Thomas Agresti wrote:what would be the first type of plant and then the workflow you would recommend for landracing considering let's say, the person has grown a garden or more, but has never engaged in what you outline in your book? Something simplified like, do these 5 steps with this plant and... you have begun to landrace.
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Gordon Hogenson wrote:
But thinking this through, if I save seed consciously and plant the selected ones, I'm managing the landrace actively. If I allow the plants to reseed on their own, I'm allowing the plants to do the work and create their own landraces.
Gordon Hogenson wrote:How big a scale does a person have to be to create a landrace?
OK, let's say I'm a typical gardener for home consumption and limited sharing with friends and neighbors, not a market grower. Therefore, I tend to grow small amounts of everything. A bed of snow peas, a handful of "hills" of potatoes and pumpkins, a row of beans, a hoophouse with 8 tomato plants and 16 pepper plants. Just eight melon vines.
I would think you'd need a minimum number of plants to keep a landrace going, to ensure enough plants to carry the gene pool year to year. Therefore, a decision to start a landrace is also "scaling up" and committing to a multi-year effort with that plant group. As an individual gardener, maybe that makes sense as a special project for one or two crops.
Or am I thinking about this wrong? Seed saving is one thing, but another thing is allowing the plant to reseed itself and naturalize on its own. In that case, let's say in a semi-wild forest garden, we could have self-seeding varieties of a dozen vegetables, and lots of plants, way more maybe than we would have if we were planting it ourselves every year in a raised bed situation.
But thinking this through, if I save seed consciously and plant the selected ones, I'm managing the landrace actively. If I allow the plants to reseed on their own, I'm allowing the plants to do the work and create their own landraces.
And in any climate, location, and garden conditions, some species will be able to naturally complete their cycle and reseed, and maybe others won't as easily. So thinking of all the species, some I might choose to reseed on their own with no management, some I might intervene and do selections, depending on many factors.
So for all of us: which species are you planning on intervening and selecting on most (by saving selected seeds) and which are you going to just allow to do their own thing? And which are you just saving seeds, not intending to do a landrace? And which are you planning to just buy seeds or starts? What's your landrace strategy?
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Dave Bross wrote:One question, I had no idea how large an area you had under cultivation and the historical/family aspect of that is great.
Do you cultivate and plant seed mechanically via tractor, tiller or whatever or something else?
Gordon Hogenson wrote:Regarding throwing squash seeds in the old pine grove, probably not, I will agree (I assume you were being facetious or sarcastic).
Carla Burke wrote:So, what can I do to start my landraces, in the meantime? What types of plants can I start with, in my situation?
Gordon Hogenson wrote:
I would think you'd need a minimum number of plants to keep a landrace going, to ensure enough plants to carry the gene pool year to year.
Victoria Jankowski wrote:Sort of a random idea, tell me if I am making any sense at all. Since a great many of our 'garden vegetables' are badly inbred versions of a very few wild plants, if one had a limited space to work with (not tiny but limited) could there be advantages to planting multiple types of plants from the same family together and seeing if you can get one or two landrace varieties by crossing back in as much of the genetic diversity as possible to a single type of plant (think a master crucifer from kale, broccoli, cauliflower, mustards etc...) So the property would grow a great crucifer, a great melon, a single great cucumber, tomato etc.. but it might be a cross of every melon you could lay your hands on, etc...
Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
It's easier to work with crosses that contain 2 to 5 of my favorite varieties. I generally recommend that people start landraces with smaller number of ancestors, so that they can get used to saving seeds, and selection. Then add about 10% new genetics each year.
Diane Kistner wrote:When you get to the point of tasting any crosses to see if you want to keep or cull, and feed any bitter ones to the chickens, will the bitterness transfer to the eggs? Or should bitter things be relegated to the compost bin?
Victoria Jankowski wrote:I have looked into getting some of the tiny tomatoes for my food forest, but as I am still really new to plant identification I decided against getting something with tiny red berries in what will become woods if I do it right in the mid/north eastern United states where we do have several bright red berries that one does not want to eat .
Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
Diane Kistner wrote:When you get to the point of tasting any crosses to see if you want to keep or cull, and feed any bitter ones to the chickens, will the bitterness transfer to the eggs? Or should bitter things be relegated to the compost bin?
In a decade of growing squash landrace style, I have only found one fruit with the slightest bitterness about it. I'm ignorant about whether the poison is concentrated into bird eggs.
Victoria Jankowski wrote: I am wondering if there might be any advantage in purposefully introducing a very little bit of round-up ready corn and soybeans to our land race just as a measure of protection from crop failures if our neighbors have accidents, or there is drift we cannot account for.
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Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
The great project of my life, is creating landrace tomatoes. Neither genetic-diversity, nor promiscuous pollination were available in domestic tomatoes, so I ended up making inter-species hybrids between domestic tomatoes and wild tomatoes.
Diane Kistner wrote:Did I dream this, or did I read you are interested in working with some folks who experience late-season blight in tomatoes? I’m in Athens, Georgia, Zone 8a working on becoming Zone 8b, and we have that in spades. High humidity. Hot.
Diane Kistner wrote:
Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
When you get to the point of tasting any crosses to see if you want to keep or cull, and feed any bitter ones to the chickens, will the bitterness transfer to the eggs? Or should bitter things be relegated to the compost bin?
I have heard it said that some chickens eat actual gourds as in things that are absolutely poisonous for people, with no effect on the safety of the eggs, that said the general rule for anything you are going to eat, if it smells or tastes bad or off toss it, My SOs mother actually grew gourd plants just for her chickens and never had an issue. Of course as always do your due diligence, but I hope this helps.
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