I love beans. It is my favorite protein source. I am particularly fond of red lentils as they are very digestible and quick to cook. When someone brought up lentils in one of my agricultural classes in the late 1970’s the professor joked, “What are those? Beans grown during lent?” He then followed up with …
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March 17, 2024
For me it is impossible not to check out the apricots in the produce section of my local grocery store. I know they are from California. I know that the flavor is iffy and not tree ripened. I still have to try. Several times I have ordered the organic Frog Hollow Farm apricots from …
March 14, 2024
A New Broadway Play Comes to Town: Escape From the L’Anse Sewage Plant A Review By Kenneth Asmus Normally anything to do with sewage in the title I would run. Yet my attention was captured from the very beginning when the lead character, a watermelon named Bob discovers a world outside of the nutrient rich …
March 14, 2024
In the process of trying to define a wild potato, I began to wonder how botany would characterize a well-known crop plant found as a wild plant growing outside of cultivation. Botany is good at defining plants in very subjective terms. Consider the following terms I found from a few of my reference books. Escaped, …
Continue reading “A Potato Escapes Cultivation and Becomes Feral”…
January 9, 2024
It started as a discussion around wild leeks as a foraging exercise at my farm. Here was a delicious wild food that was being harvested for use in upscale restaurants. I had a small planting under my persimmons at my farm planted about a decade before. They were slowly spreading outward. After a few years …
Continue reading ““Ken, no one cares about your snooty little fruit club.””…
January 7, 2024
It is incredibly easy to find and distribute new types of plants. The world is rich in diversity. Like waves on an ocean, no two are alike. People are naturally attracted to this beauty in the plant kingdom. As a nursery owner, I never would never interfere with someone’s tastes of plants. The type of …
Continue reading “Making New Seed Selections: Music To Your Ears”…
January 1, 2024
One of the great aspects of having a nursery for a long time was participating in seed exchanges. Without seed exchanges, you really are left in a botanically isolated world. There are many people throughout the world that not only want to share their plant diversity with you but also want you to succeed with …
December 22, 2023
One of the most exciting and little known areas of fruit growing falls into the category called minor fruits. When I first started publishing my catalog in the early eighties, the minor category was front and center. The unknown possibilities of minor fruits are the unexplored. To me it was very exciting. The category name …
Continue reading “The Unexplored Explored: Minor Becomes Major”…
November 23, 2023
This year was a great surprise of both quantity and diversity of fruit and nuts. I focused my attention on some of the most difficult to find selections as well as improvements I have done or found over the years on new woody and perennial crops. Some of these crops are not found within the …
Continue reading “New Seed Selections-Diversity on a Global Scale”…
October 1, 2023
It is the beginning of something good and beneficial for all of ecology and the integration of all plants and animals. Every year brings in a different selection of fruits, nuts and other edible plant seeds from around the world all harvested at my farm in southwest Michigan. Even the Wild Texas white peach above …
Continue reading “New Seeds-The Pits, the Acorns, the Nuts”…