In the first one I mentioned planting trees that provide multiple purposes. The apple tree is a good candidate, and was the main tree I had in mind with that statement. The mulberry tree would be in second. Any native nut trees, like hickory or walnut, would be third.
The following can be done with about anything, but we are going with apples. Before I get to the apples though, let me share a story I found somewhere along the way, I can’t remember where, about marigolds. I’m not going to give precise details because my memory is foggy. I got other things to remember, you know how it is. Anyways, once upon a time, all marigolds had a really strong smell. Turns out the smell prevented a lot of people from buying them. It’s not what one would call a pretty smell.
Some guy, somewhere, really liked them or something, and wanted a marigold that did not smell. This guy goes out and plants acres and acres of them. He was already a wealthy guy, so he was investing. His intention was to let the marigolds evolve. He replanted the seeds from flowers he let just pollinate in his fields. A single marigold plant will produce a lot of seeds by the way. Once his own seeds were flowering he paid people to go out in his fields and smell marigolds until they found one that did not smell, and they did. The dudes investment paid off. He basically just helped the marigolds do what they wanted to do anyways, and was waiting for the anomaly which always occurs. Anomalies are inevitable.
The thing about apples is, the ones that make the best cider are not necessarily the best to eat. I think we both know one of the benefits to growing apples that produce cider, but there are quite a few actually. Apple cider vinegar is another. It’s so easy to make, and people will pay for the legit stuff quite readily. Coming from someone who loves to cook, the flavor absolutely matters. Also, the wood is preferred by smokers and grill masters, but I am that, so if it were me none of that wood would ever leave my land. Maybe as gifts, maybe.
It’s also been reported that of all the preferred leaves for worms, apple leaves top the list. They reportedly love them the bestest. I read somewhere, that someone studied this. They laid out a variety of leaves, and consistently the worms went for the apple leaves. A crazy side fact, somehow worms will consistently pull a leaf into their whole the exact same way. It is not random as one would think it would be. Imagine that, little buggers are conscious of what they are doing!
There are some cool things that can be done with apple trees. They got tricks, and grafting is one of the coolest. Because the tree can be grafted one can have a single apple tree that produces four, five, six different kinds of apples. Because of this ability to graft, many things become possible. Also, as a farmer, the ability to successfully graft trees becomes another way of making money from the trade.
There are many trees that can be grafted, and other plants too. Tomato plants can be grafted even. Most of the apple trees one would find at a plant nursery are grafted. They will have a root base that does really well, from a wild tree I believe, then topped with a different apple tree that produces the kind of fruit desired. There is quite a history regarding the apple tree. If you became good at grafting you could easily sell your own trees with two, three, four fruits on them.
Another cool thing about the apple is that the seeds of an apple will not give you trees that will make that same apple. The seeds of an apple will each be a different tree, and they will be a mix of the apple in hand, and the one that pollinated it. This is why I told the story of the marigold first. I say the apple tree has not been allowed to evolve here in Missouri, so that it can overcome the diseases it is susceptible to. Everyone is literally growing the same varieties of apples. I would imagine the first guy to find an apple tree that is not prone to cedar rust would make a bit of money. How many other kinds of delicious apples could there be if they were propagated for that reason; to develop a new cultivar. I would guarantee there are two different kinds of apples out there who have not yet met face to face. Who knows what potential their offspring would have.
Technically this could be done with any plant, this business of evolving one's own kind of a plant. I would imagine the apple tree family would like to be free of that cedar rust, and the other diseases that cause them to have to be sprayed. Like an inbred dog, that’s any “pure” bred dog, they do not wish to be sick simply because we like how they look. The Golden Rule is not being applied in this situation. Why can’t we live in harmony with the apple, where both are happy, and both are providing for one another? We obviously can if we want to.
It’s too technical for this kind of short essay to really go into the apple tree, but the apples we have known in our life are not the best really. I’m quoting from a web page here….
”wild Malus orientalis—species of wild apples that could be an ancestor of today’s domesticated apples—are native to the Middle East and Central Asia.”1 The apple trees in this region are believed to be ancestral because they retain a robust, undifferentiated genome. They appear robust because many of them have not yet lost their disease resistances through generations of genome-thinning by artificial selection. They appear undifferentiated because they retain the potential to be bred back out into varieties like those that are spread around the world today. In that way they are similar to wolves, which are representative of ancestral dogs.”
http://www.icr.org/article/where-did-apple-trees-come-from/
So you see, if you had just one of these trees in your yard, and then planted a variety of the others, then started planting the seeds, no one knows what you are going to get. They have shown with purebred dogs, that as soon as you let one breed with a mut, the pups have dramatically less health problems. You would be playing the lottery here, but if you were mainly going in for the cider, all the apples will be of use to you. If you are mainly just growing fodder for your hugelkultur mounds, there is no pressure to turn a profit. Plus the leaves, the mulch, the wood. It could be twenty years before you scored a winner, it could be five. It’s not like you couldn’t skip a year, or just let them all fall, and see which ones pull through. Survival of the fittest. Honestly it could be done so many different ways.
Imagine though, every time you find a tree you like, it can be grafted, infinitely, on and on and on. That’s money in the bank. Using the information from the previous posts, the apple tree is a win win. I don’t think it would be all that hard to get a branch, tree, or seeds from those wild apple trees in Asia, or Turkey. Surely, someone in the States has one already.
As far as that mulberry tree goes, they are for the chickens. Find one growing in the wild, take a branch from it, YouTube rooting a mulberry branch, plant that sucker, and then wait. As I said earlier, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
If you had an acre or two worth of semi-wild apple trees growing in the middle of Missouri, getting drunk on your own hard cider; righteousness is the word that comes to mind.
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