The landscape around Mystery, one of the newly-constructed buildings on Epic’s Storybook campus, has several plants that you won’t find anywhere else. Epic’s horticulture team has spent several years developing cultivars uniquely adapted to our situation here at Epic. Through multiple rounds of hybridization and careful selection, Horticulture team member Herb Avore has patented three new plants.

The first cultivar developed was Citrus x meyeri ‘Northern Zest’. It is the first Citrus cultivar to be hardy all the way to zone 4b! It will survive and produce lemons in the courtyard outside Mystery.

The second plant isn’t hardy, though it is very useful. Epic employees in the Mystery building will have access to a particularly special type of houseplant in their cozy space. This new plant is an instant coffee tree (Coffea arabica ‘Instant Buzz’). Just drop the beans in a cup with hot water…no processing necessary!

The third plant is an intergeneric graft with Triticum durum (durum wheat) grafted onto our native prairie crabapple Malus ioensis. This has been nicknamed “The Spaghetti Tree” because it produces the pasta on its own. Culinary has been substituting this tree-grown spaghetti for typical Semolina pasta for the last year, and they have been raving about the quality. The horticulture team will supplement the Mystery installation by planting several additional trees in the farm campus orchard to keep up with demand.

With the large quantity of aluminum Klarbrunn cans generated on campus, Horticulture Team Composting Specialist, Lumbricus Terrestris, was tapped to develop a solution that could keep the waste on site. After experimenting with a variety of composting worms, Terrestris has developed a strain that will break down the cans. This promises to greatly reduce the amount that are sent off-site for recycling. The horticulture team is working in tandem with a local garden center to make the selections available to the public.

J. H. Findorff and Epic