The right name for Amorpha

There are many species of Amorpha. The species I most recommend to clients, and in my published works, is A. fruticosa. This is because it is hardy in much colder regions, and grows taller -hence producing more biomass, than most species.

It is also the species that is best known worldwide. Several varieties have been bred from it making A. fruticosa one of the best foundational N-fixers on which to build gardens of lush fertility.


The fact is many of the Amorpha in Mortal Tree came from a company that listed the plant as A. californica, not fruticosa. I’ve called it that after I personally identified it. Allow me to explain:

Amorpha californica, according to the literature, grows a maximum of 6 ft. tall, and is only hardy to USDA zone seven. I’m in zone five, where this plant has lived through winters that fully reach the limit of what this zone offers, without the slightest dieback. I also find the Amorpha I have quickly pass up six foot tall. I looked into this further by researching the USDA Plant Database. Here I found information that backed my theory, and even pictures of the different seeds, which look nothing alike. Mine resembled fruticosa. I took liberty of calling the plant what I thought it was ever since.

A. californica seed to the left, A. fruticosa seed to the right. Images from the USDA database.

I still have not the slightest doubt this Amorpha is Amorpha fruticosa. I don’t make such decisions lightly. My rather bold statement in Growing Amorpha that the company had incorrectly identified the plant got me more flack than I had ever expected.

My motive to make this statement was of course to dispel any fears the plant this company is selling won’t live for them if they are in zones 6 and 5. They are a major supplier of this plant, and I am telling people left and right to get it. I did try twice to contact the company to talk about this discrepancy, but their contact system never worked. I figured a small blog like myself was obviously of no consequence in their minds, but I was wrong.

The owner of the company was quite skeptical of my deduction. I was quite surprised when he showed skepticism of even the USDA’s accuracy, since the pictures clearly showed the seeds were not A. californica. He was in fact skeptical of most of the internet’s images of A. fruticosa seeds when I brought them up as examples. The only authority he considered trustworthy was none other than Gerd Krussman’s Manual of Cultivated Broad-Leaved Trees and Shrubs. This of course had been out of print for years, so I wondered how I would get my hands on the volume that had Amorpha in it. Thankfully, I have connections who graciously brought all three volumes to my desk in short order.

Krussman simply confirmed everything I had read previously about the plant. But we needed to identify this plant down to the very details of the flowers before this could be resolved.

Here are the results:

Flowers laid over fruticosa illustration from Krussman

Krussman’s work was not especially helpful in identifying the seeds. The real detail that sets apart A. fruticosa flowers from californica is the width of the petal, and spots on the californica flowers for what the line drawing shows.

Petal next to californica illustration
Petal next to fruticosa illustration

The flowers from my plants grown from the companies seed have especially wide petals I could not even make lay flat without ripping. So I spread it as best I could on a pen tip to show the plush width and lack of spots. I’ll let you derive the ID. It seems quite evident to me.

In our conversation about the plant, there was of course suggestion that we had a hybrid on our hands. If it is, it does not show the attributes of californica in the least. Fruticosa has the broader range, the greater popularity, and most importantly, the greatest utility for sustainable agriculture systems. I hope what I have done helped someone find success in this blossoming branch of agriculture through confident use of this amazing plant.

What does GKH need to self seed?

The popular perennial spinach good king henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus) is pretty difficult to germinate. Under Making sense of wild seeds I found how hard some fellow perennial vegetable gardeners have worked to eek out nothing but empty pots of this plant. In my own experience, a hundred seeds will likely yield as high as twenty, and as low as one or two seedlings.

When I established this plant in Mortal Tree, I hoped the seed would suit itself, and sprout on its own. I’d transplant whatever appeared. Such serendipitous propagation eluded me for years, until last year, when I moved them.

Next to the patch this year, I was ecstatic to see a moderately thick patch of the sprouts!

This is a southwest facing slope, but has a small windbreak of plants in front of it. The bed is in its second year. The grass mulch I laid to start it still covers the ground. We also had an extremely mild winter. In general, I think this plant likes really temperate conditions, prefering cool over heat, moisture over dryness.

I hope this conjures some images in your mind of areas in your garden that might suit this plant. It really is quite a nice perennial vegetable. I call it, The better broccoli, for its delicious flower buds. With seeds growing themselves now, I plan on having a lot more of this food in the very near future.

How your food can grow from air

I gave a talk at my family farm’s plant sale two weeks ago, that was supposed to center around PASSIVE Gardening. I thought it would be rather tacky to give a condensed version of the book, so decided to give a side glance of the method, by explaining the little known art of pulling nutrients from air. This is actually the basis of the method in my mind; but I often get some queer looks when I explain it that way. I’d love to know your take on it.

“I’d like to offer something rather uncommon in the gardening world…..”

View the talk here

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The why of fruit thinning

I noticed one of the apples in the food forest had finished blooming and now had tons of tiny apples clustered on its branches. I took the situation in hand and started to pick them off.

13217562 - close up of bee pollinating apple blossom
photo by Jenella

Five flowers form on each spur, leaving five small fruits after pollination. They naturally fall off, one by one, until a single fruit is left to make seed. Contrary to what we might think, an apple has grown to its maximum potential within thirty days after the flower drops its petals. From this point, any ‘growth’ is just cells filling up with sap like balloons. The number of balloons to be filled with juice resulting from cell division is already decided.

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I was pulling off all but one fruit on each spur. From this, I expected each apple left on the tree would have more nourishment from the tree, be larger, and better shaped. If I had waited for the tree to pair down the fruits itself, it would have divided that nourishment between all those extra apples that would never stay on the tree anyway.

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Is there a drawback to this unnatural thinning? Perhaps.

When plucking off the fruits I noticed a few had codling moth damage. I have gotten fine harvests of apples from my trees, with very little, if any, codling moth damaged in years past. Whether this is an especially good year for codling moth population or not might explain this damage. Or perhaps the tree had dropped much of the fruit with codling moth damage so I never noticed? It quickly occurred to me the tree grows the extra fruit in part to increase the chances at least one will make seed -as codling moths eat the seeds of the apples they infest.

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Codling moths have several generations through a season, so we will see if the moths come back for more later.

Another effect of thinning apples is more regular fruiting. The seeds in each fruit create a hormone that blocks fruiting the next year. Some varieties of apple are notorious for their violent fruiting cycles -one year not a fruit on the tree, the next (or year after that) the branches break for the myriad fruit clogging the works. By thinning, a moderate amount of hormone is produced every year, allowing a moderate amount of fruit every year.

Perhaps such staggered fruit production in un-thinned apples is a tactic for cutting down on codling moth population?

As is, thinning delivers better results for me. But my trees are also quite small -just barely above my head. Thinning falls into what I call pleasurable interaction with the food forest, or work I enjoy, and usually only takes five minutes or so to complete.

I may quit it in years to come, and just trade thinning time and larger fruit for hacking out the good hunks from myriad smaller fruits. Masanobu Fukuoka, when his students asked how they could grow good apples without equipment and sprays, said to simply feed the poor quality fruit the students thought eminent to pigs. I’m not so skeptical as Fukuoka’s students; I have seen my trees produce quite healthy fruit already, so we’ll see what they give as the system builds. Below are some of my Fuji apples last year.

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You may wonder how the heck massive orchards ever thin their fruit one by one. By machine? No, by chemicals. Hormones in trees largely dictate the quality and growth of the fruit. We have developed an array of synthetic hormones, of which there are no counterparts in nature, that cause apple trees to drop their fruit. Run some experiments to properly calibrate the dosage, and you have thinned trees by simply spraying. Some of the hormones they have developed even increase the cell proliferation process beyond what the fruit tree offers, resulting in abnormally large fruit. I’ll let you research the health effects of these synthetic hormones.

When I first came across this information years ago, I went on a long search for an equivalent that could be derived from plants. I didn’t come across one, or any information on a hormone pathway that could cause the fruit to drop, accept for stressing a tree, or simply reducing pollination. I am suspicious there is an even more elegant answer:

I find that increasing the health of trees and their ecology in general can can at times truly transform their character. Mortal Tree is still a long ways from being notably fertile. But Fruiting factors are building on their own in some places. So perhaps the good effects will get out of hand, and produce some good results I never would have expected. 

 

PASSIVE salad 

How do you make a salad from perennial vegetables? How do they pair? Is there a best way to slice them? My friend and client Elora lately posted a short video showing how she makes salad from her PASSIVE garden.

Harvesting from a Perennial Garden (~2 minute watch)

What are your favorite perennial salad pairings?

If you’re new to this blog, you might like to read the post about Elora’s garden establishment here For example:

She has posted about the garden before on her blog, The Blonde Butter Maker, and tells me she plans on making a lot more content on how passive agriculture fits into her and her family’s day to day life. I started design in their yard about three years ago, and am so pleased they are seeing such excellent results.

Here is the recipe Elora uses in the video:

Salad burnett -a loose handful

French sorrel – 3 to 5 leaves

Scorzonera -10 leaves

Welsh onion -5 of the green tops picked off, or 1 onion removed from the base up.

Chocolate mint -2 sprigs

Stritello -loose handful

Some mache stems and leaves -as much as a handful.

Violet flowers for garnish -as many as 30 flowers per salad

The scorzonera, sorrel, and onion greens should be chopped -preferably into thin strips cut lengthwise. Mix this with the stritello and salad burnett and mache. The chocolate mint can then be chopped fine and evenly dispersed over the top with violet flowers for garnish. A light vinaigrette would compliment this best.

Tasty Food Photography eBook

The above advertisement is for an ebook I personally own and use.

If you would like to learn the real details of taking good food pictures from Lindsay Ostrom over at Pinch of Yum, click to check it out. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

Food from shade: solomon’s seal and hosta shoots.

Hosta are ubiquitous to the flowerbeds of the world as any plant you can imagine. While some take sun with less complaint than others, many are misplaced in sunny positions, and run ragged because of it. They are really shade plants, preferring a fertile understory of trees.

Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum) is harder to find, but can live on even less sun than hosta and still be happy.

Both are edible. “Urui” is the vegetable name for hosta where it’s eaten in Asia. The young “hostons,” as some forest gardeners call the plants just coming up in spring, are best for eating. As the leaves unfurl they’re still edible, but become more tough and stringy as the season unfolds.

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Solomon’s seal too, is best when sprouting in spring. The leaves have a slightly bitter element; which personally I don’t mind, but others may prefer omitting by stripping the leaves from the stalk. It’s the stalk itself that has the really good flavor, which is hardly different from asparagus -with the umami richness kicked up a notch.

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This makes a lot of sense if you consider how closely solomon’s seal is related to asparagus. They are both in Liliaceae -the Lily family.

I’m harvesting both hosta and SS from parts of the food forest that are in dappled sun now, but will have little to no light once the trees leaf out. Asparagus, which as a rule prefers sun, is just showing up to the party as these two are just passing their prime. Few annual garden crops are even planted now, let alone ready for harvest to fill the “hunger gap,” but these two are shooting to the sky, ready to be crisply snapped off their stems, and sauted in the skillet.

They’re simple to prepare: “hostons” may be sliced in half lengthwise. 

Solomon’s seal I leave whole. You could peel off the leaves to remove any possibility of bitterness. Just snapping their stems at ground level I have not found any hard bases like asparagus, so no chopping necessary.

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Once prepared, heat oil of choice in a pan, and add the shoots. I flavored these pictured with some pepper, fish sauce, and vinegar to compliment the bitter element. You may prefer to omit the vinegar if the leaves are removed from the Solomon’s seal. Once tender, they’re ready for the plate.

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I got my Solomon’s seal in a trade online with the understanding they were giant Solomon’s seal (var. comutatum), and certainly appreciated getting twenty or so rhizomes freshly dug. They have not achieved the height my neighbor’s specimen achieve every year though; mine stay around three feet, hers shoot to six easily. So I think there was a misunderstanding. I may get some of the larger kind in the near future.

As for variance in hosta, I can’t vouch for the quality -especially when it comes to the hybrids. My neighbor is a formidable collector of hosta, and has even brought me with her to purchase direct from hosta breeders; so the fact that there are myriads of hosta, with crazy exotic chemical attributes and textures out there is real in my mind. Usually the blue, and dark green varieties are best for eating.  In this dish, I prepared H. nigrescens, and ‘Sum and Substance’ (a hybrid of unknown parentage), both of which aren’t too rare. These are mostly the throwaway hostas from my neighbor’s massive collection -seedlings that have no name, and extras.

Thriving in the dark corners of the food forest, these two are making food, and beauty, in places little else would grow.

Tasty Food Photography eBook

The above advertisement is for an ebook I personally own and use.

If you would like to learn the real details of taking good food pictures from Lindsay Ostrom over at Pinch of Yum, click to check it out. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

Plum Blossoms

One of the Japanese plums in Mortal Tree blossoming. This one was the first to be mulched and guilded, which resulted in a huge difference of size and maturity between it and its pollinating partner. Although just down the hill, and planted at the same time, this other plum just sat until I mulched it the following year -relieving it of the grass growing right up against it. As a result of this delay in mulching, the partner has not even begun blooming yet. It really is amazing how much grass can suppress the growth of young trees.

On another note, any pictures on this blog that are mine (i.e. no picture credit to anyone else) is available for use on your own blogs or the like. A couple people have taken this liberty themselves in the past -which I was quite flattered by.

If you could credit me, I’d appreciate it. At the same time I totally understand aesthetics can frown on clunky captions under your photos; so adapt as needed to make things beautiful. If for any reason you have a hard time copying an image yourself, but would like to use it, contact me and I’ll try to get you a copy.

I also contribute to Shutterstock as of the last couple months. Most of these are especially floral pics that won’t show up on this blog. You’ll have to deal with their payment plan to use these; but my public portfolio with them can be viewed here if you’re curious. If you do check them out, I’d love to know your thoughts.