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Landracing 101 talk, first draft
Feb. 3rd, 2023 09:58 am(If there is a projector screen, put a set of randomized landrace pictures on it while I'm talking, changing every 20-30 seconds, and say: "I brought some eye candy for the talk: everything you see up there was produced using this growing method I'm about to talk about, most of it in very difficult conditions. We all need eye candy at this time of year, right?")
I want to warn you up front, I have a bit of a tomato bias. I'll try not to make every example about tomatoes. What I'm about to say is common to the way I grow and think about many different kinds of seeds though.
Do you remember trying to buy seed for spring 2020? Catalogues sold out so early, every catalogue, and what used to be joyful anticipation of spring gardening turned into competition and sometimes despair as everything you wanted disappeared?
You know when you plant some seeds so hopefully, maybe that new beautiful tomato, and there you are with blankets at the end of the year trying to protect it from frost-- and every single fruit is still green?
Have you ever thought maybe you'd save seed, but then realized that if you wanted to do it the recommended way, everything would need to be so far apart you'd need a dozen gardens?
You know that feeling when you've gone down the seed catalogue and you want the corn that looks like jewels *and* the corn that is bright orange *and* the blue sweet corn, or you want the purple stripey tomato *and* the yellow-and-blue one *and* the tiny red one on a huge vine *and* the one so dark it looks almost black *and* the super early one *and* the multicoloured one that's supposed to taste so good *and* the neat-shaped cherry one that looks almost silver because variety is fun and amazing, but then you look at the total of your seed cart and it's a thousand dollars and you only would plant one plant from each packet and suddenly having fun with this hobby feels so expensive?
Yeah. Me too. All of those.
First I wanted to grow every tomato, but I didn't have space or money. I lived on the coast then, and I just rotated the tomatoes I grew. It was fun.
Then I moved up here. You know what happens when you're a gardener that moves from the coast to the north, right? You spend a year growing things that don't ripen even a little bit. You think, I need a greenhouse the size of my whole garden. You look at your bank account, and at the cost of greenhouses. And then you adapt.
In my case I didn't want to adapt by growing only tomatoes that do well up here -- both of them bred by Andy Pollock -- and giving up on something new or pretty every year. What was I going to do?
This is when I first heard about Joseph Lofthouse. He lives in super high elevation in Utah, a place where frost can come at almost any time, the nights are cold, and the seasons are short. It's not a place where seeds from the pretty catalogues do well. Sound familiar?
It sounded familiar to me. I found inspiration in the story of how he bred his own varieties to do well on his land, following in the footsteps of Andy Pollock and his persistence, but also with the flair of someone who loves to go out into the garden and pick tomatoes of every single colour. This is what he did:
We know that seeds grown here, from here, probably will do better than seeds from somewhere warm and maybe covered in plastic and even pesticides, right?
We know that organisms, including plants, tend to take after their parents.
This is a hard one, but, we know that if something dies, it probably isn't well-suited for the conditions we're growing it in.
Well, what Joseph did was to get a ton of seeds from all over. He grew all of them, and made sure they crossed: that is, of the ones that survived long enough to provide pollen, that pollen from many different fathers crossed into many different mothers. It's basically the opposite of keeping the variety pure like you're supposed to do in seed saving. It sounded crazy, but it was actually brilliant.
He harvested the seed from that first year. Not many plants did well; there wasn't a ton of fruit, but what he got was crosses of all the survivors. Next year he could grow out that scant handful of seeds, and he got plants that had all the traits needed to survive in his difficult climate-- and mixed in with that, he had traits from any fun and beautiful varieties that survived long enough to provide pollen. Not all of those seeds would survive and flourish but many of them would, and as long as he crossed and then saved what survived they got better every year.
Joseph's climate was rough, and in many cases it was a couple years before he could start to select, not just for what survived, but also for what he liked to eat. From a beginning with no melons that would ripen, where he had to take the melons in and set them on the shelf until the seeds were just barely ripe enough to germinate the next year, he eventually selected a cantaloupe with a rich, strong scent and just the right size for his needs. From a handful of corn kernels that was all that was left of a huge patch after weather being eaten by what seemed like every animal for miles he eventually was growing a beautiful, jewel-like multicoloured corn that was so strong, and held its ears so high, that the raccoons couldn't get to it and they gave up and left him with the whole harvest. He selected one squash that was small and so sweet and tasty that it can be eaten raw, on a platter with carrots and other dippers. He selected another squash that was big, deep orange, tasty, kept well, and-- you know, it ripened for him reliably. No big deal, right? (laughs)
And from an astonishing number of tomato seeds, wild tomato relatives, tomatoes of every shape and size and colour, he decided he didn't like tomatoes. (Rueful smile, laugh). So from tomatoes he selected yellow and orange and multicoloured fruit that weren't the tangy strong tomato taste we love. He didn't select for bland supermarket tomato either, though. With so many different plants in their ancestry, wild ones, weird ones, once he had them ripening reliably he was able to select the flavours he liked to eat: sweet, fruity flavours like... well, I'm going to read you a quote.
"Once I started growing genetically diverse tomatoes, and tasted things like melon, mango, sea urchin, and guava, I abandoned all efforts towards growing red tomatoes. I cull any reds that I find. I don’t save the seeds from reds for sharing with people who love red tomatoes. I don’t want my legacy to be the creation of one more red tomato.
Our taste testing panels consistently choose orange tomatoes as the most tasty."
(Makes a face). I love red tomatoes, but you know, a tomato that tastes like mango or melon sounds pretty magic too. I'm not saying you need or even want to grow a tomato that tastes like sea urchin. I'm saying that maybe you can, not only grow a tomato that ripens in your garden, but maybe you can do that, and you can also have a ton of variety. With this method you're not constrained to what other people like, to what they've already done, you don't have to worry that we're a tiny market here and no one breeds anything interesting for the north. If you want a tomato that tastes like sea urchin-- and one that tastes like melon-- and one that tastes like the best summertime BLT tomato-- you *can*.
And you can do it without competing for the catalogues every spring, and without buying separate seeds any time you want a little variety. And you can do it while sharing with your neighbours-- that makes it even better.
I've talked about how powerful landracing is. I've talked about what it can do to make hardy plants and to make tasty plants. But what is it, exactly?
Well, there are only a couple steps:
1) Save your seeds. Every year that you save seeds from your own yard, or are given seeds from your neighbour, those seeds get more and more adapted to your conditions. They'll do better every year. That's what Andy Pollock did, adapting Early Girl into Pollock.
2) Celebrate diversity, encourage cross-pollination. Usually when you save seeds you try to get rid of the unusual ones, the ones that don't look like they're supposed to. With landracing those unusual ones are where the fun really starts! A plant with two parents that did well is pretty likely to do well itself, and if it's a cross it's also a new variety that you've never seen before. Save it! Grow it! Visit it and enjoy the fact that it's brand new and it's yours. Encouraging pollinators, planting different varieties really close together, even looking at the flowers and saving seed especially from plants with flowers that are friendliest to pollinators-- that means you'll have even more crosses, even more new varieties, and even more chances for the perfect combination of characteristics that's exactly suited to you.
3) Encourage selection by the local ecosystem.
There's something really special about starting those seeds in February or March. About setting up lights, carefully watching those first green leaves come up, about making sure the temperature and water is just right. It's a habit to watch the weather forecast and mother's day and the full moon and try to decide, do I plant now, or a little later? Do I need to run out with blankets, or put row cover over everything? In an especially cool year, or for a lot of us in a normal year, we try to find space in the greenhouse or cover everything in hoophouses or spend every day watering in the dry year. We baby our plants. We love them, and we want those fancy tomatoes, so we try to make sure every single one has the best conditions and will survive. Even if it takes so much work on our parts.
One of the hardest parts of landracing is letting plants die. Yes, really. We try a wide range of seeds because who knows? But in order for the seeds we save to be better every year, to be hardier every year, we need to let the ones that aren't hardy die.
The first year it feels like you're the worst gardener. It feels like your neighbours are judging you and the ghosts of that 105-day tomato plant is hovering around your head filling you with regret. But that's how you get plants that most likely will grow better next year. That's how you get seeds that spring out of the soil at the end of March, maybe get transplanted into a light frost, and still somehow thrive and hand you baskets of tomatoes by July 1 even though there's a drought. You let the ones that die in cool evenings or drought or too much rain die. You keep the ones that love your garden, so that every year they love your garden more.
4) Select for characteristics that you value
Once your plants are surviving, it's not just surviving you select for. How do you like to garden?
I mean, definitely taste everything and save seed from the tastiest, whatever that means to you. Do you like sea urchin taste? Do you HATE sea urchin taste? (laugh) I'm joking, but really, taste everything before you save seed and you'll get a landrace tailored exactly to what you like-- even if what you like is a huge range of flavours.
Don't like weeding every day? Select the plants that grow well even if you leave weed pressure. There's nothing in my garden that can't compete well with lamb's quarters, let me tell you. Love weeding? You'll get plants that thrive in that bare soil. Or do you love companion planting? Do it, and over time you'll get plants that do well with your favourite companions.
I don't trellis my tomatoes, I just pick the ones I can see. Joseph is the same way, and over time his tomatoes have started to hold their fruits up above the soil where they're visible, since those are the ones that get picked and tasted and saved for seed. Meanwhile my 11-year-old self, who used to grow tomatoes up the side of the house, would have selected for the longest vines with the least side-shoots and over time that little kid would have got easy-trellising tomatoes.
Do you grow in pots because your soil is awful? You're selecting for what does well in pots. Soon you'll have a container landrace!
Select for beauty. I know so much of my joy comes from a beautiful basket of every colour of tomatoes, or that perfect blue colour in squash, but I also love that pinky-tan squash with just a little hook by the stem and that football-shaped one that's so easy to peel. I put my corn in jars in winter on a shelf just so I can admire it. Do you love a rainbow of produce? Do you love only orange corn, or tomatoes? Do you love THE ORANGEST or THE BLACKEST corn or tomatoes? Select those and over the years they'll get more intensely beautiful for you.
Really, you can select for anything you like that you see in your plants, and if you select for it every year you'll likely get more and more of that thing. Your landrace will shape to the way you like to garden, to whether you like to transplant (there's a guy in Montana working on direct-seeded tomatoes. Montana! Direct seeded!) to whether you like to mulch or water or... anything.
This is a partnership with the plants, a relationship you're entering into, where you care for them and save the seed and in turn every year they get closer to what exactly you want.
Cross pollination is a good one to select for because it offers more options later on. With some plants that have difficulty crossing on their own, like tomatoes, it can even make sense to select for the ones that cross best even if they don't have other attributes you love, so that the offspring cross better in the future and you end up with more choices down the road.
5) Share your seeds.
Share your seeds because if you do this with your neighbours you'll have more variety to select from as they share seeds with you.
Share your seeds because you're proud of what you're doing and so many of them are beautiful. share your seeds because someone just said "you can't grow corn here" and you want them to take your corn seed home, plant it, and be proven wrong.
Share your seeds so you can discover that your neighbour secretly likes tomatoes that taste like sea urchin when they share the seeds back with you.
Share your seeds because we all need to be fed, and if you have seeds that grow well here it's an easy way to help people out in these difficult times.
Share your seeds because a tomato has 100-300 seeds in it, and a squash has 50-100, so if you're saving your seeds like you're supposed to it's the only way to prevent your seed collection from taking up your whole house.
Landracing is big, and there's lots of stuff I didn't mention: nutrient density, less fertilizer use, risk vs reward for the first couple years, how many of my plants are going to die and do I really need to let them die? If you're interested there's a forum where people who do this talk endlessly about what they're doing and share seeds. I'm also happy to talk aboutany of that afterwards at the table with anyone who'd curious, but in the meantime: does anyone have any questions?
(if no:
Okay, I have a question for you: if you were going to make a landrace, if you were going to have a nice variety of something that did well in your garden that you'd previously thought couldn't be grown here, what would it be?)
(if appropriate: ask for interest, set up seed stewards)
(Goodness my presenter's voice is colloquial)
I want to warn you up front, I have a bit of a tomato bias. I'll try not to make every example about tomatoes. What I'm about to say is common to the way I grow and think about many different kinds of seeds though.
Do you remember trying to buy seed for spring 2020? Catalogues sold out so early, every catalogue, and what used to be joyful anticipation of spring gardening turned into competition and sometimes despair as everything you wanted disappeared?
You know when you plant some seeds so hopefully, maybe that new beautiful tomato, and there you are with blankets at the end of the year trying to protect it from frost-- and every single fruit is still green?
Have you ever thought maybe you'd save seed, but then realized that if you wanted to do it the recommended way, everything would need to be so far apart you'd need a dozen gardens?
You know that feeling when you've gone down the seed catalogue and you want the corn that looks like jewels *and* the corn that is bright orange *and* the blue sweet corn, or you want the purple stripey tomato *and* the yellow-and-blue one *and* the tiny red one on a huge vine *and* the one so dark it looks almost black *and* the super early one *and* the multicoloured one that's supposed to taste so good *and* the neat-shaped cherry one that looks almost silver because variety is fun and amazing, but then you look at the total of your seed cart and it's a thousand dollars and you only would plant one plant from each packet and suddenly having fun with this hobby feels so expensive?
Yeah. Me too. All of those.
First I wanted to grow every tomato, but I didn't have space or money. I lived on the coast then, and I just rotated the tomatoes I grew. It was fun.
Then I moved up here. You know what happens when you're a gardener that moves from the coast to the north, right? You spend a year growing things that don't ripen even a little bit. You think, I need a greenhouse the size of my whole garden. You look at your bank account, and at the cost of greenhouses. And then you adapt.
In my case I didn't want to adapt by growing only tomatoes that do well up here -- both of them bred by Andy Pollock -- and giving up on something new or pretty every year. What was I going to do?
This is when I first heard about Joseph Lofthouse. He lives in super high elevation in Utah, a place where frost can come at almost any time, the nights are cold, and the seasons are short. It's not a place where seeds from the pretty catalogues do well. Sound familiar?
It sounded familiar to me. I found inspiration in the story of how he bred his own varieties to do well on his land, following in the footsteps of Andy Pollock and his persistence, but also with the flair of someone who loves to go out into the garden and pick tomatoes of every single colour. This is what he did:
We know that seeds grown here, from here, probably will do better than seeds from somewhere warm and maybe covered in plastic and even pesticides, right?
We know that organisms, including plants, tend to take after their parents.
This is a hard one, but, we know that if something dies, it probably isn't well-suited for the conditions we're growing it in.
Well, what Joseph did was to get a ton of seeds from all over. He grew all of them, and made sure they crossed: that is, of the ones that survived long enough to provide pollen, that pollen from many different fathers crossed into many different mothers. It's basically the opposite of keeping the variety pure like you're supposed to do in seed saving. It sounded crazy, but it was actually brilliant.
He harvested the seed from that first year. Not many plants did well; there wasn't a ton of fruit, but what he got was crosses of all the survivors. Next year he could grow out that scant handful of seeds, and he got plants that had all the traits needed to survive in his difficult climate-- and mixed in with that, he had traits from any fun and beautiful varieties that survived long enough to provide pollen. Not all of those seeds would survive and flourish but many of them would, and as long as he crossed and then saved what survived they got better every year.
Joseph's climate was rough, and in many cases it was a couple years before he could start to select, not just for what survived, but also for what he liked to eat. From a beginning with no melons that would ripen, where he had to take the melons in and set them on the shelf until the seeds were just barely ripe enough to germinate the next year, he eventually selected a cantaloupe with a rich, strong scent and just the right size for his needs. From a handful of corn kernels that was all that was left of a huge patch after weather being eaten by what seemed like every animal for miles he eventually was growing a beautiful, jewel-like multicoloured corn that was so strong, and held its ears so high, that the raccoons couldn't get to it and they gave up and left him with the whole harvest. He selected one squash that was small and so sweet and tasty that it can be eaten raw, on a platter with carrots and other dippers. He selected another squash that was big, deep orange, tasty, kept well, and-- you know, it ripened for him reliably. No big deal, right? (laughs)
And from an astonishing number of tomato seeds, wild tomato relatives, tomatoes of every shape and size and colour, he decided he didn't like tomatoes. (Rueful smile, laugh). So from tomatoes he selected yellow and orange and multicoloured fruit that weren't the tangy strong tomato taste we love. He didn't select for bland supermarket tomato either, though. With so many different plants in their ancestry, wild ones, weird ones, once he had them ripening reliably he was able to select the flavours he liked to eat: sweet, fruity flavours like... well, I'm going to read you a quote.
"Once I started growing genetically diverse tomatoes, and tasted things like melon, mango, sea urchin, and guava, I abandoned all efforts towards growing red tomatoes. I cull any reds that I find. I don’t save the seeds from reds for sharing with people who love red tomatoes. I don’t want my legacy to be the creation of one more red tomato.
Our taste testing panels consistently choose orange tomatoes as the most tasty."
(Makes a face). I love red tomatoes, but you know, a tomato that tastes like mango or melon sounds pretty magic too. I'm not saying you need or even want to grow a tomato that tastes like sea urchin. I'm saying that maybe you can, not only grow a tomato that ripens in your garden, but maybe you can do that, and you can also have a ton of variety. With this method you're not constrained to what other people like, to what they've already done, you don't have to worry that we're a tiny market here and no one breeds anything interesting for the north. If you want a tomato that tastes like sea urchin-- and one that tastes like melon-- and one that tastes like the best summertime BLT tomato-- you *can*.
And you can do it without competing for the catalogues every spring, and without buying separate seeds any time you want a little variety. And you can do it while sharing with your neighbours-- that makes it even better.
I've talked about how powerful landracing is. I've talked about what it can do to make hardy plants and to make tasty plants. But what is it, exactly?
Well, there are only a couple steps:
1) Save your seeds. Every year that you save seeds from your own yard, or are given seeds from your neighbour, those seeds get more and more adapted to your conditions. They'll do better every year. That's what Andy Pollock did, adapting Early Girl into Pollock.
2) Celebrate diversity, encourage cross-pollination. Usually when you save seeds you try to get rid of the unusual ones, the ones that don't look like they're supposed to. With landracing those unusual ones are where the fun really starts! A plant with two parents that did well is pretty likely to do well itself, and if it's a cross it's also a new variety that you've never seen before. Save it! Grow it! Visit it and enjoy the fact that it's brand new and it's yours. Encouraging pollinators, planting different varieties really close together, even looking at the flowers and saving seed especially from plants with flowers that are friendliest to pollinators-- that means you'll have even more crosses, even more new varieties, and even more chances for the perfect combination of characteristics that's exactly suited to you.
3) Encourage selection by the local ecosystem.
There's something really special about starting those seeds in February or March. About setting up lights, carefully watching those first green leaves come up, about making sure the temperature and water is just right. It's a habit to watch the weather forecast and mother's day and the full moon and try to decide, do I plant now, or a little later? Do I need to run out with blankets, or put row cover over everything? In an especially cool year, or for a lot of us in a normal year, we try to find space in the greenhouse or cover everything in hoophouses or spend every day watering in the dry year. We baby our plants. We love them, and we want those fancy tomatoes, so we try to make sure every single one has the best conditions and will survive. Even if it takes so much work on our parts.
One of the hardest parts of landracing is letting plants die. Yes, really. We try a wide range of seeds because who knows? But in order for the seeds we save to be better every year, to be hardier every year, we need to let the ones that aren't hardy die.
The first year it feels like you're the worst gardener. It feels like your neighbours are judging you and the ghosts of that 105-day tomato plant is hovering around your head filling you with regret. But that's how you get plants that most likely will grow better next year. That's how you get seeds that spring out of the soil at the end of March, maybe get transplanted into a light frost, and still somehow thrive and hand you baskets of tomatoes by July 1 even though there's a drought. You let the ones that die in cool evenings or drought or too much rain die. You keep the ones that love your garden, so that every year they love your garden more.
4) Select for characteristics that you value
Once your plants are surviving, it's not just surviving you select for. How do you like to garden?
I mean, definitely taste everything and save seed from the tastiest, whatever that means to you. Do you like sea urchin taste? Do you HATE sea urchin taste? (laugh) I'm joking, but really, taste everything before you save seed and you'll get a landrace tailored exactly to what you like-- even if what you like is a huge range of flavours.
Don't like weeding every day? Select the plants that grow well even if you leave weed pressure. There's nothing in my garden that can't compete well with lamb's quarters, let me tell you. Love weeding? You'll get plants that thrive in that bare soil. Or do you love companion planting? Do it, and over time you'll get plants that do well with your favourite companions.
I don't trellis my tomatoes, I just pick the ones I can see. Joseph is the same way, and over time his tomatoes have started to hold their fruits up above the soil where they're visible, since those are the ones that get picked and tasted and saved for seed. Meanwhile my 11-year-old self, who used to grow tomatoes up the side of the house, would have selected for the longest vines with the least side-shoots and over time that little kid would have got easy-trellising tomatoes.
Do you grow in pots because your soil is awful? You're selecting for what does well in pots. Soon you'll have a container landrace!
Select for beauty. I know so much of my joy comes from a beautiful basket of every colour of tomatoes, or that perfect blue colour in squash, but I also love that pinky-tan squash with just a little hook by the stem and that football-shaped one that's so easy to peel. I put my corn in jars in winter on a shelf just so I can admire it. Do you love a rainbow of produce? Do you love only orange corn, or tomatoes? Do you love THE ORANGEST or THE BLACKEST corn or tomatoes? Select those and over the years they'll get more intensely beautiful for you.
Really, you can select for anything you like that you see in your plants, and if you select for it every year you'll likely get more and more of that thing. Your landrace will shape to the way you like to garden, to whether you like to transplant (there's a guy in Montana working on direct-seeded tomatoes. Montana! Direct seeded!) to whether you like to mulch or water or... anything.
This is a partnership with the plants, a relationship you're entering into, where you care for them and save the seed and in turn every year they get closer to what exactly you want.
Cross pollination is a good one to select for because it offers more options later on. With some plants that have difficulty crossing on their own, like tomatoes, it can even make sense to select for the ones that cross best even if they don't have other attributes you love, so that the offspring cross better in the future and you end up with more choices down the road.
5) Share your seeds.
Share your seeds because if you do this with your neighbours you'll have more variety to select from as they share seeds with you.
Share your seeds because you're proud of what you're doing and so many of them are beautiful. share your seeds because someone just said "you can't grow corn here" and you want them to take your corn seed home, plant it, and be proven wrong.
Share your seeds so you can discover that your neighbour secretly likes tomatoes that taste like sea urchin when they share the seeds back with you.
Share your seeds because we all need to be fed, and if you have seeds that grow well here it's an easy way to help people out in these difficult times.
Share your seeds because a tomato has 100-300 seeds in it, and a squash has 50-100, so if you're saving your seeds like you're supposed to it's the only way to prevent your seed collection from taking up your whole house.
Landracing is big, and there's lots of stuff I didn't mention: nutrient density, less fertilizer use, risk vs reward for the first couple years, how many of my plants are going to die and do I really need to let them die? If you're interested there's a forum where people who do this talk endlessly about what they're doing and share seeds. I'm also happy to talk aboutany of that afterwards at the table with anyone who'd curious, but in the meantime: does anyone have any questions?
(if no:
Okay, I have a question for you: if you were going to make a landrace, if you were going to have a nice variety of something that did well in your garden that you'd previously thought couldn't be grown here, what would it be?)
(if appropriate: ask for interest, set up seed stewards)
(Goodness my presenter's voice is colloquial)
