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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.””…
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”…
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 …
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”…
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”…
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”…
Teosinte expands outward. It’s an omni-directional force starting from a pin point and then outward like an exploding star. This makes it impossible to define by a small sample. Too late it has already exploded and is expanding at exponential speed. You can only gather so many fragments. The dust is too fine to recreate …
I always wondered why corn was so luxurious in growth and existed in such wonderful dense green fields. It was so perfect to me and completely uniform. In this uniformity I experienced corn as a single magnificent and powerful force of nature able to feed millions of people and animals alike. That was its super …
It can happen. It was the daily activity of a bumblebee searching the flowers of the horse nettle at my farm. Nearby my potato patch resided filled with heirloom red, white and blue selections all in full flower. The flowers are remarkably similar. There was no goal or thought of a potato fruit or berry. …
Continue reading “One Potato Creates an Expanding Universe”…
Every now and then I find some interesting plants at my farm which seem to have unique possibilities. Such is the case for the unassuming hybrid species Dunbarii plum. I view it as an opportunity to create a diverse mixture of plums that you can create a population from as well as create new varieties. …
Continue reading “The Dunbars Plum: Wild and Domestication Combines”…
