DIY Plant Domestication with Aaron Parker

Andy: Hey folks. Welcome back. This is Andy with the Poor Proles

Almanac. In this episode, we're talking with Aaron Parker from Edgewood

nursery, and we're going to be talking about breeding plants, specifically

annuals, and the ideas around what we should be breeding, why we should be

breeding it. And how do we make it a part of our identity and culture. So take a

listen and tell us what you think.

Aaron, thanks so much for coming on. Can you, uh, introduce yourself to our

audience? Sure.

Aaron Parker: My name is Aaron Parker and I live in Wabanaki territory, so-called Southern Maine, just outside of the big city, quote, unquote Portland,

some in Falmouth, and I am a nurseryman and seed farmer at

Edgewood Nursery. And I had lots of other things too, that, uh, we may or may

not touch on like I, uh, an organizer for a free to pick community orchard called

Mount Joy orchard. And I, uh, I do a podcast called Propaganda by the Seed.

Andy: Awesome. Yeah. Propaganda by the Seed is, um, one of the few podcasts

that I have time to listen to these days. It's one of those things that I'm sure you

experience it, it's like you spend so much time doing podcasting stuff. It's hard

to sit down and listen to other people do it, but you guys have a really great list

of guests that you've had on for sure.

Aaron Parker: And I, I definitely appreciate the, uh, the many times you have

plugged us on Instagram and such. Uh, we've actually, I think gained a lot of

listeners that.

Andy: Awesome. Yeah. You know, it's one of those things I listened to some of

the episodes you guys do. And I was like, ah, I was going to do that like in like

three years time.vBut like, for us, at least we have this like very successional process

and episodes. So it's like, yeah, I want to talk about that, but first I need, I want

to cover all this other stuff, so I'm glad you guys are doing it. And you guys do a

good job to the subject matter that you're talking about. So today I wanted to

specifically talk about plant breeding specifically around this concept of like

domesticated native plants and working with like crops that either exist or used

to exist or are just not generally widely used for one reason or another.

So I know this is something you do. And, uh, I wanted to ask, like what got you

first interested in this.

Aaron Parker: A lot of things for a while, there was some kind of different

circles of, of plants that I was kind of focusing in on. And those circles were

like medicinal plants, sort of classic Eurasian, perennial vegetables that were,

you know, maybe not mainstream popular, but familiar to a lot of people, stuff

like sea kale, and then native plants, especially for their ecological

value. Where I'm at now is wanting to really focus on the overlap of perennial

vegetables and native plants. And I think there's a lot of plants that are in this,

that are really underutilized and very, very rare in cultivation. Um, or if you do

seem then cultivation, it's people who are sort of native plant nerds, um, and are

growing them exclusively for ecosystem benefits.

And I think there's really a place to start moving. Some of our actual food needs

towards these native plants that do have a lot of great ecosystem benefits and

climate resiliency, and a lot of, a lot of great aspects to them. And there's a lot of

really interesting possibilities for, for breeding work as well, because a lot of

these plants there's been pretty much zero formal breeding work done, or

sometimes there are people breeding them in Asia or Russia. And

not around here where they actually come from, which is interesting.

Andy: Yeah. I want to just chime in on that. It's so funny. I spend a lot of

time on Researchgate for various reasons. If you look up like black locust,

which is a tree that I'm interested in, all of the research is from like either

Germany or Japan, it seems like for some reason, It's just crazy. Cause it's a

native American plant and we're the only ones not researching it.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. So weird. And yeah, it's, it's very weird. What's going on

with black locust in our part of the world where they're not historically known,

but they're, they're not very far from where I live. Their native range is people

like, oh, it's an invasive species.

And it's like this big problem. I like, I don't think it really is. And it has all these

wonderful properties. Yeah.

Andy: Yeah. I mean, even just taking into account climate change, I would

argue that at least here where I am, which is a couple zones warmer

while might not be its native range. If we were to go back to pre-Columbian era,

but climate change still happened, they would be basically native at this point, if

we came today. Yeah. So I think, especially with black locust, that argument's kind of

pointless, with the exception of endemic ecosystems that are worth protecting.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. And the, I mean, the whole idea of native plants is a

tangled mess that we don't necessarily have to get into, but it's extremely

complicated and not something I feel like I have totally wrapped my head

around.

Andy: Yeah. And I think we have to be better to continue on this tangent just a

little bit more about this idea of like invasives and like, acknowledging that we

might not have like a good or bad or easy answer. Like we can just be like, we don't

know this is a novel situation. And obviously there are cases where it's like, yes, we do

need to push back on invasives. But conversely, like with something like a black

locust, we just have to be like, yeah, we don't know. And we have to acknowledge that

it's messy and there's room for a lot of those different opinions.

Aaron Parker: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I like, I don't want to see wetlands

becoming all purple, loosestrife, but there's plenty of quote-unquote invasive

plants that are just, yeah. They've only been here a short time, but they don't

really seem to be causing too much of a problem. There's a lot of, a lot of gray

area, I think.

Andy: Yeah. And to work our way back to the main subject, one of the plants

that I'm aware of, that there was some research done on and it seems to have

kind of built its status within like this very niche community is like ground nuts.

I know LSU had been working on it in the, I believe seventies, I should have

checked this before we started recording, but I think it was in the early seventies

or late sixties. They were doing some research on it. And, um, it's just interesting that

there was this time when they recognized this value. And then it just kind of

disappeared.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. And I think there's a lot of projects that got kind of

started and never went anywhere and that's, that's perfectly fine. And

a lot of those sort of remnants of older breeding projects are a great place to

start.

You know, another round, another example of that might be, um, Illinois bundle

flower, Desmanthus illinoensis. Which is this very easy to grow plant and

people are interested in as a fodder plant and as a nitrogen fixer. But I have

heard rumors that the land Institute, which does a lot of perennial crop breeding,

was working on a non shattering variety in the seventies. And it just kind of, they

didn't get enough results to kind of justify continuing to work on. Yeah.

Andy: And I know Cornell had some really interesting research going on

around trees. I talked to Steve Gabriel about it a while back, but yeah, I mean,

the point is that there's been a lot of research done and then it just kind of gets

lost if it's not as effective or if the novelty wears off on those crops.

One of the things that I think about when we start talking about like ground nuts

and all these other potential food, especially staple foods is how do

we make them accessible so we can, we can talk all we want about like these

have the capacity to replace these giant model crops that we use, but it's a little

bit more complicated because you need to get buy-in from the public.

The way I think about it is like food. How do we make these more food

accessible for like the general public that aren't like going to be adventurous

eaters that are like, Ooh, this is something that was on this landscape 300 years

ago. I want to try eating it.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. I think a good. A good way to, to kind of introduce these

crops is to point towards the harmony where human food production and

ecological benefit can be.

So you could be planting. One of my favorites is a common milkweed.

Asclepias syriaca, that is, you know, formerly a much-maligned pasture weed.

And now people are really starting to plant because it's the host food

for Monarch butterfly law. But it's also an excellent human food at several life

stages.

And so if you can get people who are already interested in gardening are already

interested in changing the landscape to benefit the local ecology, to also be like,

and we'd do a little bit of foraging in this landscape and that forging can start to

turn into a little bit more of like a production horticulture.

Also. I think at least around here, there is. A lot of there's a whole sector that I

have almost no interactions with, which is restaurant. And there's a lot of people

doing interesting things with restaurants that do seem to kind of push, push new

ingredients. And there are people who are much more innovative cooks than I'll

ever be, you know, wanting to try something new, anything new, and a lot of

these plants, even though they might be even abundant in the

landscape around are, are definitely, you know, something novel to the cuisine

of most people. So if somebody is listening and they're like, Hey, you know,

this is up my alley, I'm interested, but I don't know a lot about like botany or

biology is the idea of starting to incorporate some of these species or as we'll

talk a little bit further breeding these types of species to selectively breed.

Andy: Is that something accessible? It's like the average backyard gardener.

Aaron Parker: I would say yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Um, and. Basically any

species that, um, would be of interest is probably useful and worth growing in

their existing state. It just might not be something that is going to be kind of

ready to be a staple crop.

So just sort of out of the box seeds you collected in the wild or

purchase from whatever source. You're going to get a plant that is totally worth

growing for a home gardener. And if you find the sort of connection with that

plant where it's like, okay, this plant is growing pretty easily, you know, I'm

successfully cultivating and I enjoy harvesting.

Then I feel like that you've kind of set the stage to take the next step of like, oh,

you know, I can now recognize that out of these 10 milkweed. This one has like

exceptional flavor. That's really cool. I'm going to like, so the next generation of

seeds, exclusively from this one selection and see what the next generation

looks like.

And that's really the first, the first steps of, of domestication. It's that simple.

Andy: Like I remember being a kid and like, they would take plants like

sunflowers and it was like, Hey, everyone plants a bunch of sunflowers, like all

the kids. And it's like pick the biggest head. So you can have a

bigger head next year.

And whoever has the biggest one, like wins a prize or whatever. So like every

year you'd be like, basically all breeding your own variant of sunflower based

on. Which one happened to have that unique characteristic. You know, I think

this all ties into like, you know, how, how do we understand and relate to these

plants?

And more than just that one season that we actually harvest the seeds and

replant them. And it's not just constantly buying from a source. That's not

connected to our landscape, not connected to our ecology or any of those types

of things. Now with your practice. Do you traditionally, like if you're collecting

milkweed or whatever it might be, do you try planting in different sites to see if

any plasticity shows new traits or anything like that?

Aaron Parker: Yeah, I, I will usually try and plant in at least two sites, you

know, across the sort of acre that I'm cultivating. A lot of that is often when I'm

planting something new, especially nowadays it's pretty hard to

come. So I don't part of that is I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.

Like if, if a plant doesn't succeed, then I might have to, you know, try and refine

those seeds or whatever, but it's also like, okay, how does this plant, how are

they going to do in full sun, really dry conditions, you know, maybe they'll act

differently or do better or do worse.

And. So that, that is definitely a, an aspect. And for shorter, that's more for

perennials for annuals. I will try and kind of bounce them around to different

spots. So, see, see how that goes now with annuals.

Andy: Do you feel that in your experiences that it's something you can see that

evolution happen, like in a short time period?

So like you, you were making the point about like milkweed, if you planted

from those seeds the next year, are you expecting that crop to be materially

better? Or do you, is it something that you think about in your, like in

5, 10, 20 years I'll have the crop I really want.

Aaron Parker: It's uh, at least with annuals, it can be a pretty short turnaround.

I am not one to make really heavy selections generally, and you can kind of get,

you know, more dramatic results by making heavy selections, but everything

comes at a cost. The cost might be if, if you made a heavy selection, meaning.

You know, you've got a hundred plants and you're only saving your choice seed

from three of them.

You're pushing that population through a really tight bottleneck, genetically,

and that could have unintended consequences down the line also, especially for

annuals. You're only really observing one year when you're making that

selection. So like last year was a really nice growing season for us. We had a lot

of summer rain and lots of plants really flourished.

And the individuals that flourish in that rainy year might not be the

genetics that are going to flourish in, in a tough dry year. I tend to remove from

the front of the breeding population or rogue out a pretty small amount. And

with wild perennials that I'm more recently working with, I've basically not

made any selection pressure on I'm still at the phase of building a reasonably

broad gene pool of localized genetic.

And then kind of, I'm going to go from there to see like, okay, do I want to

leave this plant as is to preserve that local eco type? Or do I want to either

potentially make a split decision where I will either try and maintain this broad

gene pool and then also either make clonal selections or make a different

breeding population to.

You know, have an increased production of whatever I want to

harvest or just stick with with the genetics as they are.

Andy: So that brings up a really interesting point about domestication. And,

you know, you're walking this fine line between local native species

and a domestic by definition, domestic plants need us to continue to exist.

Aaron Parker: And if we're doing breeding and we're thinking about

selectively breeding, we can do that while still allowing plants to not be

necessarily domestic. So, you know, if you're trying to breed things for your

local ecology, or thinking about like climate change and breeding for plants,

that'll be more resilient under climate change.

That's a different process.

Andy: Now I'm curious about your thoughts about, um, our role in doing stuff

like that and framing up these plants to be ready for climate change.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. And I think we're at an interesting point and in a

interesting sort of geographic position to be doing that. And I there's several

plants that I am working with.

Um, pawpaw would be a great example of like pawpaw probably wouldn't have

really succeeded here, like even 50 years ago. At least for me,

pawpaw has been very reliable and I see them as being really a good choice for

a tree crop. Uh, with climate change in mind, they really thrive on summer heat,

which we're just gonna keep getting more and more of, and they bloom late

enough.

You know, late, late frosts are hopefully not going to be too much of an issue

with them. And it's a tree I'd like to see getting out there into the landscape more

and more pause or same here.

Andy: I've got some and there they're a great tree and they, they're a great

understory fruiting tree, which is not super rare, but rare enough that they also

do well under black Walnut.

Aaron Parker: So they're, they're just a very unique tree that is specially

designed, especially here on the east coast where we could utilize them really

well. Yeah. And there is this caveat of climate change hasn't progressed so

much that we don't still have severe cold snaps. So I'm not really

planting much stuff.

That's generally considered like a solid zone six or something. So. It's pretty

likely that that time will come when it, we just don't get those winter cold snaps

anymore. But for now I'm focusing on plants like the pawpaw that can, that can

take that negative 20 Fahrenheit for a day or two, um, and still, you know,

persist, um, but are well adapted to. Also it's like, oh, it's going to be a hundred

for several days in a row.

Andy: Yeah. My crop that I've been focusing on for trees is primarily figs

because they're like a zone seven, eight, and we're on the six, B seven a line.

Yeah. So, uh, they're, they're right on the edge and obviously figs are great

eating, so it's hard not to want them, even though they’re not native, they’ve shown

zero risk of being invasive.

Aaron Parker: so easy to propagate in so many varieties.

Andy: Yeah. They're are great trees. And, uh, I just try to been trying to see

how hardy some of them can be and, uh, trying to introduce some

new genetics and just see what happens because. Uh, I would like them to be

here and I'm sure in 20 years they will be, um, th they won't need any

maintenance to, to keep them alive here.

So if you already get them in the ground in hardy, it's going to be a much more

delicious future.

Aaron Parker: Yeah, totally. And things are amazingly adaptable. My friend,

Jesse Stevens, grows them in zone four B.

Andy: Yeah. He must have to cover them or leave them or something.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. Pins them to the ground with a bag of wood chips and

covers them up.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. That's um, I used to do that and it was just like, you know

what, let me just see they're they're old enough now, unless I see that it's going

to be a real cold snap. I try not to do anything and they've been dying back to

the roots, but I'm convinced eventually they'll get hardy enough just from

having deeper roots, not that they have very deep roots, they're pretty

shallow. I'm just, I'm curious to see how they do and use them kind of as a

gauge for how the winters are changing. Yeah.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. And I, I have seen some interesting,

potentially epigenetic hardiness changes in plants, mostly in, uh, I can't

remember the common name, but, uh, Diospyros Lotus, which is a, um,

persimmon variety and in pawpaws where plant out a young plant and it gets

like tip damage or winter kill, dying back for the first couple of winters. And

then it seems to entirely overcome those issues.

Andy: Yeah, it's cool to see how plants can mutate in that way. You know,

something that you think, well, it's always died back. Why wouldn't it do it

again? And though sometimes they'll do it. Yeah. There's a lot of resiliency in

the way plants manage new landscapes.

Aaron Parker: Pretty neat stuff.

Andy: You've mentioned a couple, but I'm curious what crops in particular that

you're interested in, that maybe you're working with now, or that you want to

work with in the future and, um, why you are interested in those specifically.

Aaron Parker: Yup. Uh, there's, there's so many, um, Apios is, is

one that like, you know, has a pretty wide acceptance that this is a plant with a

lot of potential as a food crop and a lot of history of human cultivation, pre

colonization.

And, and that's kind of going to be true pretty broadly. When we think of the

ecology pre Europeans getting here. My, my understanding is that most of them.

Most of this area was essentially a horticultural landscape. It was broadly

managed and the sort of culture of that management was to make selections and

on many, many different species widely across the landscape, but they were sort

of managed with a fairly light selection pressure. And so you can see that in,

you know, sort of remnant populations that have kind of pretty obvious

selections by humans in, in Apios, in Carya, so like hickories and

pecans. And I think there's a lot of useful, useful plants out there on the

landscape that have already had some degree of human selection. And a lot of

that, that selection has been somewhat lost because over. The

colonization period last 500 years or whatever those changes that were made by

indigenous people didn't necessarily survive on an untended landscape.

So some of those species have at least partially reverted, but we can, we can

find the remnant genetics and kind of foster those. So some examples of that are

ground nuts. Carya hickories Helianthus Strumosis is a species that really

interests me. And that's the sort of north eastern version of, uh, Helianthus

tuberosa sunchoke.

I got a variety a few years ago called Chinese, which is weird

because it's a, you know, a species that comes from this part of the world. And,

you know, it does not exist in the wild in China.

Andy: It's from Canada, right. Originally.

Aaron Parker: Canada Eastern us.

Andy: Yeah. I thought it was pretty far north and then worked its way down.

Aaron Parker: I, I only basically know what's on the, uh, the like bonap map,

but that it shows that as, you know, being sort of broadly and in the Eastern

turtle island, but apparently this species was brought to Asia. Where they did

some degree of breeding work and this one variety that I have produces huge

spindle shape, tubers, very smooth, very productive.

And we're talking five to 10 pounds of tuber production per plant.

Andy: Yeah. That's amazing.

Aaron Parker: Yeah. And like sunchokes are productive as it is. So yeah.

And, and some of these tubers are even significantly larger than the

largest sunchokes I've ever seen, but I think my largest single tuber was over 13

ounces over a foot.

And this plant, you know, is covered in beautiful flowers late in the season,

covered in pollinators has lots of specialists, insect associations. Um, so that's

one that I'm really excited about and. It's actually a great example species,

because the only problem that I really see with this cultivar Chinese is way too

spready. The stolons, which are like the stems that the tubers grow on are far

too long to be easily manageable, cultivated species.

So you get this huge plant, you know, it can be eight feet tall, great production,

but you've got to disturb a lot of stuff. To get those tubers and they're you

know, really tough, really aggressive plants, which can be great in

some circumstances, but in a garden, you know, they want to run all over the

place.

So you can deal with that using rhizome barriers, but as the breeding opportunity,

you know, looking for seedlings of that plant with much shorter stolons is. Uh,

probably your number one breeding goal. And I just happened to get lucky in

that case where I had, you know, this big, tall plant and it blew over in a

windstorm, broke the stem and it was late in the year.

So I just kind of like cut it down and like tossed it to the side. And it's like,

okay, that's that's mulch now. And the next year a new plant popped up out of

that debris. And I was like, oh shit, like maybe, uh, you know, maybe in a

rodent moved to tuber over. But the morphology of the tubers was totally

different.

And when I started looking at the plant, the morphology of the stems and leaves

was actually significantly different as well. Um, and I'm fairly certain that, that

Helianthus, dermatosis Chinese crossed with one of the other sunchokes that I was

growing. And now I've got this chance seedling, which I call cluster, and it has the

exact opposite stolen all the tubes are right at the base of the plant, they don't move at

all and can be harvested very effectively with minimal soil disturbance.

Andy: That's awesome. Sometimes you get lucky.

Aaron Parker: Yeah, exactly. And I, I don't expect that many, you know,

basically when winning the genetic lottery like that, but it is extremely

heartening to know like, oh, okay.

This is just, you know, a gift basically. And this, this can happen. And the more,

the more you plant out the seeds and the more you observe carefully, the more

likely it's to.

Andy: I have a lot of hope or I try to have a lot of hope for utilizing

a lot of these crops and thinking about how, how do we integrate them into our

food ways to justify growing them?

Because that's one of the things that I struggle with is like, you know, you can,

you can harvest a lot of foods, fairly easily foraging, you know, acorns is a

really great example and that's great, but if we can't do anything more than

make them a novelty, then it's, I don't want to say pointless, but without

becoming a meaningful part of people's diets, it's not really addressing the root

cause of a lot of our food problems, you know, in our ecological destruction and

things like that. So I want to know, you know, with all the work you're doing

and all the investments in time and all these other things, you know, do you, do

you see a future in which these crops are actually at least in our lifetime, like a

meaningful part of people's diets?

Aaron Parker: Yes. I think, and. It's it's a little bit hard to tell where, where

that's going to go. And it's kind of tied up in how I, I don't want to be

a doomer or anything, but how, how the apocalypse plays out, because I

think a lot of these crops are very resilient potentially, and have a real role to

play in.

Making human food production kind of better for everyone, both us and all

living things on the planet. I guess I would say I, I see a lot of these crops being

a major part of the diet in a brighter future. That's that's a real possibility. But

it's going to take a lot of work to get there.

Andy: Yeah, I think about it, like, you know, with craft beer, I feel like I fall

back on this example of craft beer for like a lot of things in my life for some

reason, the thing about craft beer that's unique is like this idea of like the interest

is that it becomes very specific to place. And I imagine that as we try

to make these foods attractive, the way to do that is to tie it to place where it's

like you have craft beer from this place, you know, in Boston, it's like,

everything's somehow tied to the, you know, for example, one of the breweries

that's near me would do like stuff with like, various ocean material goods,

adding oysters or whatever to their beer, because it's like well you're on the coast.

Like that's, you know, you're utilizing the local ingredients. And I imagine with

a lot of the locavore movement at this point, local food doesn't mean place. It

means grown nearby and has nothing to do with the local place. It's. So the next step

in that process would be to identify plants that are native to that area and saying,

Hey, not only is it grown here, but it's from here.

This is the food of the landscape. The same way. Wine is the same way. Like I

said, craft beer has kind of moved in that direction. So it really, probably wine is

the better example than craft beer in this case. But like making that

the point that's important and giving it more meaning than just being like, yeah,

you can buy a bag of potatoes, but let's talk about ground nuts and why that

might be better.

Aaron Parker: Yeah, totally.

Andy: If that makes sense.

Aaron Parker: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And that, you know, that

really does tie in with like, why, why these plants have potentially a lot more

ecological benefit is they just have, they've had the time to develop ecological

relationships, plants that just arrived here last year or whatever can be great,

ecologically, as far as like feeding tons of pollinators and stuff. I have a plant

that comes from Korea called Dystaenia. That is just an absolute pollinator

magnet. When that plant first bloomed in my garden, I had saw species of wasps

and beetles that I have never seen before. But what those plants can't

provide is these long established specialist relationships.

Yeah. If we don't have a place for those plants that have been here a really long

time in our landscapes, then we're going to lose, lose those specialist species.

And everything's just going to collapse that much faster on that much harder

and that much farther.

Andy: Yeah. And I think that ties into what I wanted to ask about, you know, as

we work on these projects and we've talked about climate change a few times at

this point, but you know, with climate change, invariably accelerating. I don't

think anybody listening to this doesn't expect at this point. Do you think that

pressure will, you know, you're talking about like selection, pressure and

tightening that funnel. How do you see climate change playing into that funnel

basically.

Aaron Parker: Yes. And no, as, as far as these plants, you know, surviving

climate change where I live, uh, we're at an interesting spot

ecologically because, uh, I live basically at the interface of the Eastern

hardwoods and the boreal forest. And I think a lot, a lot of the boreal species are

going to be gone from this region.

In the next 50 to 100 years. So just because they're here now and have been here

since the glaciers receded doesn't mean that they're going to be a great choice

for, for cultivation or for planting as a plant to restore ecosystems. However,

we're also at the sort of Northeastern limit of Eastern hardwoods.

So there's lots of Oaks, there's shagbark Hickory that had been here. Hundreds

of thousands of years and the sort of the wind is blowing their way and they

have a deep gene pool that allows those species to thrive down into

Georgia, Carolina, ozarks and that's, you know, it seemingly where our climate

is headed.

So plants like pawpaw, spicebush, plants like that, where we're kind of at, or

near their Northern limit, I think are kind of good candidates for assisted

migration. Or semi domestication or total domestication and add sort of quote

unquote new crops. Even if a lot of these plants were stewarded by indigenous

people and potentially are continued to be stewarded by indigenous people in

various parts of the country.

Andy: Yeah, I think about this a lot, this idea of like, okay, your climate is

changing and like species theoretically can move into these new spaces, moving

north Oaks and hickories and things like that. But theses don't move quickly and

they don't move as quick as climate change is happening.

It puts the onus on us to help those species migrate and to give those ecologies

or that landscape a chance to have a healthy.

Aaron Parker: Yeah, absolutely. And I think at this stage, in the game, people

who, you know, people like me who are planting with a, you know, an eye

towards pushing plants out to the public should be planting very broadly to see

what works. You know, I, I basically want to try everything and then what, what

plants would work and what thrives. That's what I propagate for sale. And I

think having that really deep, diverse gene pool is going to be essential to

minimize. The amount of damage done by climate change.

Andy: Agreed. So Aaron, for folks that have enjoyed this conversation, want to

hear you talk more? Can you a plug your podcast again? And if

people want to buy plants from you, where can they go?

Aaron Parker: Uh, I would love to, so my podcast is Propaganda by the Seed.

You can find it on all your regular podcast platforms and

@propagandabytheseed.com.

If you want to buy plants or me, you can do that www.edgewoodnursery.com. Right

now I have seed packets for sale because it's the middle of winter. And I'm not

sure when this is going to air, but

Andy: It'll be march.

Aaron Parker: Okay. I'll probably when this airs, I will also have cuttings and

a limited amount of bare root plants.

And then as the ground thaws all have a much broader variety of bare root plant

material ago.

Andy: Aaron. This has been great. Thanks so much.

Aaron Parker: Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me

You can listen to the recording of this episode on Poor Proles Almanac, Episode 85: DIY Native Plant Propagation with Aaron Parker.