Greenstorm's Journal

I've started looking at seeds for the year. I think I'm pretty much decided that I'll be here through the summer, until I get my credential, so that means I can try and get done what I had hoped to do last year: get the pigs off their winter paddock early enough to get that lovely south-facing slope planted with grain, corn, and squash.

Last year I just didn't get the additional pig fences done in time but now they are done. So.

What I really want to do is plant a million short-season tomatoes and save seed from the ones that fruit. Then, the next year, I'd like to plant all those together with some of the promiscuously-pollinating tomatoes - most tomatoes self-pollinate but there are some that don't hide their stamens and they're much more likely to pick up pollen from what's around them. Basically, I'd like to mix it all up and do some strong survival pressure on the ones that remain. This type of mix is called a grex. It seems to starting to be fashionable, and I'm pretty happy to have language for that; previously I described the process as "put lots of stuff in and see what works". Tomatoes are not super likely to ripen here outdoors so it would take some work to get them plantable on the south slope. On the other hand, I have seeds saved from two years ago, tomatoes that ripened outdoors in my garden. So. Good start.

This all comes up because I cut open a tomato yesterday and there were sprouted seeds inside. This was a store tomato. I hate it when this happens, I hate killing the baby sprouts, so I may well plant a couple and see how they do. I have grow lights, after all.

Really I should update my garden spreadsheet before I get anything. There are a few things I know I want, though, and I worry they'll sell out very quickly after 2020.

I'd planned to use pig bedding as mulch this summer, but the pigs had reduced over a hundred bales of hay and straw into a couple inches of dust. It was amazing. Maybe this year there will be enough.

I've expanded the bed on the south side of the garden fence: I lasagna'd it this fall with chicken coop bedding so it'll be pretty hot this year. It is probably a good place for cabbage.

I've been doing a dive into open-source seeds, modern landrace creation and grexes, and deliberate crafting of locally-adapted species. This is definitely my kind of thing: my land philosophy sits comfortably in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks/the land is your partner in selection/change the genetics to suit the land and not the land to suit the genetics/lots of different locally-adapted cultivars" space that a lot of these experiments live in.

I definitely have a direction to take my tomato trials next year: whatever produces this year, plus some of the multicultivar groups. Seems like one of the holy grails of this style of tomato breeding is to get tomatoes that cross-pollinate easily rather than self-pollinating. There are a couple varieties that do this (the specific flower architecture is recessive) and if I pull one of those in with my survivors from this year, then at the end of next year I should have some crosses, and some of those will be heterozygous for the cross-pollination flower architecture but won't display it, plus have a bunch of my survivor tomato traits. Those will self-pollinate, and about a quarter of them should be cross-pollinators with a bunch of my incorporated trailts.

So that's a bit of a direction, which is nice.

It means I really want a tunnel greenhouse, though. I mean, for other reasons too: birds in winter, snow-free area for hay storage, not dealing with these weird last frosts, etc. The cheapest I can find that'll handle snowload is ~$3500, which would be manageable but not this year.

Anyhow, for next year when buying seeds: wild mountain seeds and the experimental farm network, and maybe lofthouse if he's selling them. They're a bunch of high-altitude, cold-night breeders of squash and tomatoes who release biodiverse sets of seeds that can hopefully adapt to what's going on up here. At least they'll have a leg up.