even if …

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Wildlife 2024 Retrospective

Every year brings in new plants and animals at my farm. Here are a few of them captured in a moment of time most of it from 2024.             That is wild.