Lmst

@MaQuest Seed sorting out day. Bought seed packets are in the tubs. The envelopes and jars are of saved seed.

All the seed is of heirloom or open pollinated varieties. They have been dried on a windowsill and will be stored in a cool cupboard.

Seed companies in the UK tend to have clearance sales of their stock in Autumn. It’s possible to pick up some real bargains.

#SeedSaving #SolarPunkSunday #Seeds #FoodSecurity #Gardening #GrowYourOwn #LandraceGardening #HomeGrown

Eight tubs of seed packets on a table. A tub for the part of the crop that is harvested: fruit, flower, root and leaf with extra tubs for peas and beans. The front two trays are labelled leaf and root crops. A wooden tray holds envelopes of saved seed. Two clearest envelopes have woad 08/25 and Tendergreen dwarf french bean 09/25 to denote the date other were saved. A selection of glass jars are behind the wooden tray. They mostly contain different saved bean seeds with various varieties written on the lids: aquadulce broad beans, Greek, czar, Cherokee trail of tears, noir bush beans, Carlin peas and Latvian peas. Two metal fence panels stand behind the table.

Archive from October 2024: Looking forward for 2025!

I'm locally adapting plants to my garden. This is the harvest of my first year. I got seeds from a serendipity seed swap (farmer seeds from different places in the world!).
I planted plants of very diverse genetics together: many varieties of sweet corn, many varieties of cucumber, pumpkins, beans etc. Many plants died, grew too slowly or didn't even germinate. That's part of the plan. Those that survived show me that they enjoy and fit my local conditions. They cross pollinated with each other. Their seeds are precious to me: I collect them and will plant them next season. Within 2 to 3 years, I'm expecting more abundance and will start selecting for flavour and other fun stuff of my liking. I also want to select for drought tolerance and climate change resilience.
In the meantime I'd love to exchange seeds with neighbors and friends.
This is nothing new but a very ancient and community based plant breeding technology. It's a lot of fun as well.

Big learning this year: my season was too short. Next year I want to help my plants better and give them a good time to grow. I'll start germinate in April, I promise maman

#adaptivegardening #landracegardening #localadaptation @goingtoseed1

A table with all my harvest: Locally adapted beans, sweet corn and cucurbits

@BRKitchenGarden Growing heirloom varieties is becoming ever more important. They can provide increased resilience, sustainability and biodiversity.

The Heritage Seed Library (UK) is not legally allowed to sell seed. It is too expensive and onerous to register seed for commercial sale.

Instead, people can opt to receive a small number of seeds every year as part of the benefit of membership. #Gardening #HeirloomSeeds #SeedSaving #LandraceGardening

https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/what-we-do/hsl/how-the-seed-library-works

A hangout at my home yesterday with fellow gardeners talking about seed and swapping them too. Very excited to build a network of growers working with adaptive seed, genetic diversity and community-based landraces. Our own local chapter of something like Going to Seed https://goingtoseed.org #seed #AdaptiveAgriculture #LandraceGardening #farming #SeedSwap #SeedSovereignty #FoodSovereignty

Table littered with seed bags and hands putting seed in bags

Some pics of the perennial kale landrace I'm developing. Original seed came from Chris Homanics which I crossed with Daubenton for further bushy growth habit. There's probably also some other kale genetics in there by now. Have been growing it for 5-6 years or so at 4 different sites. This one is at the school. I love to go looking for new colors, shapes or particularly healthy individuals, esp. ability to survive the winters, slugs, birds and caterpillars. My goal is to adapt this landrace to my conditions and the tastes of local chefs. These are doing pretty well in February! #PerennialVegetables #PerennialKale #PlantBreeding #LandraceGardening #AdaptiveGardening #BrassicaOleracea

Photo of leafy kale with slight purple tinge on leaf veines

Photo of leafy kale with savoy-esque texture

Sorting chinmarked corn from my genetically diverse sweet corn landrace. Will isolate this with chinmarking this year and see if I can get the pattern to express itself more along with high anthocyanin content (coloring) #landracegardening #corn #chinmarking #plantbreeding #zeamays #sweetcorn

Kernels of sweetcorn with red lines called chinmarks

A few sweet corn kernels with finer wrinkles possibly extra sweet genes on those

This may be the first distinctly tri-color calendula I've ever seen emerge from my diverse gene pool. #bloomscrolling #landracegardening

An incredibly colorful bloom with orange tips, pale cream petals with vibrant yellow center.

#bloomscrolling really like the firey tips on this pale specimen. #landracegardening #calendula

A calendula flower with butter yellow petals with strikingly orange tips.

Free and Open-Source Seed (the other #FOSS)

Preparing a big batch of many different seeds to send the first package in one out of hopefully many seed chain letters among #landracing colleagues in the EU. The idea is to send all kinds of seed, take what you want, add in at least as much, and then pass it onto the next one in line. With enough circulation, we should be able to maximize the genetic diversity in the chain package over time. A rolling seed swap by mail. I’m very excited about this and already looking forward to receive it myself somewhere down the line.

Want to get in line for a package too? Sign up in this forum: https://landracegardening.discourse.group/ and tell me your username, then I’ll add you to European seed swap group so you can read the rules before being added to the waiting list.

#serendipityseedswap #landracegardening #goingtoseed #freeseed #mutualaid

Genetically diverse corn in Denmark, the northern range of maize growing. It’s fascinating to think that every grain contains individual DNA and holds the potential for new kinds of plants. Naturally hybridizing plants are wonderful, because they do most of the breeding work for you.

#landracegardening #maize #corn #plantbreeding

First fruit from a test project to landrace melon (Cucumis melo) for Danish climate and my way of gardening. I didn't like the flavor of this one, but the plant was healthy and gave earlier fruit than others. I'm not sure which type this was - maybe a cucumber-melon type that should have been picked early?

#landracegardening #melon #northernmelon #cucumismelo #landrace #plantbreeding

I thought it was only possible to grow broad beans one time per season in our climate (Denmark). This year, I grew another round with seed from the first generation sown in spring just for the edible shoots and flowers in late summer and fall. But now I am in fact getting beans on those too. That’s both an extra crop and also makes landracing much faster, because I can cross the plants two times per season.

#broadbean #favabean #viciafaba #landracegardening #shortseason #plantbreeding #gardening

Agronomist and Professor Salvatore Ceccarelli talks about the #enshittification of the seed industry, just using other words. A few Big Seed/Pesticide companies managed to get everyone on-board their pesticide-ready seed and then made the switching costs really high. Saving seed from that gene pool often doesn't work without pesticides. Plant breeding needs to become a popular activity open for all gardeners and farmers again! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZxw_qLgHPE&t=134s #Agriculture #seedsaving #landracegardening

Tell me about folks in the fediverse working with #landracegardening, ie. breeding #landrace varieties when gardening, or are in some way inspired by #josephlofthouse

For anyone interested in plant breeding as a hobby, it's not nearly as hard as you'd think. Joseph Lofthouse has a great article series on the #LandraceGardening approach.

#LandraceGardening

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