![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormWhat's calming? Writing about the principles of landrace gardening.
The principle is, it's more likely that a plant will be able to determine if it can survive there its own self than that I can predict what will grow well based on generalized descriptions from unlike soils/climates/water regimes/altitudes/biotic communities/growing styles/etc. Give something three years of trying to grow and by the end of it you will know whether it will grow well there.
More excitingly let genes mix. They won't be shackled to the rest of the genetics in that one variety. Over time the genes that aren't suitable will drop out of the mix and ones that are will combine in new ways. Each plant will have a larger and larger percentage of genes that work well on your site, for you, in your situation.
There needs to be some survival and some mortality for this to work. Genes need to be propagated at different frequencies. If you carefully save every seed from every plant, and keep every plant alive, there will be no change in frequency of surviving genes and thus no selection. Obviously if no seeds survive to make the next generation there will also be no propagation of genes.
For a gardener this means that things will often look bad or die. A garden grown this way is a garden that, on walkthrough, displays visible failures. Maybe some of the food tastes bad before it's removed from the gene pool. Maybe locusts or aphids descend and eat 80% of the crop.
Up to a point more failure of individual plants means more success for the project. When only 10% of the plants are dying out you're not getting tremendously strong selection; that's when you can step in and remove something that sprawls over the pathway or is too upright or doesn't look pretty or is bitter without erasing the whole project.
I think this is a different paradigm? We like nourishing the little plants, taking great care of them, feeling pride and love when they thrive. It can feel like a loss if they die, because of course it is. Those genes might well be propagated elsewhere but the individuals are what we get attached to. It is a different feeling to pivot from caretaking the individual to a fierce curiosity as to what the next generation will be, and to caretaking this balance between genes and hyperlocal spot of land.
In any case it's a much humbler and more intimate interaction with natural processes. Instead of doing all the intellectual and physical work to keep nature out and thereby create a perfect specimen myself, I am partnering with a cloud of resources and processes that function all around me whether I'm there or not and will grow something whether I am there or not. My goal becomes half guide, steering the process of selection to include my own needs layered on to those of the specific spot of land; but also half student, leaping along from development to development and trying to decipher what just happened and why. The process is in some ways more violent - there's more death, after all - but also less hubristic and narcissistic. We cease warring with nature when we cease warring with death. I suppose that makes sense.
So basically my garden will now always have things dying and failing. That's how new things are born and how new life comes forward. My garden will also likely always have things held static, preserved out of sentimentality or utility or just lack of energy to change them. Balance, right?
This doesn't feel complicated or hard to me, even though it kind of is complicated. Lots of sources and varieties and uncertainty as to particular outcomes is part of this process. I am created to love this kind of thing and to resist one-to-three-cultivars-that-get-planted-every-year-forever.
Is it hard for you to think about? Would it feel wrong?
The principle is, it's more likely that a plant will be able to determine if it can survive there its own self than that I can predict what will grow well based on generalized descriptions from unlike soils/climates/water regimes/altitudes/biotic communities/growing styles/etc. Give something three years of trying to grow and by the end of it you will know whether it will grow well there.
More excitingly let genes mix. They won't be shackled to the rest of the genetics in that one variety. Over time the genes that aren't suitable will drop out of the mix and ones that are will combine in new ways. Each plant will have a larger and larger percentage of genes that work well on your site, for you, in your situation.
There needs to be some survival and some mortality for this to work. Genes need to be propagated at different frequencies. If you carefully save every seed from every plant, and keep every plant alive, there will be no change in frequency of surviving genes and thus no selection. Obviously if no seeds survive to make the next generation there will also be no propagation of genes.
For a gardener this means that things will often look bad or die. A garden grown this way is a garden that, on walkthrough, displays visible failures. Maybe some of the food tastes bad before it's removed from the gene pool. Maybe locusts or aphids descend and eat 80% of the crop.
Up to a point more failure of individual plants means more success for the project. When only 10% of the plants are dying out you're not getting tremendously strong selection; that's when you can step in and remove something that sprawls over the pathway or is too upright or doesn't look pretty or is bitter without erasing the whole project.
I think this is a different paradigm? We like nourishing the little plants, taking great care of them, feeling pride and love when they thrive. It can feel like a loss if they die, because of course it is. Those genes might well be propagated elsewhere but the individuals are what we get attached to. It is a different feeling to pivot from caretaking the individual to a fierce curiosity as to what the next generation will be, and to caretaking this balance between genes and hyperlocal spot of land.
In any case it's a much humbler and more intimate interaction with natural processes. Instead of doing all the intellectual and physical work to keep nature out and thereby create a perfect specimen myself, I am partnering with a cloud of resources and processes that function all around me whether I'm there or not and will grow something whether I am there or not. My goal becomes half guide, steering the process of selection to include my own needs layered on to those of the specific spot of land; but also half student, leaping along from development to development and trying to decipher what just happened and why. The process is in some ways more violent - there's more death, after all - but also less hubristic and narcissistic. We cease warring with nature when we cease warring with death. I suppose that makes sense.
So basically my garden will now always have things dying and failing. That's how new things are born and how new life comes forward. My garden will also likely always have things held static, preserved out of sentimentality or utility or just lack of energy to change them. Balance, right?
This doesn't feel complicated or hard to me, even though it kind of is complicated. Lots of sources and varieties and uncertainty as to particular outcomes is part of this process. I am created to love this kind of thing and to resist one-to-three-cultivars-that-get-planted-every-year-forever.
Is it hard for you to think about? Would it feel wrong?
no subject
Date: 2022-03-01 03:04 am (UTC)This gets particularly complicated for plants where you normally eat the seeds. So maybe you grow some plants from generation 1 seeds and perform crosses, save those generation 2 seeds, plant *some* of the gen 2 seeds, evaluate the plants and their fruits and seeds, then go back to your saved gen 2 seeds and plant just the ones whose grown-out siblings did well. Cross those, etc. Complicated! (And I don't know the name for it. Maybe you do?) You could do selection without tracking multiple years' worth of seeds, but apparently it's a lot slower.
I think the only time this technique is actually *required* is when you're making unstable, uniform hybrids, which he's not into and neither am I. My hazy memory is that he has instead done it for an heirloom variety that had gotten very polluted with off-types and that he was trying to shape up again.
I think record-keeping just appeals to me, too. I like the idea of being able to trace the ancestry of a variety. :-) I'm keeping track of all my citrus, and I plan to keep track of the lineages of any crosses I make.
But... the feeling of obligation that comes with the record-keeping is a minor source of stress, so if I can drop it then it might make some kinds of gardening more fun, which is good.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-01 06:21 pm (UTC)though the way the climate is going, maybe i should just buckle down and do the data-keeping work as well as the hands-in-the-dirt work.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-01 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-01 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-05 03:02 am (UTC)that would be a great community experiment! especially if two people committed to memory and the third person wrote it down and then you compare notes the next year and see how variable those impressions are. Jenny and I regularly have very different tomato experiences in the same garden in the same year. we end up with conversations like "the cipolla's pride were the best red slicer last year" "did we have a red slicer? i don't remember those at all" "remember, we ate them in that salad at X event" "was there salad? oh, wait, those! did we grow those?" etc
no subject
Date: 2022-03-05 06:11 am (UTC)Though your narrative seems to have room for sort of nudging each other into mutual agreement on events?
I've had some experience with internet conversations like this, where we can go back to the written record and learn that, in fact, it was super different from what we remembered. I definitely wonder whether the sensory engagement of gardening/eating would anchor memories better.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-09 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-10 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-01 07:50 pm (UTC)I admit I'm struggling to think of a plant where 1) you eat the seeds and 2) there aren't enough seeds to just taste them and keep the rest from that plant.
I mean, for someone talking about landracing I have an awful lot of deliberate crossing (tomato and pepper and corn mostly) planned for this summer. My windowsill pepper cross is still the most fun thing I've done this winter, matchbox to hungarian black. So excited!
Record-keeping lets me check my own biases, meaningfully compare more than I can remember, and come up with pretty statistics. It's why I love the RED Gardens guy on youtube-- that's the level of comparison I aspire to.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-01 07:55 pm (UTC)