The glorious garden of Elissa Steeves

This post is long over-due, but hopefully worth waiting for.

Back in August, I got a chance to go to Blacksburg Viriginia to speak at the Down and Dirty Gardening Symposium hosted by Virginia Tech. It was a terrific conference, put together by the marvelous Dr. Holly Scroggins, who you hopefully know from the excellent Garden Professors Blog. The symposium was beyond excellent, the talks (aside from my own) were informative and fun, but the real highlight was getting to see the spectacular garden of Elissa Steeves. It was a garden I'd want to have someday. Gorgeous design, a wonderful mix of solemn beauty lightened with exuberant silliness, and a really spectacular selection of plant ranging from the familiar to off-the-charts rare.

Enough talk. Onto pictures.

Best. Agaves. Ever.

Spray painted allium seed heads and I WANT THAT FOUNTAIN!

Backlit bamboo in a container

Hardy begonia, B. grandis, catching the rays of a lowering sun

These brilliantly colored chairs were tucked away in a dark, shaded nook, all the better to show off their brilliant, exuberant colors.

A traditional fairy garden...

...and a very UNtraditional fairy garden.

The glorious Impatiens namchabarwensis. Yes, I got seeds.

I love the way she matches furniture paint colors to plants.

I feel like I should know what this is, but I'm drawing a blank. Lovely backlit, in any case.

Again, furniture colors that MAKE a garden room.

Sempervivums in a boot... taken to a marvelous extreme.

Slightly nontraditional containers. She told me she gets them from a place that sells seconds of plastic bones for anatomy classes. I kind of want to get some too.

Call me Joseph Appleseed

WARNING: I just read through this post before putting it up, and though it starts out calm and reasonable, I get increasingly over-excited as it goes on. So brace yourself.

My good friend, Rachel (http://cityscapesandgardengates.blogspot.com/) and I have known each other for 7 years now. And for nearly that long, we've been plotting to go to Geneva NY to visit the grape and apple germplasm center there. I would post a link to the page all about them, but it is a USDA funded project, and so defunded with the current government shutdown. But here is what you need to know: It is housed at Cornell's Agricultural experiment station, and their mission is to collect and preserve as much genetic diversity of apples and grapes as possible. In other words, visiting there is going to see an giant collection of all the possible awesome that apples can do. Aside from being so cool you can hardly stand it, it and the rest of the USDA germplasm system is incredibly important, preserving genetic diversity and making it available to breeders and researchers to create new varieties with better disease resistance or winter hardiness or just generally more awesomeness.

But the BEST thing about the germplasm center there? KAZAKHSTAN!

Um yeah. Let me explain. Apples come from Kazakhstan. Modern cultivated apples are descended from wild apples in Kazakhstan, possibly with a little hybridization with other species thrown in. Okay, so yeah, that is where the wild ancestors of apples live. What's the big deal? Apple FORESTS. Seriously, whole forests of wild apples. http://exhibits.mannlib.cornell.edu/apples/expeditions.htm

To be honest, I don't know logically why that excites me so much, but that concept just blows my mind and makes me very happy. Someday I'll get to Kazakhstan and dance euphorically through the apple forests, but in the mean time: Other people have gone there and collected seed, and planted HUNDREDS of them. In Geneva, NY.

That's right folks. A little slice of a wild Kazakh apple forest growing happily in upstate New York. And I got to walk around in it. And taste the apples. And TAKE SOME HOME!

Be still my beating heart. So crazy excited.

There weren't just Kazakh apples, there was a whole host of them, row upon row upon row of trees wth big fruits and little fruits and pretty ones and ugly ones and delicious ones and ones that tasted so gross you had to give it to someone else to taste too just so you could watch them be grossed out by it.

And I got to TAKE SOME HOME! Aren't they beautiful and amazing?

After I got them home, I spent a few hours extracting the seeds...

Apple forests sitting waiting to grow...

Of course, apples don't come true from seed, each of these seeds will produce something different from the parent tree I picked the fruit off of... which, you know, makes me crazy excited too. (I think I may be overusing the phrase "crazy excited...") The whole plant breeder thing in me... I've got a mix of seeds from all sorts of different apple trees, pollinated by who knows what gorgeous and interesting diversity of an entire germplasm collection... oh what marvels may grow from these seeds!

So, yeah... I'm going to plant all these seeds and grow my own little slice of Kazakhstan.

And if you ever get a chance to visit the germplasm center, DO IT. So much amazing. And that was just the apples! They have grapes too. (Oh. My. God. Grapes!!!)

Black corn bread

I was curious on the flavor of some of my crazy corn, so I decided to cook some up into corn bread and see what I got.

So I took some of my black corn, and plain yellow corn for comparison

Ground them up into corn meal

And made corn bread -- half yellow, half black.

Is it just me, or does the black corn one look like a brownie? It didn't taste like a brownie, but the flavor was different and delicious. The yellow corn bread tasted like what I'm used to, but the black one was... how to describe it? It had an earthy almost meaty flavor to it. The yellow one tasted like it would be lovely with honey and butter. The black one I wanted to eat with a warm, thick winter stew. I admit I was surprised at how different they tasted... I'm going to have to do more corn taste tests here and start breeding for flavor as much as for beautiful colors.

On the radio...

I was on public radio's The Splendid Table again this weekend! Talking more about the tomato I've bred for the host, and growing delicious tomatoes in general. If you missed it, you can listen online here: https://soundcloud.com/thesplendidtable/joseph-tychonievich-on-the

Corn breeding projects

I've been playing around with corn breeding for a few years now. I harvested this year's crop this morning, and have been very pleased with my progress!

This BLACK one was a surprise. I was breeding for other traits, but this popped up and I LIKE it. Glossy, and just about as close to black as you can get. I'm thinking of calling it 'Black Gleam'. One more year to grow it out and make sure there aren't off types in the seed, and this one might be done!

The husks are very dark red as well, and even the stems of the plants are black as you can see in my not-very-good picture. The stand of them looked better before the groundhogs got it into their tiny brains to start tearing the plants down. These black stems were actually my goal for this population, so I'm quite happy about that. And pleased that the beautiful dark kernels came along for the ride...

 On the OTHER extreme, I've been aiming towards this color mix for a while and just love it. I'm calling it 'Mother of Pearl' I really like the delicate pinks and blues and lavenders. Some of the plants have too much dark blue in them, but I think I'm getting close to my goal with this one.

 A total surprise... from a population of white popcorn, these ones have just a touch of pink at the top of each kernel. I really like it... I'm calling it 'Pink Blush' for now, but I keep thinking it needs a better name. Suggestions would be appreciated.

I really like the mix of colors from this population, LOVE the glossy kernels, and they also were really good growers, with big full attractive ears. Too much boring yellow in the mix, but I'm going to go through and pull out the best colors and sort them out into a series of different color strains.