Though Dr. Maxine Thompson died last year, days before Taylor Malone and I were scheduled to interview her for a podcast, a friend sent me her obituary (written by Kim Hummer of the NCGR in Corvallis, Oregon) this week as a reminder of how much of a badass she was. Founder of the USDA ARS clonal genebank repositories, fruit breeder, and fruit explorer. I wanted to share her obituary here.

Emeritus Professor Dr. Maxine M. Thompson, Horticulturist, Plant Explorer (1926 – 2021)

 Dr. Maxine M. Thompson, world-renowned horticulturist and plant explorer passed away on 1 March 2021. Maxine was born on 3 November 1926, in Bloomington, Illinois. After a few years in Illinois and Minnesota, her family moved to Pasadena, California, where she grew up. She received an Associate of Arts degree from Pasadena Junior College in 1945, and a B.S. in Plant Science in 1948, M.S. in Horticulture (Pomology) in 1951, and Ph.D. in Genetics in 1960, all from the University of California- Davis. Her major professor was Dr. H. P. Olmo, the renowned grape breeder. While in graduate school, she married Harry S. Thompson, a student in the Veterinary College. They had two children, Michael and Laurie.

From 1960 to 1964, Dr. Thompson took a position as a part-time Junior Specialist in the Viticulture Department at the University of California-Davis, while simultaneously caring for her young children as a single parent. In 1964, she accepted a position as Assistant Professor in Biology at Wisconsin State College-Oshkosh, where she taught General Botany, Cytology, and Genetics. In 1965, she moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where she had a series of temporary appointments in the Department of Botany and the Department of Horticulture. She was supervised by Dr. Quentin Zielinski, until his untimely passing.  In 1969, she became Assistant Professor of Horticulture, the first woman to be appointed to a tenure track position in that department. Her major research activities involved fruit breeding and genetics of hazelnut and sweet cherry, and floral biology, pollination, fruit set, and cytological studies of fruit and nut species. Her teaching responsibilities included undergraduate classes in General Botany, and Fruit Systematics and graduate classes in Plant Genetics, Pollination, and Fruit set. 

During her assignment at Oregon State University, Dr. Thompson was an excellent mentor to graduate students. She provided a friendly face, generous use of laboratory equipment, and helpful advice whenever students visited her fourth floor lab. When students had difficult times, she spoke up for those who had complexities of balancing a professional career while managing a young family.

Dr. Thompson was fascinated with wild and cultivated plant variation. This interest was born in her freshman General Botany class and expanded over many years to her final project, the breeding of blue honeysuckle, Lonicera caerulea L. Dr. Thompson was one of the founding scientists who lobbied for clonal genebanks in the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS). Thanks in no small part to her efforts the first clonal genebank was dedicated in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1981. For many years, she participated on the Technical Committees for the National Clonal Germplasm Repository (NCGR) in Corvallis, and the Western Regional Plant Introduction Station, Pullman, Washington. 

Her international genetic resources activities began with consultancies with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1982. She was hired to assess under-utilized fruits and nuts in six southeastern Asian countries (India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines). She was assigned to a second consultancy that assessed fruit and nut genetic resources in Pakistan. Her objective was to recommend plant collection expeditions and design a plan for clonal genebanks in that country. 

In 1986, she retired from her faculty position at Oregon State to embark on a series of U.S. Department of Agriculture sponsored international plant explorations for fruit and nut genetic resources. Her first trip, in 1987, was a six-month expedition to the mountains of Northern Pakistan, a region adjacent to Central Asia and rich in diversity of fruit and nut species. Next, she accompanied Dr. Calvin Sperling, USDA Plant Explorer, to Central Asia in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan to collect apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, and apples. That same year she and Dr. Jim Ballington traveled to Ecuador to collect Rubus, Vaccinium, and other members of the Ericaceae with potential ornamental value.  In 1992, she led an expedition to the southwest of the People’s Republic of China to collect blackberries and raspberries in Guizhou Province. She traveled to Kyrgyzstan, in 1994, to collect walnuts. In 1996, she returned to the People’s Republic of China, this time to the northeast. She led the expedition to collect small fruit germplasm in Jilin and Heilongjian Provinces with collaborators Chad Finn and Joseph Postman. Her final two expeditions occurred in 1998, to eastern Siberia, Russia, and in 2000, to Hokkaido, Japan, to obtain blue honeysuckle.  Because of her plant collecting expeditions, Dr. Thompson donated 645 accessions (seeds and plants) to the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS). In 1997, Dr. Thompson was honored with the Crop Science Society’s Frank M. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources, and, in 2000, with the American Pomological Society’s Wilder Medal.

The high caliper of Dr. Thompson’s science continues to be recognized. Fruit breeders and students of pomology study her Rubus cytogenetics manuscripts as seminal. Her manuscripts on the floral biology and non-dormancy of hazelnut are frequently cited. Her research into incompatibility in hazelnuts provided techniques for standard tests now used by several generations of nut breeders. 

In the mid 1970’s, Dr. Thompson and plant pathologist colleague, Dr. H. Ronald Cameron, visited diseased orchards in southwest Washington. They noticed that among the nearly dead ‘DuChilly’ trees were pollinizer trees free of cankers.  She made the first crosses with this pollinizer, ‘Gasaway’, in 1976.  Recent releases from the OSU hazelnut breeding program carry a single dominant allele from ‘Gasaway’ that confers a high level of resistance to eastern filbert blight. From crosses made by Dr. Thompson, the Oregon State University hazelnut breeding program released four main crop cultivars (‘Willamette,’ ‘Lewis,’ ‘Clark’ and ‘Tonda Pacifica’), four pollinizers with high resistance to eastern filbert blight (VR 4-31, VR 11-27, VR 20-11, and VR 23-18), and one red-leafed ornamental (‘Rosita’). ‘Lewis’ was, for about a decade, the most widely planted cultivar in Oregon, until the release of ‘Yamhill’ and ‘Jefferson’.  Growers have eagerly planted the resistant cultivars. Hazelnut orchards in Oregon increased from 29,000 acres in 2009, to more than 80,000 acres in 2021.  

Since her final plant collecting expedition in 2000, Dr. Thompson embarked on the breeding of blue honeysuckle, called “Haskappu” in Hokkaido. Over the years, she obtained plant material from Russia and Japan. The Japanese subspecies Lonicera caerulea L. var. emphyllocalyx (Maxim.) Nakaiproved to be the most useful parent because its flowering time suited the climate of the Willamette Valley. She planted thousands of seedlings, and selected improved genotypes. Of these, she released and patented 10 cultivars.  She continued this program on her own resources, supplemented with small research grants, but mainly out of her love and devotion to horticulture.  

Her fierce independence and sharp scientific mind lead to a remarkable horticultural career. Her work spanned a score of years when our society’s concept of women in the workplace greatly changed. When she began, women, worked hard to be noticed professionally, and were offered lower salaries than were received by male counterparts. Those of us who have come along since then take for granted that our abilities are considered on equal par with other qualified individuals. The meritorious work of Dr. Thompson and others brought about this change. Dr. Maxine M. Thompson, geneticist, horticulturalist, professor, world explorer, and mentor, will continue to inspire generations of horticulturists yet to come.

Maxine requested no memorial service. Please remember her in your heart. 

It is with a heavy heart to report the passing of C. Lee Calhoun, Southern apple hunter.

Lee Calhoun at Horne Creek Historical Farm

In March of 2009, while living on an un-bridged island in Maine, I was struck by an instant and permanent passion for apples. When I came out to my family that I wanted to be an apple orchardist, my Grandmother wrote me back and said: Did you know that we have a family apple? Your great-great-great-grandfather, JA Dula, whom you are doubly related, was a famous North Carolina orchardist of his era. Our apple is called the Dula Beauty.

Immediately after reading this, I googled “Dula Beauty” and the only descriptor I could find was a snippet from the Book “Old Southern Apples,” by Creighton Lee Calhoun. I was too poor to buy the book at the time, so I found Lee’s phone number and gave him a call for the full description. He answered, asked me to give him a moment to pull out his notes, and started to tell me everything he knew about the Dula Beauty apple and where I could find it.
—
Lee graduated from NC State with a degree in agronomy and plans to become a plant breeder, but the Korean war had different plans for him and he joined the army soon after graduation. Though the army soon made a career man out of him, he couldn’t shake his passions to get back to farming. The day he retired, he bought a chainsaw and started clearing a site for a house and orchard in Pittsboro, NC.

Once his Japanese-style house was built, he shared with his elderly neighbor that he wanted to plant a few apple trees. This conversation sparked the neighbor to share with him that he had once had a Magnum Bonum apple growing in his childhood home, and he’d sure love to find another to plant at his house. Finding the Magnum Bonum was the sort of challenge that got Lee’s wheels turning. How many old apple cultivars were still out there? Little did he know at the time, the tradition of Southerners growing apples was quickly disappearing from the landscape and he had been tagged to help keep it alive.

Apples were once grafted onto seedlings or roots as a means of propagation, which gave them a lifespan of around 100 years in the South if the vines were kept out of the trees. In the 70s, Lee realized these trees were aging out, as were the people who knew the names and stories of these trees and the window to find them was quickly closing. From there, he and his wife, Edith, devised a plan to go find what they could: They would buy ads in the rural electric cooperative newspapers across the South and see what people knew of the old apples in their landscape.

This plan worked. Soon, Lee and Edith were getting calls and letters from all over the place with apple names they’d never heard of like “Notty P,” “Crow’s Egg,” and Early Joe.” Excited for the adventure and exploration, they hopped in the truck and took off. As they gained more fruit exploring experience, they developed more parameters for apple hunting which they called “signs of elderly people.” If there was an apple tree, a clothes line with laundry hanging on it, and an old car somewhere on the property, they would stop and knock on the door. Lee told stories of pulling into these driveways to find an elderly man skinning a muskrat on the porch, or a man whittling a wooden duck for his great-grandson which he planned to give him on his 100th birthday, which was only 3 days away.

My favorite Calhoun cold knock story came when I asked him if he knew of any apple varieties that were used to feed hogs. He snorted and then he told me about the time when he pulled into a driveway next to a doughnut factory. The man who answered the door said he’d gladly take Lee to the tree in the backyard, and grabbed a large stick on his way out the door to keep the pigs back, because the apple tree was located in a pig paddock. When looking at the tree, Lee asked if the pork was good from eating all of these apples. The man smirked and hollered in to his wife to make a couple ham biscuits for Lee. Once back to the house, Lee sunk his teeth into the ham biscuit and it was the best he ever had. “This is what apple fed pork tastes like?!” He questioned/exclaimed. “Nope,” the old man replied. “That’s what doughnut fed pork tastes like.”

It took Lee and Edith two years to find the Magnum Bonum that his elderly neighbor first mentioned from his childhood. With each find, each letter, each phone call, a world of apples unfolded. Through the grapevine, he was finding other people who were also looking for and propagating these apples. People like Joyce Neighbors of Alabama, Jim Lawson of Georgia and Tom Burford of Virginia. People catching on to Lee and Edith’s work were contacting Lee wanting to take part in the hunt, too. Soon, Lee and Edith had a network and a lifeblood to go rescue these lost apple cultivars from the throws of nature and human development/axe. Over that decade, Lee and Edith had acquired nearly 400 apple cultivars from across the South. They grafted these trees to dwarfing rootstock and started one of the first high density apple orchards in the South, if only to hold their large repository in a small space. They also started a fruit tree nursery where they custom grafted these apple varieties from their home, located on Black Twig Road.

In the 90s, Lee and Edith wrote the book “Old Southern Apples” cataloging all of the apples they found and all of the apple cultivars they believe to be threatened or extinct. I never got to know Edith, as she had died of pancreatic cancer a few years before I found Lee. However, Lee would never start a story about the book without telling me that Edith wrote that book. She typed the whole thing. Edited it. Gave insights to Lee on what to say. He would also tell me that she could bake an apple pie in her sleep, as she had to try each and every apple in their orchard in pie form to see if one of the old uses could be for pies.

Which leads me to tell you about the gargantuan amount of research and work that went into each apple find. Lee and Edith traveled far and wide to find old nursery catalogs, books, flyers, and articles describing these apples and their uses. These descriptions, aside from their elderly caretakers, were all they had left in terms of what these apples were used for. Dried apples. Pies. Molasses/Syrup. Fresh eating. Winter storage. Dumplings. Hard cider. Vinegar. And the list goes on. Edith and Lee were at the helm of running a home lab to try and bring back a purpose for these apples.

We’re all eating “Tony,” one of Lee’s most resilient apples.

In 2015, I traveled to Lee’s house for the second time with my friends Pete Halupka and Pete Walton to sit down and drink some hard cider with him. We asked him what the chances of finding old lost Southern cultivars might be in this day and age. He responded, matter of factly, that it is nearly impossible in today’s time. So many pressures endanger an apple tree on the landscape, time being the greatest of all when it comes to old Southern apples. In seeing our fruit explorer hopes being dashed, he quickly amended this statement by saying the chances are nearly impossible of discovering identities of these fruits we find in the landscape, but we may very well still find old apple trees. He also encouraged the exploration of mulberry and other nut trees like pecans, as they are much more long-lived than the apple.

Lee Calhoun was a member of the North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX) and his contributions went beyond apples, as he was also the one to re-introduce the Silk Hope mulberry to the US fruit world. He would tell me of streets in Chapel Hill lined with old Silk mulberry cultivars and the sleeping mulberry landscape of North Carolina which remained despite the failure of an industry. He also collected old rose cultivars, telling me that most of his rose genetics came from cemeteries throughout the South. He grew plums, peaches, sour cherries, grapes and other fruits at his house as well. Even the mightiest of the mighty fruit explorers fall to wanting to plant a little bit of everything.

The world has lost one incredible fruit explorer, but he seemed content with leaving this earth. A mutual friend of ours, Carl Thomasson, visited Lee on Wednesday at hospice, where he was lucid and grateful to have been given a couple extra victory laps of life after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 3 years ago.

Lee and Edith are now driving down old country roads, spotting apple trees and “signs of the elderly.” Together again, the old truck doors shut and they make their way up the steps of a stranger’s porch. Each knock on the door filled with the thrills of being on the heels of recapturing a piece of history and breathing new life into it.

Picture from Calhoun’s book “Old Southern Apples”

*Lee’s orchard was nearly destroyed by fireblight in the 2000s. His nursery business was passed to several nurseries, of which David Vernon of Century Farm Orchards and Horne Creek Historical Farm are still active.*

Fun Fact: Creighton Lee Calhoun was the last remaining descendent of John C. Calhoun, founder of Clemson University, and former US vice president.

Lee Calhoun’s List of Cedar Apple Rust Resistant Apples:

I have spent the better part of 3 years obsessed with mulberries and their possibilities. It all started with the concept of an everbearing mulberry, which can drop various amounts of mulberries (from a light rain to a canopy downpour) daily for 2-4 months. This journey started with ‘Hicks Everbearing,’ which was known to drop prolific amounts of mulberries for upwards of 4 months in the deep South, and soon transitioned into much, much more. 

I am not really a believer in silver bullets, but after much passion, obsession, discussion and study, I believe mulberries are one of the most versatile and adaptable trees on the planet. This is coming from someone who has devoted a decade of her life to the self-study and research of apples, one of the most adaptable fruits in the world that has strains growing from India to Russia, Alabama to Alaska, Bahamas to Beirut. In my own humble opinion, and facing much sacrilege from 10 years-ago-me, mulberries have a lot more to offer than apples alone, and should be implemented in most agricultural systems world-wide. 

White people have never been good at identifying mulberry species. The common ones found in the Eastern US are Morus rubra, our native ‘red mulberry;’ Morus alba, otherwise known as ‘white mulberry,’ a native to China which was brought over to the US in the 1600s and after; and a hybrid of the two species, rubra x alba, as they readily cross with one another in the wild. It is my current theory that many of the mainstream East Coast botanist of the late 19th/early 20th century tended to mix up M. rubra and M. alba with the hybrids. This can be seen in Liberty Hyde Bailey calling Hicks Everbearing a full Morus rubra, which most certainly is not the case seeing as how it contains smooth shiny leaves and multiple lobes (among other characteristics). It is theorized by A.J Bullard, one of the last remaining mulberry experts in this country hailing from Mt. Olive, NC, that all East Coast originating everbearings are rubra x alba hybrids. I tend to agree with this theory due to the rampant hybridization between asian cultivars and our native red that has been happening for 400 years here in the US. To hammer home this point, a study of isolated and endangered populations of Morus rubra in Canada revealed that 53% of these isolated stands were comprised of hybrids. That’s in Canada! No doubt, the further South you go into North America where the native rubra ranges expand, as do the silk prospecting regions, the number of hybrids will increase. Point being: I think the horticultural greats, guys like Andrew Jackson Downing and Liberty Hyde Bailey, were given hybrids as baselines for their botanical keys. Meaning, I think the large majority of mulberries we have in the US today are hybrids and very few are strictly Morus alba (which people term as invasive…even though they have been here as long as white people have). Also, if you do much research on certain cultivars, you’ll find a huge amount of copying what the person before them said. Not a whole lot of original American thoughts have occurred in the mulberry realm.

Support my writings and more through the purchase of charcuterie at www.hogtree.com

While everbearings and other fruiting mulberries are amazing when thinking about them for human and livestock fodder, there’s another aspect to mulberries that shouldn’t be overlooked: the leaves. Mulberry trees have been in cultivation for 4000+ years in Asia for the exclusive harvest of their leaves, which they use to feed silkworms. This is the oldest form of agroforestry in the world. Silkworms are monogastric wee beasties that are quite sensitive to what they eat. They have different needs throughout their different life stages and Asian cultures have selected certain mulberry genetics and combined these genetics with harvesting strategies to feed these silkworms exactly what they need to thrive and produce high quality silk. It’s all incredibly complicated, but silk is worth it. 

So worth it, that the US has been struck with a get-rich-quick scheme for silk TWICE in it’s infantile history. Once in the early 17th century when King James I tried to encourage silk production in the colonies, first using the abundant native red mulberry (M. rubra) and then mandating each landowner plant 6 mulberry trees a year for 7 years from M. alba stock sent over from England. Once tobacco was discovered to prosper in the Southern soils and the crown and colonists got a hankering for nicotine, the cultivation and excitement of mulberries faded out. To this day, in and around Williamsburg, some of these old 17th century cultivated silk mulberry trees (M. alba) still exist. Two centuries later, the silk craze struck again- this time having Americans consumed with the planting of “Morus multicaulis,” an Asian strain of white mulberry (M. alba) known for its silkworm rearing (Multicaulis= many stems, a hat-tip to the pruning used in the cultivation of mulberry leaves). Conventions were held all across the East Coast with arousal and promises of employment and riches, the first in Baltimore in 1822 . Gardens, fields and highly productive farmland were planted to the gold-producing tree with hopes of getting filthy rich. New Jersey had the most M. multicaulis cultivation, followed by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and further South.  For a variety of reasons, all of this prospecting came crashing down in 1841, with millions of trees in the Mid-Atlantic and beyond remaining on the landscape- flowering, fruiting and hybridizing more than ever with our native populations (and creating a large hive of everbearing genetics). These trees, comprised of Asian genetics meant to feed silkworms, have leaf protein contents equal to or higher than alfalfa, only they are more digestible by livestock and more nutrient rich due to their roots plunging deep into the soil. These defunct orchards could have helped to feed livestock (pigs, chickens, cattle, goats, sheep) without a problem, yet this alternative to feeding silkworms was never acted upon. To this day, Asian mulberry trees from the 17th and 19th centuries still sleep in the landscape, their lower limbs browsed by deer (who know what’s up). 

It is my goal to assemble the genetics necessary to provide both humans and livestock with nutrient rich, climatically adaptable perennial fodder (fruit and leaves). This includes everbearings and silk cultivars which are cold hardy,  resistant to popcorn disease, able to flourish in the intense heat and humidity of Southeast, able to be grown without chemicals, and the like. Myself and others are hunting our surroundings and the world* for the old, the impressive and the everbearing to offer a diversity of mulberry options for farmers and fruit enthusiasts alike. My mulberry catalog is launching this coming week on HogTree.com (which is currently down for maintenance) and will include a smattering of the above.

*Next year (2020), fellow NAFEX (North American Fruit Explorers) board member Taylor Malone and I will be traveling to China to observe a few mulberry cultivation systems that could potentially benefit fruit and livestock fodder production in the US. We have obtained clearance from the USDA to import 5 cultivars per year from Asia, and will be importing genetics for high quality fodder and fruit. We plan on making this trip part of #thefruitexplorers and will soon be launching a Patreon to help support us in our collection and dissemination of  knowledge for the cultivation of mulberry and other fruits for home and farm (agroforestry, silvopasture, grazing, and livestock-in-orcharad settings). We’re also looking for in-kind help. If you write grants and think you can help us in this multi-year endeavor, we’d love to talk. You can write us at thefruitexplorers@gmail.com.

This post is about pigs, not apples. 

Often times in the pastured pig world, you’ll hear people refer to their pig’s butcher day as their “one bad day.” This is because these pigs have lived on grass, rooting and running and generally being happy pigs for their entire life, rather than confined indoors in crates the size of a coffins in CAFO-style situations (contained animal feeding operations). The only bad day for my pigs is the one where they go to the butcher. This essay is NOT about all that. This essay is about MY one bad day this year. Yesterday, September 10th, 2019.

For those of you who follow me on social media, you might have gotten a chuckle out of how hard last year was for me to keep pigs contained within their paddocks (which I move regularly). They got out a half-dozen times, with the majority of those escapes happening when trying to load them out of the fields and into a trailer for their butcher date.

The most story-worthy scenario happened when the pigs ignored my attempts to load them and busted out of the fence, nearly making it into a 10,000 square foot wedding tent across the street. I chased behind them in the dark early morning, freshly electrocuted from getting tangled in the electric netting that I did not see and only wearing one boot because the other got stuck in the mud (it was pouring down rain). It took everything I had to sprint and get in front of them, ultimately turning them around and getting them back on the farm.

The memories of not getting pigs loaded out of the fields and missing butcher dates has stuck with me to the point of anxiety for this year’s butcher date. That day was yesterday, and this is the story of my one [really] bad day…

A few days ago, I backed the trailer up to the pig paddock, reorganized the fencing (creating hard walls for loading rather than the normal poultry-style netting) and started feeding them in the trailer. When the day came to load these pigs, I rallied a few friends and used my friend Sara’s truck instead of mine because it has 4 wheel drive and the loaded trailer would need to go across several hundred yards of cow pasture. All went amazing well and the pigs were loaded within 20 minutes, a personal record! We hooked the trailer to Sara’s truck and headed back to the road, where I noticed that some cables had been eaten and the lights were no more. Because of this, we decided to delay taking the pigs that night and instead take the pigs to the butcher in the morning, after I had gotten some temporary lights on the trailer.

Fast forward to yesterday morning with lights that work and a trailer full of pigs.  I got up early, sang to the dogs that I’d be back in a couple hours for a nice long walk, and skipped out the door. Sara had suggested I use her truck to take them to the butcher since it already had the trailer hitched to it, and I thanked her for the suggestion. Off I went…

8 miles away from the butcher, on Interstate 70 in Maryland, the truck started to lose power. I thought to myself: If I could just get to the butcher and unload these pigs, all will be much more easily handled. 3 miles from the butcher, and 30 minutes from the deadline to bring in the pigs, the engine light came on and I pulled over as much as I could, cars whizzing by at 80 miles an hour only inches away. The electronics on the dash read: TRANSMISSION.

I screamed a string of curse words, watching my happy productive day flash before my eyes, and called GEICO.

The GEICO lady, whose name I do not remember,  should get an award for best performance “out of her comfort zone.” Pigs in a trailer attached to a truck that doesn’t belong to me that won’t move. She worked really hard to finally break it to me that, turns out (she must have called 15 tow companies), it is near impossible to get a tow company to tow a trailer full of livestock anywhere. Even if it’s 3 miles away. She could, however, tow the truck back to it’s home location. Deal.

I then texted farmer friends Andrew and MK of Open Book Farm to see if they knew of anyone who could help me in the area. Andrew, a wonderful man and livestock farmer, told me that he had invisioned this for himself before and it was his worst nightmare.  He would come get me and the trailer full of pigs.

Meanwhile, the tow truck had showed up and the tow guy was in a bad mood. He pointed out the trailer had a recent flat (probably from driving on the side of the road and hitting glass) and when I asked for him to help me fix it, he started in on how that was not part of the protocol. I warned him that I was about to start crying and his attitude got a little better, no doubt to avoid having to console me in some way.

Soon thereafter, Andrew showed up and we decided to try limping along for the remaining 3 miles with only one good tire on the right side of the trailer. We hitched up and made it, 3 hours after I first had to pull over. The butcher accepted my more-than-late deposit of pigs and they unloaded like champs. I left the trailer at the butcher’s shop because there was no way I could get it 40 miles back home.

Andrew brought me back to his and Mk’s farm and Sara then came to pick me up and take me home. On our ride back, the mechanic called. He had gotten a chance to take a look at the truck and the transmission was blown. $3500-$3700 in repair costs.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Folks, we are in need of some meat sales in order to afford these truck repairs/another truck that can host a snow plow.

Beef: <— Click Here for Sara’s website

Sara is an amazing beef cattle farmer who is the 10th generation to reside on her family land in Northern VA, Oakland Green Farm. She has 4 cows going to the butcher next month and needs to sell some sides to help pay for the blown transmission. If you are in the Northern Virginia area, or en route from Northern VA to Hampton Roads, I can deliver beef to you: A whole side or by the cut (cut minimum is $100). More info about her cuts and sides can be found HERE.  Beef sides are $4.50 a pound hanging weight plus processing and Hagerstown is where you’d pick it up (unless you contract me to deliver to you)

Pork: <— Click here to buy salami on HogTree.com

Salami: Price: $17.50 for 6 ounces of dry-cured goodness. Use promo code TRANSMISSION for free shipping on 2 or more. This stuff is delicious, no lie. Now that the weather is cooling off and I’ve blown a friend’s transmission, I’m ready to ship these cured salamis to your door. My HogTree salamis are ‘Cacciatore’- a traditionally cured American-made Italian recipe. It is nitrate free and the ingredient list is as follows:

HogTree Pastured Non-gmo Pork. Salt. Dried Milk Powder. Celery Powder. Dextrose. Vitamin C. White Pepper. Garlic Powder. Fermentation Starter Culture. Natural Pork Casing.

Sara and I will be collaborating on a half pork/half beef Spanish Style Chorizo in the next month as well. This will also be available online in early November.

Pork Cuts: I am primarily selling cured bacon, ribs, pork chops and sausage (assorted flavors). This is pick-up only or delivered en route between Northern VA and Southeastern VA (but try me. I drive all over the place). Pick up by appointment only.

Everyone in the Frederick MD area: Go shop at Open Book Farm’s on-farm store on Saturday mornings and support really amazing people who grow nutrient dense food and saved me big time!

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog and that’s not to say I haven’t been writing (I’ve been writing quite a bit and getting extremely (and excitedly) nerdy). However, my 1000 word essays have been in short supply and I thought I’d throw one up on the blog today. It is inspired by the amazing Jack Kertesz of Maine, who shared this photo with the Maine Tree Crops Alliance  last week:

Same branch.
Same tree.
Two distinctly different apples. (Calyx, stem, skin, fruit shape, flavor, etc)

This was one of those WOW moments for me because I don’t ever see this sort of thing.  No, the yellow/green apples aren’t unripe versions of the red apples. Nor are they a more pale version of the other. This is something special and when I first saw it, there were three possible scenarios for what this was:

1.) Bud Sport. Not a typo for the epic Jean Claude Van Damme movie. A bud sport it’s basically a chance mutation of a single bud on a tree that produces a different looking fruit.  Sometimes this bud turns into a branch that produces apples double the size of the others on the tree. Sometimes a red delicious apple tree produces a branch of black apples…

No, I don’t think what Jack found is a bud sport, as two distinctly different kinds of apples are coming out of the same bud. We won’t venture down this rabbit hole, however I do plan to write more about bud sports in the future. They are fascinating!

2.) Top-Grafting. This is one of my favorite methods of grafting because it allows you to graft one or unlimited cultivars of fruit onto an existing tree of the same genera (ish). I made a quick video of how to do this with Bradford Pear:

However, if everything goes correctly, you still wouldn’t end up with a tree producing two different apples from the same bud on a branch.

3.) THE GRAFT-CHIMERA!  OMG. I’ve been waiting to find one of these! I had first learned about this crazy concept  when reading about the rediscovery of the citrus fruit cultivar ‘Bizzaria’. The gist of the story is this: Back in the 1600s, a Florentine gardener named Pietro Nati discovered a citrus fruit tree  that was growing three different fruits.  One fruit was the sour orange, which was from the rootstock’s genetics. The next fruit was the citron, which had been grafted onto the sour orange and was of the scion’s genetics. A third fruit was growing from this stem, which appeared to be a complete meld of the two fruits. The scientific community at the time, perplexed, fittingly named this fruit ‘Bizzaria.’ This branch was grafted in gardens all over the place and, amazingly, the chimera held true.

Bizzaria Fruit- half sour orange, half citron

Centuries later, the concept of having 2 or more distinctly different fruits emerging from one stem was revealed to be a graft-chimera, a botanical phenomenon where the cells of the rootstock and the cultivar being grafted get wrapped up together in a single branch and both traits are exhibited.  Sometimes, like with the case of Bizzaria, a 50:50 fruit also emerges. How this happens can be boiled down fairly simply thanks to a German botanist named Hans Winkler.

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Winkler was fascinated with the idea of graft-chimeras and began to experiment with how this sort of thing could come about and happen more regularly. How could he cause two different cultivars of fruit/vegetables/flowers to come out of the same bud? Instead of using apples for his experimenting, which take years to produce fruit, he used tomatoes and other graft-compatible nightshades (I’ll use eggplant for this essay, though it may not be historically correct) to conduct his experiments because they looked completely different in fruit and leaf.

The experiment goes like this: He grafted a tomato cultivar to an eggplant rootstock and when the graft was well healed and the plant established, he cut the graft union in half so the rootstock/scion union had exposed cut tissue.  He watched these cuts callous over and develop adventitious buds (new buds that arise from calloused tissue) grow. If a bud arose from the eggplant portion, it was an eggplant. If it arose from the tomato portion, it was a tomato.  If it arose from the graft union, it was a n Eggplato, composed partly of eggplant and partly of tomato. Essentially, two different species present within the same stem!

Turns out, this little experiment from Winkler is highly replicable and he was able to show how such branches can arise incidentally from normal grafting methods. The genetics and botanical world should have gone crazy at this time, experimenting with these concepts and producing serious Frankenfruit. But, like many cool experiments uncovered from the last century or more, they never picked up steam.

Back to Jack! And apples!

When I asked for more pictures, especially of the trunk, they sent this one over to me:

After seeing the picture, I think there are two possible scenarios for this graft-chimera.

1.) The tree’s graft union was buried and suckers came about from the union, producing chimeras.

1.5) The tree was mowed/driven over at the graft union and what came up was the graft-chimera

2.) The tree’s graft union was buried and some low-down injury occurred (weed eater?), causing a deep enough cut around the tree to reveal both rootstock and scion tissue. Up from that came these chimeric shoots.

Regardless, I think this ability to meld two cultivars into a single stem is very cool and somewhat witchy. I definitely want to experiment more with this concept in the future and I don’t know why more hasn’t been done with this concept. Maybe it has and I’m unaware, but I have found that some ornamental cultivars, especially the variegated types, came about as graft-chimeras.

Sidenote: I find it fitting that Winkler coined the term ‘Genome.’ How did he do it? Much like the Bizzaria fruit being half citron and half sour orange, he combined the words ‘Gene’ and ‘Chromosome’ together to get ‘Genome,’ lol.

Resources:

1. https://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/tisscult/Chimeras/chimeralec/chimeras.html
2. http://irrecenvhort.ifas.ufl.edu/plant-prop-glossary/03-genetic-selection/04-genetic-chimera.html
3. STOUT, A. B. (1920). A GRAFT-CHIMERA IN THE APPLE. Journal of Heredity, 11(5), 233–237.
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160616300902
5. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/330463